The Fremen

thinking about Paul's agency a lot and. this scene got to me.

if you only look at the first book in the series, it's a tragedy in the classic sense. it's Paul fighting his future and his past with a futility that's heartbreaking. trying not to become the thing he fears and then becoming it.

because book Paul can't win.

not against the grandfather whose hunger for leadership he inherited, not against his mother who raised him for power. not against his father who clearly lays out Paul's path on Arrakis in a few desperate words to his son: become the lisan al gaib, guerilla-warfare your way back to ruling. the only love Paul knows speaks the language of power and control.

Paul inherits what he will become.

and then there is the spice that opens his mind but what he sees isn't enough to guide him. and his quasi-mentat powers can't help him because they are disconnected from his heart and soul. and the Fremen culture he eventually becomes part of, well. putting the tribe above everything else, killing your way to leadership, constant war and violence... his fight with Jamis, his initiation into Fremen life, is itself an act of violence. and heavily manipulated by Jessica who watches the fighting machine she helped create kill a man she helped weaken for the kill.

the Villeneuve films take a different approach overall, not just with the Jamis fight. Paul is less of a 'machine' and 'product' in the films and especially Leto a much more loving influence.

Film Paul has more of a fighting chance. His agency is painted in a different light.

I’ve just realised how significant Gurney’s quotes and music are.

Gurney was born into Harkonnen slavery, and lived his life in a slave pit until Duke Leto got him out. There’s no way that he would have been educated in music and literature, and Leto would have focused on Gurney’s value as a warrior.

Which means that Gurney being a well-read musician was his own choice. This man was born a slave, scarred by Beast Rabban’s inkvine whip, grew up a deadly fighter. But when he got his freedom, he learned to sing and play the baliset, and he read classical literature.

Could he even read when he got out of the slave pit? Who taught him?

There’s no way he’d have seen a baliset as a slave, so at some point post-Leto-rescue he saw one and thought ‘I want to play that’. Someone would have taught him that as well.

Leto & Jessica Atreides, Dune 2021 (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

Now, I don't know if this is canon exactly but I've always interpreted Jessica as being somewhat bitter about her BG education. While she always sticks closely to it because obviously, it's basically all she was raised on, it feels to me kind of like her marriage to Leto was more a means of getting away from that than a means towards gaining power for herself on the BG's behalf. Her having a son, while done for her love of Leto, was also something of a rebellion - even if she wasn't intending to create the KH, surely she knew it was a possibility deep down. At the very least she knew it was an act of defiance against them. But it still seems to me like she wanted nothing to do with the BG shit and just have her family and illegal son in peace.

One, I do kind of wish the movies had kept in the detail (or mentioned it I guess, seeing as there isn't exactly anything that contradicts it either) of Chani being Liet Kynes' daughter. Because Kynes is initially presented almost like a religious leader himself at the beginning, with the Fremen following him and his version of the "green Arrakis" dream. (which, I should note, I'm not actually clear on the origins of -- because it could be yet another Bene Gesserit-related thing, but what I've more understood it as is something that the Fremen, under the right leadership, would ideally work towards very gradually and in a way that didn't disrupt the natural ecosystem too much, but also increased the availability of water. The issue then being that when Paul does it, he's coming at it from an outsider/colonizer standpoint rather than doing it the way the people of that planet actually *wanted* it to happen)

So especially with the way Denis chose to depict her in the movies, I'm actually surprised they didn't cement Kyne's connection with Chani. Because think of how much more layered that would make her perspective of things -- her father (or mother in the films) was already a leader of the Fremen and already someone trying to fix the issue of water scarcity. Someone who is treated with reverence and respect by her people. And then Paul comes along.

Two, another book-film difference that I don't have much opinion about re: whether it should've been changed or not but I just thought it was interesting -- in the movie it sort of seems like Leto is oblivious to the whole "this entire planet thinks Paul is a messiah" thing, but in the book that isn't the case. He finds out about the so-called superstitions of the Fremen pretty early on and in fact tells Paul he should use them to his advantage if need be. There's literally a scene where he's like "yeah I might die because the Harkonnens have totally set us up, if that happens our whole house might fall to ruin and you'll basically need to go rogue so maybe try using that 'I'm a prophet' thing to win people over". Which is. Hm . Pretty dark when you think about it. (but does also give another interesting layer as to why Paul ultimately does Just That -- among many many other things, his dad literally told him to.)

Because in a way, Liet was kinda an outsider as well... his father Pardot was an imperial planetologist, and he's the one who initially started preaching the idea of turning Arrakis into a paradise (through his leadership and guidance, of course). And I think I remember in the books it being mentioned the the Fremen wanted to slowly terraform a small part of the planet?

Either way, it is Pardot's teachings for paradise that really started paving the way for Paul to take advantage, and Liet only later took up his father's mantle.

And so having a mother (in the movies) who comes from this outsider who used a Fremen dream to spread his own gospel might make Chani resist and believe even more fiercely in the Fremen. Or, (or and, if you want to make things complicated!) having her mother killed by Harkonens (but because she helped Paul) might deepen her mistrust and resentment of Paul.

Kynes is somewhat different between the book and movie too, and I think the differences are interesting. The book goes out of its way to tell us that Pardot Kynes, Liet's father, was an outworlder who never really learned Fremen ways, couldn't ride a worm, etc. But Liet Kynes was born on Arrakis and considers himself Fremen. "I am a desert creature," he thinks about himself as he's dying, and he refers to the Fremen (in a kind of paternalistic way) as "my Fremen." Movie Kynes was not born on Arrakis ("been here twenty years" Thufir Hawat says about her). She, like Paul, is someone whose loyalty has shifted from colonizer to colonized through the experience of living among the Fremen on Arrakis. I too think it would have been interesting to have movie Chani confirmed to be Kynes's daughter; one can easily imagine that the unnamed "Fremen warrior [she] loved and lost in battle" that Paul mentions is Chani's father. (This is the headcanon I use in my fic). I think it would fit really well with Chani's willingness to give Paul a chance to prove himself trustworthy. She already knows an outworlder who became Fremen.

The way the terraforming of Arrakis is presented in the books has been rattling around in my brain since I visited the Oregon dunes, and I recently went back and read a bunch of the sections of the book that talk about it. In the book it is very clearly Pardot Kynes's idea and to me there is a real tinge of "benevolent outsider bringing Science and Progress to the natives" to it--especially to the idea that the only way to ensure multiple generations of Fremen would cooperate with this project is to turn it into a quasi-religious mission. Which Kynes very explicitly talks about doing--but NOT connected to the Lisan al-Gaib myth, but rather as a completely separate set of introduced beliefs. The connection between the two sets of ideas is something the movie adds. There is a hefty dose of paternalism in the way book Kynes talks about the Fremen and educating them about the ecology of their own planet. (This tracks with the way in which the book is sympathetic to the Fremen but doesn't give them a lot of agency--after watching the movies it is really striking how much the Fremen in the book are a medium for various outsiders to act upon.) But also, notably, Liet Kynes dies halfway through the book--literally swallowed by the desert he sought to control.

To me all the terraforming stuff really highlights some of the unresolved tensions in Frank Herbert's politics around imperialism, environmentalism and solidarity with indigenous people--including how his politics shifted between the mid-1950s when he started doing the research for Dune and the late 1960s when he published Dune Messiah. (For more on that I highly HIGHLY recommend this article.)

—Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert