Dune Remake Is Painfully Anti-White
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
157.3815
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the new remake of Frank Herbert's Dune, directed by David Lynch. It's a remake of the 1984 classic, but with a twist. The new Dune is based on the novel by Frank Herbert, but it's set in the pre-World War II world of Arrakis, a planet ruled by a white, male, oppressive empire.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
So let's talk about the latest remake of Dune. Back in 1984 was the first time that it was a film version of Frank Herbert's book. Was it a trilogy? I forget how many books was in the series. Dune, Frank Herbert, great story. David Lynch directed the 1984 version. Always loved the movie, always loved the film. Some incredible, you know, just sets and storylines and completely new things. I really enjoyed it.
00:00:25.880
And so we rewatched or watched this one, the remake, I should say, just a few days ago here and wanted to talk about it. So of course, spoiler alerts ahead here because we are going to show some clips and we're going to talk about some of the general, you know, kind of themes in the first part. I think it's slated to be a three part series. They're beginning, beginning working on the second now. And I think they do that because they didn't know if it was going to be a success or not. So they didn't know if they're going to do part two. But apparently they've decided that within a few days of this being released.
00:00:54.480
But yes, it is a didactic as it was a remake. In fact, we can even let's do this first. Let's watch the introduction to how they introduce us to the to the Dune universe and see if you can see if you notice any themes. We'll drill down into this and show some more clips after this, too. But this is how the whole thing begins. Take a look at this.
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My planet Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low.
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Rolling over the sands, you can see spice in the air.
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The outsiders race against time to avoid the heat of the day.
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These outsiders, the Harkonnens, came long before I was born.
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By controlling spice production, they became obscenely rich.
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Our warriors couldn't free Arrakis from the Harkonnens.
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But one day, by imperial decree, they were gone.
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Why did the Emperor choose this path, and who will our next oppressors be?
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Yeah, I was so nauseated when I saw the very introduction of it, right?
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It was like, okay, we see exactly where this whole movie is going to be going now.
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We can break it down a bit for you in case you didn't catch it, right?
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the writings incorporated an updated 21st century sensibility.
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Sensibility, that's a nice word for it, into the script,
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including increasing the prominence of female characters.
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And not only that, inclusion of a lot of non-white characters as well,
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And then you can think about who are they, how are they portraying these, right?
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First, we have the, I always call them the Harkonnens,
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I'm not sure how they're, maybe they're asked Frank Herbert what the exact pronunciation was.
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But essentially, these are the whitest white skinheads in the movie.
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And yes, there were bad guys, you know, kind of in the old version as well.
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It wasn't that, like, it wasn't this divided and obvious.
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Yeah, I mean, there were some white, pasty, you know, gothic-looking guys.
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But it wasn't obviously such a racially motivated thing.
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They just thought, oh, this is a cool look for these people.
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This, it's clear that they've updated it to make it look like this is the bad white supremacist,
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And obviously, we should say, too, we'll play a clip from Harkonnens,
00:05:00.280
just how they depict them and so forth in a moment.
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But a lot of it has, you know, there's Islamic themes, obviously, in this.
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We'll talk about an example later when they talk about the Fremen,
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which is, you know, the free men, right, kind of thing.
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But, yeah, a lot of Islamic themes in the book and so forth.
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It's like some, some people, it's basically Islam in space.
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Maybe this was kind of exotic or even interesting to someone back in, you know,
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And they were young at that point, 1984, when that was shown or something like,
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But, consequently, with mass immigration and terrorist attacks and stuff.
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That's a direct word that they use in the novels and in the 84 version.
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It's jihad, the sacred war, right, of the Fremen and stuff.
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But I didn't hear that anywhere in this one, which is kind of interesting.
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Here's the Harkonnens or Harkonnens, as they say here.
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Look at how they're depicted here and see if you can see any themes here.
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Take everything we've built and give it to that Duke!
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And, by the way, this is the Swedish actor, Stellan Skarsgård, right?
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So they took a lot of Nordic people to play these roles as well.
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But even this guy, the big guy right here, he's, I think, he's like Maori or something like that.
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They made him super white and stuff as opposed to keeping him...
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I mean, even in the book, right, their name was, his name was Vladimir Harkonnens.
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It was like a very, like, these are Russian white, you know, people and stuff like that.
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I kind of got the feeling, though, too, they were trying to rip off a little bit of Prometheus.
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Yeah, John Spaeth is one of the screenwriters together with Eric Roth.
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I didn't mean to talk about this, but this could be a good time to do it.
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Dennis Villeneuve, which seems to be the main driver of it, director.
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But then I said, Eric Roth, he's done a lot of other things.
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Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close.
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That was all about, you know, specific people being the victims there.
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So, yes, they have done what they always do, which is to kind of, you know, rewrite, you know, things and put it in a modern didactic political perspective, essentially.
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Back to the clip of the Harkonas here now, too, because there's another theme into this thing.
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I'm not sure if Stice Hustwood is the best actor in this.
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He's a good actor, but I'm not sure he's the best one.
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It's literally bathing in the oil that he's gone to these Middle Eastern, North African people and robbed them of, right?
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Yeah, he's bathing in, like, you know, the black.
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Send word to Gaty Prime to begin selling us by his reserves.
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And then he sinks down into this nasty black goo, right?
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And yes, I mean, yes, they're still depicted like this in 1984.
00:10:04.060
So I'm not saying that that's new, but with this new kind of racial framing, right?
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So now let's go over to the Fremen, which you can clearly see the majority of them are depicted as blacks.
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Except with bright blue eyes, like Cheddar men or something.
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Yeah, it's the Cheddar men that they're fighting here.
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The Atreides, of course, or at least Paul and his mother joins up with them later on and stuff like that.
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And this was not at all how, in my view, how they were depicted back in the 1984 version.
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It's way over the top with the clearly Islamic themes.
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They had a little different, you know, sensibilities.
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And not all of them were black or Middle Eastern or even South American looking.
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And if there was a couple brown people or whatever, it wasn't the main focus.
00:10:59.100
Like they're focusing on this girl so much throughout this movie.
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And, of course, you know, keep the themes in mind here.
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They have some sacred mystic connectivity with the desert and nature and stuff.
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And here we have a couple of Cheddar Man shots here coming up.
00:12:41.880
Your desert boots are fitted slip fashion at the ankles.
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In the 1984 version, they have this, like, internal dialogue.
00:13:12.120
There were, like, great themes in the old movie, which was just beautiful, wonderfully done.
00:13:16.400
Again, I mean, this visually, yes, it's almost too pompous in a way.
00:13:20.780
There's, like, everything is magnificent and pompous.
00:13:23.520
And it's like, therefore, nothing is magnificent and pompous in a way, right?
00:13:28.620
I mean, the effects have improved, of course, yeah.
00:13:33.000
Yeah, as the quality of, like, production goes up, it's just everything else has dropped, right?
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Anyway, here's a little bit more from the Fremen here.
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He's fighting Cheddar Man here towards the end of this one, too.
00:14:20.080
But she's still so kind throughout all the oppressing.
00:14:29.100
Before Paul Atreides is led into the Fremen Muslim North African group here.
00:14:50.880
But, yeah, so you get the idea of kind of how they're depicting them.
00:14:53.360
And it's overwhelmingly non-white among the Fremen, which is just not the case back in 1984, right?
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So it's this idea, again, of the perpetual oppressor.
00:15:05.360
And then all of a sudden there's this new white group that comes in on decree by the emperor, right?
00:15:12.520
In a way, you can say that the Atreides are the good whites, the selfless whites, right?
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That come on board and they're going to help them and they're going to ensure, you know,
00:15:19.520
we're going to come in and fix everything for you and stuff like that, right?
00:15:22.800
Again, generally, that was the theme back in 1984, but it was not drawn along these racial lines, right?
00:15:37.060
Now, she used to be played by Sean Young, who, by the way, we had on the show way back when, like 2010, right?
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She came on, you know, our show, talked with me.
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And apparently she went off the rails on some certain people that are, you know,
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doing a lot of the production in Hollywood and things like that.
00:16:00.920
And she didn't get as many roles after that point, surprisingly, right?
00:16:04.540
But so they replaced her with a mixed race girl, right?
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And this is very promoted as well all throughout that this is all about mixed, you know, mixed race.
00:16:13.540
And he comes in and he joins this new group and he falls in love with her and they idolizes her.
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Again, although they're high tech, they show them with these clearly, like, Islamic, Arabic type, you know, clothing and stuff, you know?
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Long, drawn out, like, these love, the love scenes and things here, like, you know, yeah.
00:17:21.020
You can get the full enjoyment of this here, of him merging with the Fremen here, right?
00:17:28.460
But then she stabs him in the back and kills him.
00:17:32.160
Surprise, surprise, a stabbing all of a sudden here, huh?
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It's made from a tooth of Shihalud, the great Samuern.
00:17:45.620
This will be a great honor for you to die holding it.
00:18:28.060
It's a very obvious kind of thing of what's going on here and the themes and how they changed it and stuff like that.
00:18:33.820
This kid is not, you know, terrible, you know, necessarily in it.
00:18:37.640
But McLaughlin, the old actor, the one who was in Twin Peaks, like David Lynch, worked with him quite a bit.
00:18:46.460
Last clip we'll show is one of the – my favorite part of the 84 movie is the Navigators because they're just so weird and so bizarre and you've never seen anything like it before.
00:18:55.320
They're the ones that have been consuming the spice, right, to be able to fold space so they can travel without moving and all that kind of cool stuff.
00:19:03.640
They are zoomed into this huge – it looks like a train or something, like a black, just bullet, massive.
00:19:11.420
And they're opening up the, you know, the windows or whatever you want to call it on that.
00:19:14.640
And they can start communicating with the emperor, right, one of the first scenes.
00:19:17.700
And this next shot we'll see two themes in that.
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And one of – I think this is the Navigators, but they're basically showing them as humans.
00:19:24.680
They just have this bubble helmet on and you can not even see behind that.
00:19:27.500
Maybe they'll introduce them more in part two or something.
00:19:30.480
But then also symbolically the spokesperson for the emperor is an African, right?
00:19:36.800
Yeah, and listen to the delivery of what he says in one of the scenes as well because I think that that's very symbolic.
00:19:45.500
Yeah, here's the – I think those are the Navigators right there, but you don't even see.
00:20:02.480
I stand before you as the herald of the change, right?
00:20:10.500
House Atreides shall immediately take control of Arrakis and serve as its steward.
00:20:25.900
So I think overall I think they ruin it as usual as they always do.
00:20:31.460
Some of the scenes are great and it's very pompous.
00:20:36.480
You know what they're up to when they're doing all these things.
00:20:41.080
Now, there was one funny other thing I want to show as well, and that's how –
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Also, Warner Brothers, how they do fold to pressure from other countries.
00:20:51.520
They ended up removing the black characters from the movie poster.
00:20:57.340
They've done that before to sell it to China, right?
00:21:08.480
It's, you know, some white people and stuff like that, right?
00:21:14.720
Yeah, of course, they insert the Asian guy in there.
00:21:28.000
But so it's funny how they're like, still the message in here is clear, you know, in
00:21:32.380
terms of like the racial component and stuff, but then they still bend the knee when they
00:21:38.520
It's that's OK because they're not white supremacists.
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It's not, you know, it could be it could have it could have been much worse in one way.
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But I just cannot get get over the the clear subversive message that always is weaved into
00:21:56.060
And I bet you that both Eric Roth and John Spaeth and all these writers have a finger
00:22:02.000
and a reason, you know, for why that's the case.
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