Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code jacksaint at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: incogni.com/jacksaint As usual I'm going to use this as a spot to reply to frequent comments/criticisms, will try to keep updated as more come in (DUNE BOOK SPOILERS); 1. "Leto II wasn't trying to 'unify' humanity, he was trying to scatter them/had other motives." 'Unify' was a phrase used more to talk about Ozymandias in that section but either way I think this is splitting hairs in full context. I don't mean Leto II wanted to physically unify humanity but I think it is inarguable that he saw in the Golden Path a potential to turn humanity collectively against 'great men', and that's the context I was discussing it in the video. I agree he had other complex motivations, but this was an attempt to simplify several books of Villain Monologue into a more straightforward point. 2. "Lady Jessica didn't actually know how to trick Mapes and lucked into it." This is a lot more fair and would've been worth properly addressing beyond just the excerpt on-screen showing it - when I say that Jessica knew how to manipulate Mapes, this was a comment on her knowledge of the Missionaria Protectiva that she was trying to exploit from the start of her time on Arrakis. At the time of writing the video I was worried I was getting too granular in talking about that specific scene so I considered her 'maker' mix-up a less relevant detail, but it's definitely worth pointing out. 3. "Lawrence of Arabia is more critical of the white savior trope than you gave it credit." As a fan of the film myself this was also a case of cutting down the script in a way that may have oversimplified it - I definitely maintain that Lawrence of Arabia perpetuated some ideas/aesthetics that Dune is a commentary on, but I agree that there is a surprising amount of commentary in the film and I think I'd like to delve into this further with a future video. support links: 💰 PATREON @ www.patreon.com/jacksaint 🔴 UA-cam @ ua-cam.com/channels/dQKvqmHKe_8fv4Rwe7ag9Q.htmljoin 👛 TIPS @ ko-fi.com/lackingsaint Second Channel: www.youtube.com/@officalwordfromjack Bluesky 🦋 lackingsaint.bsky.social Instagram 📷 instagram.com/lackingsaint Twitch 🎮 www.twitch.tv/lacksaint Discord 🗣 discord.gg/pf5PXAzv8V TikTok 🎞 www.tiktok.com/@jacksaintreal
I think in the end these people fought for Freedom from the machines And in the end There great God emperor is nothing but a organic version of their machine Overlords. This kid is nothing but a quantum computer Made of flesh and bone.
You could probably do a whole series on Warhammer 40k. Games workshop has taken on the idea that 40kis a send up of fascism, but fan base seems to fully embrace the message without nuance (the danger of any satire I guess) and is one of the most toxic fandom in my experience.
i think you can both value the deeper meaning of the narrative and appreciate the surface parts. liking the "fear is the mind killer" line doesn't inherently make the reader shallow or blind to the moral of the story as a whole. Chani in Dune part two is a masterpiece imho because she reflects Paul's hypocrisy and flaws but only in those soft, barely-noticeable, "romance flick" vignettes, subtly juxtaposition-ing his relationship to her v. perceived self-actualization. You cant really be an "equal" to someone when you call yourself the chose one; nor a leader of the people, when you betray your vows. It is Chani who is the last scene on screen; not Paul and all his messianic glory. A very cool way to bring this into the next film. gonna have to finish watching this video when i finish the 2nd book. but good stuff. subscribed.
Same. A small anecdote, i heard one of my friends the other day complaining about kids on twitter putting content warnings on honkai's spoilers and i was like 'bro you shouldn't care about that shit' but he seems to have felt it was outrageous for some reason. Indifference towards menial things can be good, actually
I'm feeling that. Saw stuff come about "media literacy" and I was like, "yeah I sorta agree with some of these talking points" but this feels like the exact same debate the internet's been having with itself for the last decade or longer. Like I increasingly realise some people, (not necessarily excluding myself) have kinda poor relationships with media, be it some nutjob who constantly sees wokeness in everything or people who lose their shit because someone on deviantart did a "ship" that they didn't approve of. It is kinda just the modern condition I guess at least for people who are more online.
Saw a leviathan of discourse pass under my rickety little canoe recently when I read post that includes the phrase "I hope a favorite manga gets a seasonal anime of the year studio trigger adaptation and everyone starts doing the world war 2 of yuribait" and like that's obviously in reference to Dungeon Meshi and good god am I so happy I have no clue what "world war 2 of yuribait" even entails. This was posted almost a week before episode 12 came out as well, so I can only imagine the horrific cesstrench that has erupted like a beautiful forest of colorful cordyceps from the hyphae riddled corpse of an ant since then.
I think you've missed the forest for the trees. Fundamentally, the deeper and more human thread running through the Dune series is "Wow, cool, big worm."
@Tasmantor yezzir that was in the mystique of seeing the David Lynch on local tv in the late 80s, when he goes "the worms are the spice" I was just all "so like worm meat?" I think it was when sandtrout poop mixes with water
Dune is a story about your boyfriend getting redpilled into starting a podcast that slowly grows a following because his mom is actually the one managing it.
The irony being that Leto the Second did what he did to save mankind from AI which is definitely a red-pilled cause for many a podcaster. Yup it actually follows
Paul: “These magical space drugs will DEFINITELY make things clear.” Space Drugs: “You need to become a worm and genocide humanity to make it stronger.” Paul: “The math checks out but I’m conflicted…”
@@DR-es5ey if I remember correctly he is told that he should in his visions but then refuses because he views it too great a Burden...so naturally he leaves his son to do it.
@@kurtwagner350 I haven't read the other books, but I'm guessing his son is like "ok cool, no problem, I'll turn into a worm and wax philosophical in the fourth book"
“Would you still love me if I was a worm?” “Yes, dear.” “What if I were a worm-god who suppressed human development for two thousand years?” “Uhhh that’s a more complicated question”
but he was ensuring that the golden path happened and undoing the actions the bene gesserit took to gain control over humanity. :( it was worse than suppressing development too, he effectively stranded everyone not only on their own planet, but made them serfs in their own towns.
I say it every single time - those “gurus” don’t actually want for the Matrix to crumble, they want to climb on top of it and replace the current “authority”. They’re not rebels, they’re pretenders.
11:40 The funny part is that, in the book, Pauls mother nearly failed the test and it was only due to dumb luck that she suceeded. The answer "A Maker" referes to the knive being the tooth of a sandworm, which the Fremen call 'Makers' for making the spice. However, in the book it was made clear by an inner monolog that Jesica didn´t just wanted to say "A maker-", but "A Maker of death" refering to the knives purpose as a ritual weapon. She would´ve answered the question wrong if Mapes breakdown hadn´t interupted her answer half way.
What's funny is that Paul is literally no one's chosen one. He's not the Fremen chosen one because that's a story manufactured by the Bene-Gesserit, and he's not the Bene-Gesserit chosen one because according to their plans he never should've been born.
I haven't read the books but what I got from the movies is that the Mahdi was created by the Bene Gesserit (as it follows their framework) and the Bene Gesserit did so because they wanted to control the Fremen. Paul's mother then decided to make him the Mahdi since she knew the plan No one was the chosen one since it was supposed to be a role filled by a Bene Gesserit puppet, Paul simply got in that spot because of his mother
@@fra604the missionaria protectiva of the bene gesserit planted these myths on all planets outside of the imperial core as a security insurance for bene gesserit who should find themselves there. it literally is a security mechanism for bene gesserit. its explicitly stated in the movie. In the books (and in the movie as well if i remember correctly) they contemplate leaving Arrakis and inform the Landsraat (the other great houses) about the highly illegal actions of the conspiracy between House Harkonnen and the Padishah Corinno, which would probably have led to civil war between them (with interplanetary nukes, so: multi-planet genocide). So: to leave the Fremen be and try to get their justice by means of the Imperial law and the core. It's Paul who decides, both because of his (at this point still weak, pre-water-of-life) preciense and the vague plans of his father about desert power, to stay and embedd themselves with the Fremen. Arrakis is literally the only planet in the universe they couldn't just glass from orbit.
@@fra604the Bene Gesserit planted those prophecies and religious traditions in cultures across the known universe. It wasn't intended specifically for controlling the fremen themselves but as a way for Bene Gesserit to integrate and safely survive in those cultures as needed and to prepare for the eventually creation of the kwisatz haderach. Jessica wasn't actually intended to have a son. She was supposed to have a daughter that would be married to feyd routha to end the feud between atreides and Harkonnen and then their son would be the kwisatz haderach. But Leto wanted a son and Jessica gave him one which upended the plan. He wasn't intended to be the kwisatz haderach but being one generation removed from their intended kwisatz haderach he was able to become one anyway. He and Jessica used the religious beliefs Bene Gesserit had introduced to survive out of necessity. And in the books she was much less eager a participant in making him the kwisatz haderach. Fitting into their legends for survival was one thing but she was actually terrified of what he became in the end. Which makes sense because an actual kwisatz haderach is terrifying. And the early arrival of one teaches the Bene Gesserit an important lesson in the end: despite millennia of meticulous planning they could never have controlled him. They're too powerful and too dangerous. And between Paul and his son they spend 3500 years paying for that mistake and learning that lesson the very, very, very hard way.
I can't even bring myself to say she is a good OR bad mother. On the one hand, she does show that she cares for Paul's well-being, but then she contradicts herself by bringing the Reverend Mother to Paul, knowing full well that he could die. I understand that there was reasoning behind her decision, but it's a bad sign when the Reverend Mother herself ridicules Jessica for bringing her to Paul and reminds her that he is lucky to even be alive.
Especially as she looks at what she has done and runs away for Caladan right after the end of the movie, and is further present only via one letter in next book, bashing what mockery of the state Paul has build.
@@jessea4438if i remember correctly, she was less so ridiculing jessica for bringing her to paul to perform the test, and moreso ridiculing her for having a boy because jessica should have known that the odds of him surving the test were astronomically low due to him being a man. Shes criticizing her for gambling the fate of a bloodline on a whim, by putting paul in a disadvantageous scenario for his test, when she was ordered to have a daughter that would have near garunteed passed the test.
Paul magically summoning rain in the David Lynch one always made me laugh, because that would exterminate all of the sandworms and stop Spice production permanently. Water is a deadly poison to the sandworms.
@@WalkthroughHorde Threatening to do it and actually doing it aren't quite the same, though. The threats were to force the other Houses to accept him as emperor as an alternative to the collapse of civilisation, but if he just does it anyway the other Houses might as well burn the planet with him on it.
actually, there was a mention of a flashflood and fremen drowning in Children of Dune. I think you need a lot of water to start the chain reaction that distroys spice production, more than one rain delivers into one area. The worms can go deep under the dunes so not get water on them?
@@1983pety in Children of Dune they had built a network of irrigation canals to supply water to the plants that had been cultivated. It was mentioned that they also very deliberately left an area of untouched desert for the worms to live in and that the worms do not enter the irrigated areas. The water canals are open to the air and sandtrout congregate near the edge, trying to envelop the canal.
Can we just lock all the "Dune is about traditional family values and good conquering evil" people and the "Dune promotes a white saviour" people in an arena and let them sort it out?
idk dude, there's something to be said about the fact that a large portion of the audience, even ostensibly "progressive" people, idolize paul or call him "Him" or whatever. Of course part of that's the culture we live in but there's more to it than that. Yes the movie (like the book it's based on - maybe even more so) very clearly understands white saviors, and has a very coherent notion of religion's use to settler colonizers and how white allies end up centering themselves and their personal feelings in a situation where they should not be the primary focus but have outsize power to do so, but like, the eye of the narrative also kind of does that? Paul is very clearly the central character. Anyways here's hoping the next part Chani's knife doesn't chip and shatter before finishing off a deranged and imperially-ambitious desert mouse boy; and we can get a whole lot of "woooow this part is so depressing and boring and ruined the story, " like we did with the endings of Goodfellas, Fight Club, the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc, etc, etc.....
Without knowing the intricacies of the series, it doesn’t do much for me to flip the white savior Messiah thing on its head mainly because from my understanding, it still holds a patronizing relationship between the “civilized” and the “uncivilized” by way of the group of nun ladies “planting” the prophecy into that society. Not only does it give off Jewish kabal conspiracy vibes, but it maintains a lack of agency in the Arab stand-ins to develop themselves independent of string pulling so deep it literally becomes their belief system. That is still a pretty weird hierarchy of cultures vibe, but this is what I’ve only heard and read, I haven’t yet seen the second movie nor have I read the books yet, so I could be totally wrong.
Ah yes, Alia and Jessica's story is very pro life, with the mother who later genuinely considers whether she should have killed her daughter in infancy because of the horrendous atrocities she commits in her later life
Shapabeboo has no interest in context or plot. Pretty much any take on media he has is either surface level, or politically charged to the point of not actually referring to the media he's supposed to be commenting on. It's what his followers want, after all.
the fact that they didn't show Alia as a 4 year old psychotic murder child and have people call her abomination, only to be instantly killed for heresy, is on the movie. the text does it legwork to show you how this is fucked.
When Jessica calls the crysknife "a maker..." she was actually going to say a maker of death cuz she was bullshitting and thought it would sound cool, but the maid immediately cuts her off and misinterprets Jessica's words to align with the prophecy the Bene Gesserit have propagandized her with. In the movie, you can see Rebecca Ferguson has more lines after "maker" but her words trails off after the maid interrupts her, and then you can see on her face how she just goes along with it. Just shows how carefully Villeneuve paid attention to the words and themes of Dune.
If I were them and messiah is of the same quality the first two films have been; I think that'd be the strongest anti-authoritarian lesson I could experience. This is OG StarWars tier of quality.
Is that happening? That's kinda weird since I feel like Paul is a hell of a lot worse in the books. Or is this non-book-readers going to the subreddit to ask the book-readers?
@@Nuvizzle its been more or less confirmed at this point when hans zimmer gave an interview on another youtube channel about how he created the soundtrack for dune 2, he said denis came in his office slapped dune messiah on his desk didn't say a word and walked out of his office so YES its coming
I feel a lot of people should watch herberts interviews about Dune before he died. He talked about how he had a journalist fanboying about paul as the hero and wanted to see what great feats he would achieve next, Herbert then essentially said 'im going to kill your hero and you should too because paul isnt a hero, he's a villain made of good intentions which lead to the absolute worst outcomes for everyone.' People get too caught up in the more minute narrative moments of Dune often imo rather than the grander narrative meant to make you question your own beliefs. The central philosophical dilemma of dune is the necessity and evils of power. Paul uses his power to avenge his family and try to make the universe a better place, in doing so he releases a tide of bloodshed across the galaxy not seen in ages, his actions make this happen and he chooses to follow the path knowing full well the reprocussions but doing so with a naieve hopefulness. We are asked to think of the actions of the god emperor, he is a brutal tyrant who intends to break humanity in order to save it against even worse tyrants. Once again a figure of power which justifies their good intentions while commiting heinous actions against the innocent. We must ask given the universe, are these tyrants right or wrong? Do they actually reinforce the power of those that eventually break them down? Essentially the book asks us to put ourselves in the heads of heroes and tyrants, to understand their justifications both true and not, to understand their intent and to understand the consequences of following power as both an actor and a puppet. I think you missed something in Letos goal, his goal wasnt to unify humanity against tyrants like him, it was to break humanity into a million independent and deeply paranoid segments, essentially he wanted to balkanize humanity over such a massive gulf and with such divergent technologies and power that no one tyrant or god or alien could wipe them all out, that there would always be some pocket with the the distinct paranoia to counter the threat against man.
Haven't completely finished watching the video yet but I just had to say that "media literacy is not about being the best at knowing what an author said about their work" is an absolute banger quote. It's generally very refreshing to see an approach of using media literacy as a tool to think about things more deeply rather than a tool to Win at Twitter
plus with Dune, having read the first 4 novels, I don't really get the impression that Herbert really didn't have a specific moral message so much as it's one big, complicated exercise in hypotheticals and a meditation on human nature and the cycles of history. it's not "based and redpiled", nor is it "woke", it's just a honest work with a lot of stuff to think about.
I have a rebuttal... shouldn't we listen to authors when they tell us what their book is about?? Hypothetically say you're writing an essay for your English professor on a book & you go off on a tangent about something that just doesn't seem to be there like their pro life claim for Dune. Wouldn't that essay get a bad grade for an interpretation not really there?
@@craigmusa2254 I think of it as authors being good as an additional reference, but what they say outside of the text doesn't change what they actually wrote, and any interpretation should originate from what's actually written. Something an author says about what they meant can be good as a sign for other places to look in the text that you may not have considered otherwise, but it still needs to actually be in the text to begin with. Additionally, as Jack said in the video, authors can subconsciously or accidentally include additional elements without realizing it, sometimes even ones contrary to what they actually intended. So that essay would get a bad grade, but not because the author disagrees with it.
@@craigmusa2254I mean what an author intended *can* be important context or Jack wouldn’t be playing clips from an interview with Herbert, and someone pulling their own beliefs out of a work where they’re not present would probably get marked down for having extremely shallow or limited examples to make that point with, but there is also an extent where an author may inject things unintentionally through tropes or shortsightedness. That extent is going to vary depending on the work. The Room, through incompetence or shortsightedness, is far more interesting as a way to read into the creator’s views of relationships and women than whatever the original point was supposed to be. Loss is an infamous meme not because it’s an effective communication of tragedy, but of completely tone deaf writing. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between what the author intended or says it means, and what was made. You still take that intent, but you ask whether that’s the work they produced. (And sometimes if your like the creator of The Room you pretend that the popular fan reading was your intent all along to save yourself from embarrassment)
I think one of the biggest reasons why there's such a divide among audience's response to Paul is because his archetype isn't nearly as familiar with in pop culture. Paul is not a hero, or villain or even anti-hero. Paul is a tragic hero, and that's a very different thing than most of the discourse surrounding the character and ultimately what Herbert is trying to communicate within his work. The whole "Paul is good guy vs. Paul is bad guy it just depends on your perspective" perspective misses the point. Paul is very deliberately written as the Mary Sue of Mary Sues; he's raised from birth as a mentat, an order that represents all of the sacred aspects of the masculine. He's surrounded by alpha males who love and guide him. He's trained in the Bene Gesserit way by his mother, representing all the cunning power of the feminine. Paul's mother loves him and his father so much that she disobeys a sacred order of her own sisterhood. Paul is raised as a ducal heir and learned in the ways or war and politics. He then goes on to live among the most robust, resourceful and pragmatic people in all the imperium and eventually becomes their legitimate ruler after succeeding in all of their rituals and besting all comers. At this point the missionaria protectiva is moot, Paul has fulfilled all of the prophecies that no other person in the imperium ever could, he literally is That Guy and proves it. And that's all before becoming the goddamn Kwisatz Hadderach, the supreme being who can see in all places at once. The most capable human to ever live. And yet, even this supreme being is unfit to wield such monopolized power because no one is. The jihad is inevitable, violence sings its own song. This understanding of power is demonstrated in all the surrounding characters and subplots. The Bene Gesserit have the hubris to think they can control humanity and even the Kwisatz if they just patiently plan in the shadows long enough, the Fremen think they are ready to fulfill their dream of the "green paradise" which they do, but at great destructive cost to themselves, and so on. Herbert once stated that his favorite president was Richard Nixon as Nixon taught the American people to distrust presidents.
And also, I fully understand the necessity to make Chani the voice of opposition when adapting this book into a movie. The book grants the reader access to the consciousness of its characters and through Paul’s consciousness, we experience his conflict with his ascent to power and the upcoming jihad, his attempts at stopping it until he realizes it’s much bigger than him and that he can’t. This kind of complex internalization simply isn’t the domain for cinema. Not fluid cinema anyway. So it’s necessary to bestow this conflict into an external source. And because the only character suitable to impose this upon is Chani, she’s the one who gets fundamentally changed. The movie version of Chani is a complete invention of the filmmakers and does not represent Herbert’s vision in any meaningful way. Again, while I understand that narrative necessity of this action, it comes with the tradeoff of erasing the original purpose of this character. In the book, Chani is Paul’s internal peace. The two of them both lose their fathers to this campaign providing the opportunity for these characters to comfort each other. Chani understands Paul as an outworlder as her dad was also an outworlder and has her outworlder father was in a leadership role within the Fremen, she sees Paul being the rightful man to take that position. Chani and Paul’s relationship is born out of deep empathy in this way. Chani becomes Paul’s ride or die, she too wishes for the freedom of her people, she provides her lover with valued counsel during his times of crisis. She understands the politics of marriage as all Fremen women do. The movie version of this character just has none of this. She’s little more than an avatar to voice Paul’s conflict and I consider this to be a substantial downgrade for her character. She’s vastly less interesting and complex and so is her relationship with her people and her lover. When I hear people say that this adaptation is an improvement to the character, I really think those people don’t know what they’re talking about.
@@cambodianz it made me existentially sad when I realized that Chani was used for this literary purpose. I understand the need, but poor late game Paul only has two things to bring him any kind of joy; without Chani there will be Duncan Idaho front and center I guess? Idk he’s a tragic hero and Chani is one of the only things keeping him Human in my opinion, and one of the only characters that can make god Paul make any kind of human decision, not because she “tells him to” but because he actually can’t emotionally. It’s more romantic by a long shot.
Beautifully put, this is literally the exact thing I’ve have been saying since the movie came out. It really seems like people think they are being clever and insightful when they try to claim Paul is a villain or antihero, but they totally miss the message that Frank wanted to convey in his books. Paul is not a villain, he is a hero, and that is what makes him so dangerous.
I love to go back to the final conversations that leto II has with Duncan idaho. The realization and the attempt to free humanity by being THAT guy and knowing that he shouldn't exist. Great summary and analysis, friend!
“we just lived through a global event that killed millions of people. And did that unify humanity? The answer, like humanity itself, is messy and unclear. All I can say is I definitely wish those millions of people were still here.” ~Jack Saint, Kwisatz Haderach
yeah i was hoping at least the "essential workers" would bargain a better deal, instead the exploitation only increased with small business closing and creating massive unemployment
@@timtim6373 OMG yes thank you. "opportunists opportuned and the unfortunate unfortuned" is how imma sum up the covid period to my children when they'll come back from school really confuseds by it in history class lol.
Movie: *shows Paul walking through the crowd in slow motion while Reaper horns blare and ominous drums beat and Johnny Mar's guitar screams in agony* Me, a person who has never read the Dune books or seen other adaptations or knows much of anything about it beyond quotes and sandworms: "Huh, this is a bad thing. A bad thing has occurred and is presently occurring" Bless you, Hans Zimmer, and your Garth Marenghi-esqe disdain for subtext.
'Garth Marenghi-esque disdain for subtext' is a phrase I need to use much more often in my life, that's pretty damn accurate to Hans Zimmer' way of scoring, he's great, but is very much prone to a John Williams directness when it comes to what's bad and what's good. It's a great way for the audience to be clued in in all the chaos
Subtext can be boring when used often. Why settle for a nod when you can go for a Ah-ha moment instead? The same sort of logic why pure evil villains with no greater goals or reasons is universally loved despite their being much more clever options available.
I used to be fed up with people thinking of Paul as a great hero. Now I'm fed up of people overcorrecting and practically painting him as a villain. The beauty of Dune is that it's much more complicated than that.
Yep. Dude saw a million terrible futures, including a bunch where Feyd or some other cousin awakened and seized power, or multiple cousins awakening and waging wars over things that never happen because they're reacting to prescient visions, and then he decided that the LEAST harmful path forward was to make sure no other prescients awakened. He says he sees "a narrow path" and it clearly agonizes him. Audiences should identify with him for seeing what must be done but being too moral and just to do it. (Leaving it to his son, for better or worse.) That's not shades of grey. That's the entire damn color spectrum. But 9 out of 10 people I've talk to about the plot and themes of the movies and books miss this entirely.
He only really becomes fully morally complex once Leto II is presented as the alternative that he kind of was the lesser evil of. He manages to do everything Leto II does but less severely; also a lot of what he does is ultimately out of pride as he mentions multiple times there is a path open to him that's more boring and stagnant. He and his son are ultimately addicted to change (Leto II ironically so), which I think is an effect of spice addiction.
It's going to be so funny. Because the reason Dune Messiah exists is precisely because Dune fans lacked media literacy. Herbert basically had a "No, what the fuck, Dune is a tragedy, cult of personality figures like Paul are bad, for fucks sake." Although to be fair, he did come at that from a rightish perspective being very put off by Kennedy's personality cult.
@@petermann673 I don't think that has to be rightish, cults of personality are just cringe. There were plenty of good reasons not to like Kennedy even if you were progressively-minded back then, transparent nepotism being the least of them.
@@petermann673 I don't think right wingers are gonna complain that a group of people who resemble islamists are seen negatively NGL but go off I guess
Shortly after Akira Toriyama's passing, I had a Redditor tell me in no uncertain terms that the only reason I no longer enjoy Dragon Ball Z as much as I did when I was a child, is because I lack ✰media literacy✰. I imagine this is becoming some sort of buzzword circulating around BookTok or something.
@@hvitekristesdod Disagree-able. Paul is a kid who was chosen and then never really made a choice in his life. Trump is a irl human being who is currently a deeply controversial figure in the center stage of a culture war. That war is currently causing massive divide between two groups who cant stop screaming and think critically because "Our tribe always good, Other tribe always bad"
I personally always saw dune (especially alongside Messiah and Children) as having three layers: 1) the savior - the face reading, where Paul is the savior, the Atreides are good, the harkonnens are evil; 2) the lie - the fremen are being manipulated by the colonial aspirations of the empire and Paul is manipulating the fremen into following the messiah myth; and 3) the machine - every character, even Paul, even the Baron and the Padishah Emperor, is a cog in the machine of history without true autonomy. I think all of these readings have value and are interesting, and all of them are expanded on and subverted throughout the books. In my opinion, the third layer sort of shows us Paul’s tragedy - he never had any choice in his path. By the time the Atreides land on Arrakis, he’s lost any agency in his life. I think the presence of both genetic memories and prescience are indicative of the total destruction of agency brought about by prophecy. But hey that’s just me
"By the time the Atreides land on Arrakis" I'd say by the moment Jessica falls in love with Leto, as that is probably the only free-will thing that happens in books 1 and 2. Afterwards yeah, it all set in stone. Personally I blame the Ben Guess-ain't-it witches.
Even that is iffy, because its part of the atreides mystique that Leto attracts fanatical loyalty from his men, and perhaps love from his women. Its part of what makes the atreides dangerous.@@ofgreyhairwaifu4089
The way I currently interpret it, Paul did have an element of free will depending on how you define it. He explicitly stated his other options that did not include taking over the Fremen and kicking off the Jihad, but he chose to go down that path because he wanted revenge against the Harkonnen and the Emperor more than anything else and was willing to sacrifice billions as collateral damage to his goal. But at the same time, I think most of us would do the same thing or worse if our entire family was slaughtered and our enemies were getting rich off of it.
Reading the books I always read Paul as more of a victim of circumstance than anything. I think his character specifically speaks on how even with unlimited power anyone is susceptible of drinking their own kool-aid. Leto works better because while he feels guilt about his role, he was more prepared to accept who he is and his role. Which Paul was just never able to do himself.
Yep. Those gu less circumstance and more the conspiring of your whole family and every organization that is connected to them. Paul for most of his rise to power was more a tool than a user ironically enough. In their hubris seeking a solution machine in the Kwisatz Haderach. But what they made was a monster, a tortured monster that was very angry at the witches with the whip, which was them. Paul's tragedy is of a man never knowing freedom given power and ultimately enslaved to it all the same.
I took that it was the difference between Paul and his son Leto. Paul grew up human, among a loving family and with real human connections. It was his human desire for revenge and the injustice of the fremen oppression that prevented him for diverting off the path to jihad. But that same humanity that kept him from going all the way. He could never fully commit to the golden path because it would cost him more than he could give, his humanity. Leto on the other hand was born with his connection to spice and prescience. He never had the untampered childhood that Paul had, he was already on the golden path before he was even born. Whilst he cared and took comfort in others, he was never at any point ever fully human even before his transformation. That was why he was able to do it. He never had to give up his humanity, he had only to follow the golden path already laid out for him, even all the while every step of the way knowing exactly what it would cost. At least that was my interpretation.
Well said. I'm a long time Dune fan (the novels and the films). As a bit of an amateur Dune "scholar", I think it's like Dune 101 that the stories are absolutely meant to be ambiguous in it's political message. Is Paul bad? Sometimes. Is Paul good? Yea, that too. All human endeavors benefit some and harm others. Even the Baron is far more "gray area" in the novels than in the film adaptions. He is greedy, ruthless, hedonistic, and a sexual deviant, but so are a lot of people. He isn't cartoonishly "evil" so to speak in the novel. God Emperor Of Dune is Frank's real philosophical masterpiece, and I'd guess it's the closest we get to Frank's personal thoughts on politics, religion, and even the reception of the messages of his own previous novels. "Iconoclastic" is absolutely the right word. Dune is not black and white. Dune is deeeeeeep.
Yes, God Emperor is definitely the most telling and insightful look we get into Herbert's mind. It's also the start of the very weird sexual stuff that inflitrated then dominated the stories. The...proclivities of his contemporary sci-fi authors and his own rumored personal life do make you take a second look at the 'awakening' of the child gholas.
I feel like the whole “media literacy” thing started in a good place where people genuinely wanted others to be able to understand art on a deeper level, which is a shame, because now it’s a buzzword to throw at anyone you disagree with.
yeah. the first time i encountered the phrase "media literacy" was last year, and i instantly clocked that it was being used as shorthand for saying "my team's political position is better than yours because we're better at understanding stories." yet another feeble, pathetic attempt to try and say "i am better than you" in the ongoing internet culture wars. remember when people could just enjoy stories and appreciate their ability to speak to us on a profound, universal, human level without having to make it part of an argument? yeah, me neither.
tbh yeah, I first saw it when mfs were saying "patrick bateman is literally me frfr" which obviously goes against the point as he is consistently portrayed as a loser but i think its sort of come down to the same level as "woke" in the sense that it can be used as a descriptor of "an opinion i dont like"
I think it's a natural outcome of the internet's lack of a "filter". People have no clue what is a "good opinion" or a "good argument" because our standards are so low now. The media we consume nowadays isn't vetted or go through a reputable pipeline of quality. Our information is tainted. A well-made article by a practiced journalist mixes with a blogpost by a reader on a fringe newssite. The extremely stupid aren't caught in the filter and moderation of quality.
I think it 100% has turned from "hey guys we all really like this thing lets dig into it on an academic scale" to using it as yet another political bludgeon "putah -spits on normie- you fucking idiot dont you see that your favorite story was actually making fun of you this whole time. Youre disgusting. Oink for me piggy -kick kick- your author doesnt love you he loved me all along"
Maybe, but almost every time I hear someone bring up media literacy, I know I am about to get a lecture from someone with dumber than average takes who is so sure they are right that they are up on a high horse about it. Their "deeper level" is actually our entire societies default opinion and untrue more often than not regardless.
I actually found this the most (unfortunately) realistic side of dune, Paul's hair was stiff and dry and Chanis looked frizzed out from the oppressive heat, when I'm reality idve much preferred her luxurious curly locks were atleast looked after (realism being damned) she's a very pretty girl and the effort they took to "roughen her up" was toomuch imo
@@o-wolf Women have to look pretty in completely unrealistic contexts in so many other movies. It's hard to name any movie where women are allowed to look 'un-made' and like they actually live in the context they are written in. Let us have this one
Just waiting now for that last movie scene where the Giant Sand Worm final boss says ,'I am all the Sandworms' and Paul says 'No I am all the Dune' and then uses a stick to beat the Evil Sandworm back into the dirt. It'll be a happy ending because it reflects contemporary family values
I'll be honest, the second Dune movie made me realize an amazing trope in history/fiction, which is: *"Omniscience erodes humanity"* After drinking the Waters of Life, and re-awakening from the experience, Paul becomes "monstrous". He sees the pathways of destiny, and aligned with his interests, he plots a course through the sands of time to arrive at a fate which holds no surprises to him. To all others, he is an ascended being, but really (and I will give the movie incredible merits for Paul's portrayal in this) he is now something that I hesitate to call "human", because now the power balance is completely shifted between him and anyone else. He no longer sees people, he just sees pieces on a chessboard and their possible moves. Life no longer holds any surprises, there is no more chaos, benign or malignant. All there is left are "the moves". The cold calculations and sterile decisions that he must take to arrive at his foreseen "destiny".
Yes. And this also seems contrary to Paul's vision of Jamis from Part 1: "The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it." He's no longer experiencing now, and he's not part of the flow, as he sees the past, the future and is only concerned with plotting a course through events to arrive at a destination. Obviously, he does later realise prescience is a curse.
Tbf I think that still says more about power than it does specifically omniscience. You see billionaires acting like this, people aren't people just chess pieces and power plays. Kings Billionaires Company conglomerates Unless you don't consider those humans either.
@@MrFrankEast Oh yes, I understood that it is almost an extension to the "power corrupts" trope, but here I think it is more in-line with a metaphysical aspect that is explored in storytelling. In fiction, religion and legend, there are many stories where a character catches a glimpse of the future or a destiny is foretold by an Oracle, and in those stories the character does what he or she can to avoid it, only to ultimately fail and the prophecy fulfilling itself in the end regardless. But that's the curious part isn't it? Why aren the characters NEVER shown the "whole" reality of what will happen? Because to see the "whole picture" of the fates is something reserved only to the divine itself, it can only be shared (in its imcomplete form) with humanity. And that's what so interesting about Dune, it's a story of a character to reaches that level of (what some may call) divinity and becomes something antithetically human.
This is reflected very explicitly with Jessica earlier in the film. She drinks the goop and for the rest of the movie, interacts with the other characters purely through shows of power. Whether that be using the voice on people, trying to strongarm them into situations, or even bragging to the other Bene Gesserit at the end of the movie. It's very much a story about loss of humanity. About how individual figures can be elevated to gods and how that destroys the individual, and then the individual kills everyone else. Whether they're a Messiah or an Emperor, they're still always the same: completely detached from the people they are supposedly there to serve. I really really like Dune. I'm so happy the movies exist. I'm even more happy that they're incredible. Shame that people have decided to push an agenda onto it, but their voices will fade out pretty soon, while the story itself will stay alive and speak for itself for a whole lot longer.
@@chetmanley1885 In Dune Messiah, in the assassination plot line, it's mentioned that the Bene Gesserit lady and the Tleilaxu both internally despise the Guild navigator, and think he's essentially a prisoner, trapped in a room full of spice for eternity. The same guy, who like Paul, can literally chart the course of the future through being hideously tortured into it via spice. It's Herbert, doing that the thing where he's looking into the camera and saying "omniscience fuuuucking suuuuucks"
Thats the beautiful thing about Dune, the fact that Paul becomes a monster over time and his son Leto 2nd becomes the greatest Tyrant in all of human history, ON PURPOSE
I kind of feel for Colbert's take. He lost his Dad and I did too before encountering Dune. It was only on reading Dune Messiah that it really made me encounter the horror of Paul's rise to power. But that original work with Paul's perseverence after losing his Father and old life really helped me through a really rough patch in life so I do feel for Colbert in his take on that first book.
In the 60s, a lot of Sci-Fi were released in chapters through magazines, and early on the appeal was definitely vicariously living through Paul as the protagonist, and the power fantasy was becoming a super-being. It became the text, more or less, of the 1984 movie (the literal rain falling at the end there) and so on. It's totally understandable to see how people got into that power fantasy reading of the first book.
@@ErebosGRNo, I think that was his genuine take. His interviews normally don't have the same sarcastic tone as his stand-up bits or The Colbert report. Even in the Colbert Report he sometimes broke character (as in from the satirical politically conservative version of himself) and talked more like he did in that Dune interview when a subject he really cared about came up. I do think Jack bringing up Colbert's perspective is very interesting, because it presents a counterpoint to both of the politically entrenched sides of the culture war discourse around Dune. Colbert is unabashedly liberal, so both sides of online culture war discourse would automatically think he sees Paul as an explicitly colonialist monster, but he has a much simpler interpretation of Paul as a brave individual overcoming adversity to be become himself, an interpretation that the culture wars would declare is conservative territory. Is Colbert media illiterate? Well I struggle to say that someone who knows literally everything about Tolkien's work is media illiterate. He just had a much, much different takeaway than Herbert intended- but that interpretation meant a great deal to Colbert and helped him grow personally. Is that wrong because it isn't what Herbert meant? I'm no fan of Death of the Author, but I don't think I can say Colbert's interpretation isn't valid or legitimate.
i feel like its a shame that the film adaptation of dune didnt explain the butlerian jihad or do much world building around the actual roles that mentats and melange play in the dune universe because then it would probably be a lot more obvious that the kwisatz haderach isnt ACTUALLY meant to be a messiah, but more like a prescient super computer who would give the bene gesserit total control of the galactic economy and the reason they reject him isnt because he "isnt the one" but because he doesnt work for/have undying loyalty to them
The thing is Dune is not only long, but also dense. Even without those elements, many people still found it hard to follow. I think Denis is doing a great job at unveiling just enough at a time to keep it less taxing for a general audience. Best examples: leaving Feith Rauta and the emperor out of part one, barely mentioning the guild
0:45 “the story is about family and conflicts between good and evil” Great to see people really missed everything about Dune and are confident enough to farm content on its back
What do you think Dune is about? It feels like it's just about politics to me, but I've only seen the Villeneuve movies & read the first ~100 pages of the first book
@@burpie3258 It's a story about a lot of things. Of course there is a lot of politic discourses, trying to show the good and bad in all of them But there is also a great theme about religious fanatism, how religions are constructed and distorded by the powerfuls to keep the power over the masses. Paul is a purely constructed Messiah. The Benegesserits fabricated its myth to keep power on Arakhis, to allow themselves, through thought control, to manipulate their behaviours and everything. For example : water. The Fremen already have more than enough water to make Arakhis green again. But because of their religions and beliefs, instead of releasing it, they keep more and more water in vaults as they die, ensuring against themselves that the planet stays a dry desert that can harvest the spice more easily. Frank Herbert was really marked by WW2 and its humanitarian horrors. He didn't see a good and a bad side anymore, he saw powers growing and competing with each other at the expenses of the people below them.
I would add that it’s definitely also about moral responsibility to some degree. a lot of the situations Paul ends up in aren’t technically his fault - Jessica and the Bene Gesserit, the imperial conflict with the Harkonnen, the Fremen mythology, all of that are things that are more or less just thrown at Paul, and his life depends on being able to handle all of that somehow. he does have good reasons for the things he does and how he goes about them, but still, it’s undeniable that he’s exploiting people and the trust they place in him for his own goals, sees terrible consequences for his actions coming, and chooses to go along with it anyway because he considers it justified. and drawing the line where exactly that responsibility started is difficult. i personally think that it makes a point about power and how people and organisations general should not be trusted with (to much of) it, in a lot of ways, but that’s a little more debatable.
@burpie3258 also for the 'conflict between good and evil', Dune is actually far more morally grey, as 'good' characters do evil things and 'bad' characters do good things
Anyone know that comic of the ogre tearfully lamenting his lack of capacity to engage in literary analysis and only being able to grasp stuff largely on the surface level? Man, I relate to that so dang hard.
The joke of the comic is that the ogre is reading James Joyce (a famously difficult to read and understand author) and is actually being way too hard on themself, u prob pick up on more things than you realize.
@@freddiekruger3339 Not knocking you but I find it amusingly ironic that you're explaining the deeper point of a comic to someone specifically to tell them to not be hard on themselves for not grasping the deeper point of stuff.
Dear op, it doesn't have to be this way, read some philosophy and you'll find the clues. Maybe you'll have to reread to understand at first, but it's doable and even fun. Then you get to feel smart 🤙🥸
Lol, the idea of "teaching humanity a vital lesson by being the worst possible leader" is completely bonkers once you look at actual history and see that humanity never learns anything.
i guess in this magic hyperfuture, there are literal human computers at the right hand of every major leader, so maybe its banking on essentially a new subspecies of human thats able to think truly logically
@@Saibellusthat's a good point, but most people are nowhere near as smart as a mentat, and mentats themselves are too indecisive to make decisions without ALL the information. Paul had some mentat training, which allowed him to deal with the multitude of vision he had very efficiently, but otherwise everyone else is nearly as smart as the average car mechanic
Something that I've noticed in a lot of cases of "media literacy" is less 'this is the only good interpretation' and more 'your interpretation is so horrifying and awful why do you even think that?' Of course, that's a matter of opinion and very case-by-case.
Leto II wasn't trying to unify humanity, he was trying to divide it. A divided, unleased humanity, released from the "Known Universe" and spread across the stars unrestrained by any one power was the only way for humanity to survive.
Yes, I also understood from Herbert's books that this is the end goal of "The Golden Path". Humanity so diverse, and so widely settled across the galaxy, and so de-centralized, that no single threat can wipe out the whole species.
your reading of larence of arabia was really brief but i think you misunderstood it to be honest. lawrence of arabia is deeply critical of the idea of the white savior, lawrence is constantly depicted as being lost in the fantasy of being the messiah, while none of the arabs buy into his messianic persona (even ali who's probably the most pro lawrence character). The scene which you described as him "heroically riding into battle" he's chasing down and massacring a retreating turkish column and within that "battle" he exclusively executes unarmed surrendering people. in fact every time lawrence kills someone in the film its an execution. In the end lawrence isn't able to save the arabs or help build an arab state, he was nothing but a tool for the british and the ottoman empire is divided between the french and british. Lawrence goes home and dies in a motorcycle accident and a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about or have stated political agendas tell the press he was a "great man" lawrence of arabia is a much more complex and thoughtful film than people give it credit for
I think this is a very fair take, I actually really liked the film when I was younger and I agree it is critical in a lot of ways, on reconsideration I think it is more of its influence which was negative and certain ideas/aesthetics, but I think getting into the complexities of that just didn't fit right in a video that already took 10 minutes to start talking about Dune lol
@@LackingSaint I think the response from most people to lawrence of arabia at the time was very similar to the Conservative response to dune which you touched on in the video, I think it's difficult to make a film which is critical of this narrative in a way which doesn't get misinterpreted sadly
this 37 minute video took me like an hour to get through because I kept pausing to read the text and mulling over what you said lmao. absolutely packed with thoughtful commentary, it was a blast to watch. thank you so much.
Ok, since you're read it, I have to ask. On Red Dwarf season 3 episode 2 "Marooned" it's mentioned that there was a naughty picture on page 61. Is it true?
So much of what is called criticism on the internet now is just rage bait and literal nonsense trying to drive clicks. Entirely surface level critiques about the way characters look and nothing about the themes or plot or dialogue its so boring always the same "wokeness" or "bad writing" with zero substance behind it
I think a big portion of it is people have to run moral defense for something that they genuinely like, basically believing that if something like Starship Troopers or Helldivers is found to be morally questionable then that reflects on them poorly for liking it. The thing is though you can just...like bad things. You thinking Starship Troopers is a cool action movie or Helldivers is a fun game to play doesn't make you a fascist or a xenophobe, you don't have to argue and defend the morals of these series as if it would.
frank herbert literally wrote Dune: Messiah because people misinterpreted Dune. the same thing is happening with Denis' dune duology, people do not understand it.
No he did not. Stop believe BS you see on the internet without checking it. Herbert conceptualized the storyline for ALL THREE books before the first book was even published.
I remember seeing an article with a title something along the lines of "Dune is another example of Hollywood's obsession with the White Savior Narrative", right after Part One released. There isn't a quicker way to tell me you either didn't read the book or didn't get the message the book was trying so hard to convey. like how many times do you have to hear the main character say they are going to commit Jihad before you start to question who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. I think the interesting thing about Paul is he isn't just a Villain in a story filled with Villains, he is a tragic villain. He does the the wrong thing for good reasons, and as a reader going along with him it's easy to try to justify his individual actions as they come, one by one. It's not till things go to sh!t that we see those individual actions had major longterm consequences, and that he knew where the story was going before he made them.
It's notable that Chani is the daughter of Liet-Kynes so it makes sense that she would not only be more skeptical of the 'teachings' of the Missionaria Protectiva but also someone who aspired to be a leader among the Fremen.
If you really linking something in book that the movies hadn't even mentioned, Let's talk about Chani being a Sayyadina. Chani protesting about the prophecy is like a Priests protesting and not believing to the religion he is teaching. Paul is a prophet to the religion she leads. And more importantly, yes it's the fact that she is the daugther of Liet-kynes, a man that devoted his entire life for his dream and by extension, all of the fremen's dream to terraform Arrakis. This dream is so important to them to the point that, even if someone is in dire need of water, they wouldn't even dare touching the collected pool of water allocated for that dream. So I don't really get what's chani getting angry about when her father's dream and her people's dream will be much closer to achieve when Paul becomes the Emperor.
@@ragingtomato04yeah, I agree. I feel that the movie sidelining Kynes and the ecological aspect, made things make less sense and honestly made the Fremen seem dumber than are portrayed in the book. They make the collected water look like some woo woo stuff as opposed to a centuries long plan to terraform arrakis. I think they could have still achieved making it more obvious that Paul is not a hero if they’d harped more on that aspect. E.g. Kynes’ hallucinations of talking to his father about ecology and prophecy (maybe that would have made it too much telling or something). Just my thoughts though.
Jessica actually didn't know much about the significance of that knife. She intended to call it a "Maker of Violence," it's only by coincidence that she is cut off and thus misinterpreted as making reference to the Worms as Makers. She openly admits such in a monologue immediately after that line.
I really enjoyed this video. What people don't seem to pick up on with Paul's story is that he is ultimately powerless. He can't really do anything to stop the jihad once he's taken the step to survival. Him surviving that storm is the whole reason all those billions of people die: because Paul wanted to live and he thought he could be smarter than the universe. In that way it's a very classical story about ambition and hubris, the protagonist continually pushed into their kismet, appearing to have ultimate control and really having none. The same can be seen with the bene gesserit. They lost control of their breeding program, their methods of controlling the messiah failed. The missionary protectiva, the lies and propaganda they spread to help themselves in the future, turned out to be true and what the bene gesserit believed was shown to be flawed. There's lots of instances of this happening in Dune, people believing they can outsmart or understand the universe and ultimately being foiled by some baseline expression of humanity, some instinct or urge. “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
It's not as simple as if Paul and Leto II's visions are correct or not - they are definitely seeing possible futures, but in doing so, possibly blinding themselves. It's stated that looking into prescience with any bias or subjectivity (which can't be avoided) affects what futures you will see and can obscure some from you.
Oscar Wilde once suggested that "All criticism is a form of autobiography" because criticism tells us at least as much about the critic as the work being criticised He wouldn't have known this but it's probably particularly true for criticism epic sci-fi franchises
The real problem with online media literacy is the view, shared by people in all parts of the socio-political spectrum, that any sort of deeper thought about a piece of media is antithetical to fun.
Bro the amount of times I have seen someone make an incredibly cogent analysis of a piece of media only for these mfs to come out of the woodworks like "it's not that deep bro just turn your brain off and enjoy it" is crazy. I know people like this in real life and I don't think it's an attitude they have specifically toward media, but rather that these people just find deeper thought about anything to be boring/painful/undesirable.
I feel really bad for not enjoying deeper though about media all the time, but to me it really can be antithetical to fun. Sometimes people just straight up ignore or refute what is said in the text to make a point and then simultaneously refute what is obviously implied because it’s not explicitly laid out. Other times people attribute malice where there is none and get worked up over imaginary messages in their head, (I.E. the folks who endorse nonsense like how xyz is apparently in actuality an attack on masculinity and white people). And at the same time I don’t see the merit in applying deeper analysis to literally every single story and then getting mad at the author(s) for imaginary readings that don’t actually exist.
@@jimjimson6208 There is an issue with interpretations in general, that you usually only see patterns you are familiar with, and tend to want to see things that support what you already believe. If a movie would have an underlying message that goes against what you personally believe, you have total freedom to ignore that, and interpret your own meaning into it. A meaning you agree with. You can deconstruct stories in many ways, you can put weight into any aspect of your choosing. This makes these sort of interpretations much less a exercise of actually understanding what is being implied, and much more an exercise to make it about whatever you personally care about. This is why it's so tiring to see peoples interpretations. I'm not actually readjng anything meaningful or useful, I'm reading what you care about and can make fit. You WHISH it was about those topics, you WHISH this is what was being expressed and implied. In reality, it probably wasn't. In reality, you are just taking part in a huge circlejerk, trying to prove to your peers how "not racist" you are by saying Pinocchio was actually about how terrible slavery was. People have their personal philosophies and ideologies, and they try to cram them into absolutely everything. Add to that that there are a few very common ideologies, and suddenly EVERY movie is about a small set of socially critical topics. But they aren't. It's a pirate movie about pirates. It's an alien movie about aliens. It's not about wokeness, it's not about colectivism, it's not about colonialism, you are just obsessed and lack creativity, trying desperately to make any work of fiction revolve about those topics you love to think about all day. It's not that deep, and you are not that intelligent or virtuous. Watch the movie and please stfu. I don't want to hear YOUR personal values expressed using the plot of some movie as the vehicle.
@@DuelaDent52 All meanings are imaginary duh. If you think there are obviously implied themes that aren't directly stated then I don't see how you can be as bad at seeing deeper meanings as you're claiming maybe you're just surrounded by pretentious people who are secretly jealous of you or something. The guys who argue that media is secretly attacking masculinity aren't making imaginary nonsense they're trying to push a fascist definition of masculinity to make young men feel bad about themselves and be vulnerable to fascist recruitment. If someone's idea of masculinity is that men can't have character flaws then basically every piece of media outside of Steven Segal filmes are an attack on their idea of masculinity so its a technically correct piece of media analyis if one also happen to completely suck as a person. If I was the first person to discover that The Hungery Caterpiller was secretly an anti-semitic allegory I would be a weirdo. If perpetrators of anti-semitic hatecrimes kept refering to The Hungery Caterpiller as the lynchpin of their ideology then maybe I'd have a point about the children's picture book promoting hate crimes maybe not more likely I'd just be being trolled.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to view media as a form of consumption to waste to, which to me is kind of sad. I can understand what kind of messages a piece of media is trying convey and still have fun. In fact it just makes me appreciate it more, even media that I happen to disagree with. I can't imagine watching something and NOT wanting to understand what the creators wanted to tell us.
I (a bi man) was very interested on whether they’d keep the Baron Harkonnen gay panic bit in. They avoided it and I went “it would’ve been funny but I’m glad they took it out” and then WHAM out of fucking nowhere Austin Butler gives Stellan Skarsgård a simply prodigious smooch and then mogs the audience. It was beautiful
@@CRSB00 yeah it is just a plain and simple good thing they decided to leave it out, I just thought it would be really funny if they did. Turns out we got the best of both worlds
Slight nitpick: Jessica saying the knife was "a maker" was by accident. If you watch the clip you see Mappes interrupts her, and in the book it tells you she meant to say "its a maker of death" but obviously Mappes reacted before she could get the rest of her sentence out.
I mean, chaos and warfare are an affirmation of life. Stagnation, gerontocracy and stifling of violent impulses for convenience are the opposite to that. Dune portrays cycles of both.
I read the books after I watched the movie and the miniseries and was struck by how little they pulled from the inner thoughts of the characters - I learned that Paul is swept along just like everyone else - for example, when he goes to the desert and sees his last chance to prevent the jihad, he doesn’t (can’t) because that choice would lead to his death, and who could expect a child to make that choice - in a way he was a pawn in the game too
30:14 oh dang, you’re talking about it right now - re: prescience: I always interpreted it as more than just an educated guess, because we saw it had supernatural features: seeing despite being blind, having consciousness in the womb, “persuading people” of things no one could ever actually persuade that person to do - at least Paul, and the pre-born crossed into the supernatural for me
It's a very hard thing to translate from books to film if you want to show, not tell. Internal monologues are often very clunky. Another good (bad?) example is Annihilation (and the entire Southern Reach trilogy) which is absolutely steeped in the thoughts, emotions, and mindsets of its characters. The inner lives of the characters is what pulled me into the books, and while the film is certainly very good, there's precious little that survived in translation.
@@Paroex yeah, it’s one of those things that makes you see the need to turn books like that into movies and wonder: why? That said, Fight Club managed to improve upon the book, and that was very much in the head of the Narrator - as I am an internet nobody, I will direct you to a more respected source for this insight: Chuck Palahniuk
50IQ: It's about a magic guy who conquers the galaxy 100IQ: It's a subversion of the hero trope and societal system's fault etc. etc. 180IQ: It's women's fault
You forgot to mention in the Jessica maker scene that she completely wings it and gets lucky, she was meaning to say "maker of death" but lucked into the right word
Yeah he started and then forgot to finish his point by "the context is missing" unless by excluding that portion of the script he showed that "context missing" is frustrating
@@shth34d57the bene gesserit didn’t name it, the freemen did. Jessica knows the fremen calls the sandworms makers and thought the knife used to bring death was the maker of death. She was completely winging it.
The one thing that bothers me about people who regularly use the phrase "lack of media literacy" is the fact that, more than half the time, what they are describing is not, in fact, a lack of literacy. Literacy is a skill. It is the ability to analyze a story or speech and grasp themes that may not be expressed explicitly. But that's not where the issue lies with online media discourse. The issue is one of agendas (and I do mean it neutrally here). A dudebro who idolizes Rick Sanchez or Walter White or that guy from Fight Club isn't reading the story "wrong" because of a skill issue - he is CHOOSING to tune out any subtext that would come across as critical of a character that resonates with their own ego. They don't WANT to engage with media critically. That's not a literacy problem. It's an intellectual honesty problem. (and yes it does also bother me because it reeks of equating lack of education with regressive politics and I refuse to engage with that sort of nonsense)
as a former stupid teen, this idolizing can absolutely not come from a choice but inexperience. Not knowing that characters being manly badass heroes and them being bad people and criticism of those things absolutely can be a skill issue. Person is a protagonist ^ protagonists are good => person is good is a correct take in 99% of normie media so i don't fault anyone for falling into it AT FIRST
@@maciejglinski6564ok, I will admit me using the word "choose" led me to say something inaccurate. But I still don't think it being an inexperience problem contradicts the point I was trying to make. Ego gets in the way of critically analyzing media. How well educated you are doesn't necessarily dictate how capable you are of putting aside your personal and cultural bias when analyzing media. Obviously lack of intellectual honesty can coexist with poor literacy, and that may well be the case, but I still heavily dislike the emphasis that is put on the literacy part as if education alone were enough to make biased interpretations go away (and it really isn't, there are plenty of intellectuals and academics out there with outstandingly awful takes about literature)
yeah even framing it as a choice is incomplete the expectations and assumptions that make up our capitalist, patriarchal culture are impressed into people from a very early age. I'm paraphrasing but bell hooks describes the socializing of young boys as emotional mutilation, and we as individuals don't really have a choice but to play by the rules of capital and so "buy into" its idea of success That isn't to say resistance isn't possible, especially in building a community that cares for you and shares your commitment, but well "resistance" is certainly the right word for it.
I'm not even sure they need to ignore anything, most of the time. Very often, peoples who consider themselves politicaly progressives tend to think that everyone must adhere to the same hierarchie of values than them, and so, when they see a character or an action that they deem condamnable, that everyone else will either have the same moral analysis, or be delusional or ignorant in any capacity. Reactionnaries however, who adhere to a completely different system of values, where might makes right and in which the most admirable caracteristic is power in various forms, will not react to a Walter Whight or a Paul Atreide by condemning the damage they're doing to other, but by desiring the power they posses. Of course, they won't outright admit it, simply because they don't want to bear the social stigma that come with treating other people as human carpet.
As someone who considers themselves as a conservative, has read the Dune novels up to Children of Dune, and who has read and watched multiple essays on Dune and Frank Herbert, it is absolutely hilarious to me that so many conservative spokespersons completely miss the point of Dune in ans of itself. And I will laugh at those morons along with everyone else.
People who think the first Dune is a wholesome pro-life story with Jessica have NEVER read the sequels. That precocious telepathic fetus becomes a cruel tyrant, basically the heir to her Harkonnen heritage. Saint Alia of the Knife.
forget about Jessica and the sequels, Paul has practically gone mad with power by the end of the first book and is starting an intergalactic war, because of a position he was pushed into against his will and going with out of both revenge and desire for power. His mild-mannered father is dead, his mother's gone full religious oracle. There is literally no message about family in the story that could also be considered wholesome.
I think you can and should read most of dune both ways. Offering Paul up for torture is terrible. Paul overcomming that struggle is inspiring. The multi-generational manipulation of the fremen is horrible. The effort Paul makes to intergrate into a new situation is laudable. Paul adopting the roll of messiah to achieve his ends is aweful. The Fremen defending their culture by rellying behind a fremen cultural symbol is wonderful. Overthrowing a galactic tyrant and system of cast and oppression is great. Galactic war, genocide, and death is bad. No situation is not one dimensional, what elevates Dune is that you're asked to look at a character in every situation they find themselves in and ask, are you the protagonist or antaginist in this scene? The media screams this at the reader every time a character within the text blatently fails to.
The scene with Shadout runs even deeper Jessica was going to say "Maker of Death" when the right answer is "Maker of the Deep Desert" Mapes could have caught her out as a fake but was so eager to see her faith confirmed that she jumped the gun and tricked herself.
@@startingfromlevelone9510the humor is he IS a worm man and IS an amazing character. Someone without context telling you the worm is the best character is amusing.
I basically worship these books lol (as works of art I dont try to live by them lol I'm not an idiot but I have read them like.... 50 times?) you read them at the age you are. When I read them as a kid I read and loved the power fantasy, the chosen one the other more exiting lonely teen. Now I read for the political drama, the philosophy, the dystopian setting and sociology. Fyi this is how my reading changed over more than 20 years.
That steven colbert bit is absolutely wild. I read Dune in highschool as a summer reading assignment. And ultimately had to read something else because one of the questions on the assignment was "which character do you identify with the most" ? Which was impossible to answer. So to hear that someone read it and decided that they specifically came away with "I identify with the guy who exploited a race of minorities using fake myths planted by his mother's relatives in order to start a massive holy war", is crazy to me. I enjoyed the book, but 'relatability' was not one of its aims.
I think there are ways that you can still find Paul relatable in spite of those things, and I don’t think finding him relatable means that you aren’t aware of those complicated aspects of the character. A lot of his internal monologue humanizes him and might speak to a reader’s own inner conflicts, and like the video pointed out, one can still vicariously enjoy the hero’s successes even while knowing it has darker implications and ends in disaster. Colbert doesn’t strike me as someone who lacks MeDiA lItErAcY.
@@phuctifyno1 Okay, but "vicariously enjoy the hero's successes" etc =/= relatable. I enjoy most heroes in media, I identify with very few of them. I didn't say Colbert lacked "MeDiA lItErAcY", I just marveled at the idea of someone who identified with a character that was written to be likable in a complex way, but not at all relatable to me. For perspective, the book I read afterwards was Lord of the Flies (another somewhat unfortunate pick for that question imo haha), and I ultimately picked 'Piggy' for lack of better choices. Which should explain why I find identifying with Paul so mystifying.
I mean, I've never photosynthesized, but there are times I can relate to a plant. Empathy is more than just deciding "welp, xyz doesn't fit me in one *or* all-but-one way, so therefore I can't relate or identify".
I feel like that Colbert’s experience was that of a lot of Highschool. It was my favorite series and Paul and Leto were some of my favorite characters even if I didn’t agree with everything they did.
The worst part about the "media literacy" debate is that many assume that all books and films have articulated their intended message with absolute competency. If you want to criticize Starship Troopers for the flaws in its thematic intentions, with its utopian authoritarianism and lack of any attempt to portray the war with the Bugs as anything other than in Humanity's best interests, then you're "not media literate".
It's not? Starship Troopers was Heinland expounding the grounding for his political positions for a controversy in the 1950s (I believe nuclear testing). Hence the political system is what he thought was good, but it isn't intended to be utopian or feature much focus (it is basically an info dump). The political side of the war with the bugs doesn't get focus because the book is from a grunts perspective; Heinland was more interested in the weapons systems and men who used them. It is idea science fiction, where the plot is just a wrapper for getting the concept across (orbital dropped space marines).
@@samuelskinner7704 I'm talking about the film, which claims to be a satire of the book's alleged fascism but instead presents an extremely idealized, ethnically diverse, and sexually equal setting that - while militaristic and authoritarian - has very few flaws. And there is SUPPOSED to be a manufactured conflict between the Bugs and Humanity, but the Federation explicitly banned colonization in the Bug Quarantine Zone and we outright see the asteroid headed for Earth nearly destroy a human ship. There are so many "Well, actually, this is supposed to be interpreted this way, trust me on this" in the film it's no longer satire and instead unironic. That's where this whole "media literacy" debate stems from; but somehow everyone who actually saw the film and interpreted as presented instead of what the director said in an interview is wrong.
@@hydra7427The movies does fake propaganda so well that most of the people actually believe it because it mimics how real politician or media host talk. It's ironic, anyone who have basic knowledge on the subject of how propaganda works can see it, it's obvious and funny like the sketch "are we the baddies?". But here's the problem, most of people don't understand propaganda, so they believe the ironic part of the movie, and when someone believe that part of course humanity is right and the bugs need only to be exterminated, no question. You see "very few flaws" because you are blind or want to be. For example: In the fake ads part, a supposed murderer (if I remember correctly) is captured in the morning and the execution is live streamed the same night. If you think even a millisecond, how is this even remotely possibly fair. How can you do all the trial and investigation in just few hours? It's simple, you don't. So, when you say "very few flaws" you are hugely underestimating them
@@hydra7427 On one hand I agree that you have to be able to criticise satire and whether or not it was effective and something can be both satirical and counterproductive. But I don't think you don't understand Verhoven's Starship Troopers its not supposed to be a critical look at a Fascist society but a satire of the Fascist themes in American cinema. Its not a satire of fascism as it exists in fully fascist countries. Like all of Verhoven's work its a satire of America the fascism references are just there because that's the kind of insult that gets under American's skins due to the cultural role of WW2. The Federation is ethnically diverse and utopian ON THE SURFACE because so is America as it idealised began itself in film and TV from the 70s onwards. There are no flaws because its not about societies but about image and propaganda. The irony is the deliberate bad taste and shitty acting. The satire is that its bad on purpose and the intended commentary is that fascist art is bad but also fun if you embrace the tackiness in itself while rejecting the messages. The joke is that if you can embrace the absurdity you can simultaneously find it fun while also seeing everything it represents as absurd and not worth taking seriously. This is just how most educated Europeans view American action films its not obscure or hard to understand if you're not from the USA. If you don't get it its not because Verhoven wasn't clear its because the film's take on America is somewhat mean spirited. The people who don't get Starship Troopers are part of the experience of the film because its for smug anti-American European intellectuals. If you don't get the joke its because its at your expense. The film is ironic, the characters and scenes are all unironic. Satire is more complicated than yes/no style binaries.
@@AC-dk4fp I'm not going to debate to heavily - because I think this whole debate has run its course in other circles - but my overall point is that Verhoven operates on a lot of assumptions throughout the movie that aren't actually in the movie or even possible given what the audience is shown. "Actually the Federation false flagged the asteroid attack, the bugs have no way to launch the asteroid" has been an "um actually" for as long as I can remember, but that's not what happens in the movie. It could have happened, and that would have been a very neat twist, but it doesn't and thus the Federation's war is justified. Arguments like "well actually it's a satire of how war is portrayed in movies" is moving the goalposts; the movie was allegedly a critique of the book, and going off of that it's not good satire. There are plenty of anti-war comedy films that do not have these problems. Helldivers 2 itself lacks these problems, and is pretty much what Starship Troopers should have been.
Even the people who act like 'Media literacy' just means 'Knowing what the author's intended message was' don't *actually* believe that, because if they did it would mean applying that standard to media that has intended meanings they might not agree with. It's purely a rhetorical tool used for cheap dunks. It can't be both "The Matrix can only be read through a progressive lens because that's what the Wachowski's say is correct" and "My reading of The Lord of the Rings as a queer romance between Frodo and Sam is as valid as any other reading."
you have a point, but there is a difference between knowing (or, having an accurate supposition based on the work) the author's intent, and considering the author's interpretation most or exclusively valid Like your example makes sense in itself but I haven't heard people say that a trans allegory is he exclusive valid interpretation, more that the themes are definitely there and anyone who entirely dismisses the queer reading of the story is spitting nonsense. Then again I can't speak for everyone; there probably do exist people who treat the author's intent as the one true canon interpretation.
Yes it can. Because a queer reading of the lord of the rings is understood to be a particular lens on a story that was not explicitly about that, it's not mutually exclusive, it relies on acknowledging the intended meaning and choosing to interpret the material through a different lens to the author. Most people who are accused of lacking media literacy are not using a particular lens to reinterpret the work, they are asserting that their (mis)interpretation IS the intended meaning of the author. It would be like someone saying that Tolkien intentionally wrote the books to be a queer love story of Frodo and Sam and that any other themes represented in the story are not what it's actually about.
@@kaylemathewcomendador6964Well they didn't put the trans allegory in there by accident, but it's not the only theme and allegory in there, it's about a lot of stuff
@@EternalGuardian07 that makes sense, her character is very understated and kinda only exists to give the audience a reason to be skeptical of Paul, yet people are still mad because the WOC is expressing opinions contrary to the white saviour.
I'm pretty sure Herbert wrote that the Fremen were mixed race because they were descended from displaced slaves forced to live on Arrakis? The slaves were mostly Black and Arab. @@EternalGuardian07
@howareyoualiveifyoudonteatbeef Tell that to them. These would be the same types that were mad about the Black character in The Hunger Games was played by a Black person in the movie.
This was phenomenal, I was expecting some light-hearted joking about funny-stupid tweets or podcasts or alpha-male influencer rants about Paul Atreides, but instead we got some great content about the books itself, death of the author theorising, just exploring the ideas of Dune itself and how we can best go about thinking/debating about them rather than subscribing to just one conclusion. Also the statement you made about the pandemic is something i'd never thought of before, we did go through an extremely horrific period and instead of giving us some grande new purpose, like it might've in a Dune book, we are overall worse off now. Reading the book we kind of get sucked into the delusion that the Golden Path might be a net-positive by the very end. I think World War 2, however horrific it was, made it so that the next few decades after it seemed like genuine progress, genuine progress towards democracy and liberalism and freedom, or at least the war create fundamental morals and ethics for people to strive toward. It was never worth the death of all those millions though. And now I struggle to see whether WW2 really changed much in the long run, we're backsliding pretty damn quick, and the morals I thought were concrete thanks to the devastation of WW2 are now no longer set in stone.
I mean, all conservative media analysis is about forcing media either into the “conservative is good” box, or the “other than conservative and evil” box. That’s it. It’s all about forcing things into boxes and power.
Reminds me of the American wing of evangelicals/Christians, the way they need to make "parodies" of songs or movies to fit into Christianity or else they seemingly cannot interact with it, It's all Christian puritanism in a different coat
@@kanjonojigoku8644 Media literacy among conservatives seems very similar to Bible literacy among evangelicals: cherry-pick from the "sacred texts" what supports their believes, ignore the rest and condemn any other interpretation as blasphemous.
"But we just lived through a global event that killed millions of people, and did that unify humanity? The answer, like humanity itself, is messy and unclear. All I can say is, I definitely wish those millions of people were still here." What a poingant and sobering thought. A great piece of evidence that collective suffering does not always lead to greatness, and sometimes to suffer is just that: to suffer. It can be easy to become swept up in grand ideals that if people could just rally together, the world would be a better place. Context breeds thought, and thought changes context, and so on and so forth in constant dialectic, but the future remains ultimately unpredictable in any certain sense. But a *vision* of the future, a desire for something to *be* in place of what *was*, is what changes context to allow new thought and modes of living to come into existentence. Change comes from the will, and who can say what truly galvanizes the will? And who has the right to implement their vision, and lord it over others, or to cause suffering because of an *ought to be*? I think its fair to say no one, because we *all* have visions of what ought to be, and though some have more reasonable visions than others, the basic ability to imagine and *will into being* (even if our ability to manifest our wills are restricted by external forces) is the great equalizer. Sorry for writing a manifesto in the comments, but this prompted a deeper understanding of ideas I've been wrestling with for quite some time.
@@LackingSaint I love that episode and it really makes you think about how things look like when its someone of a different gender but also just as morally dubious, still as a kid I just liked the cool worm aesthetic. Much love and the video was still great! :3
Paul goes on a massive galactic super war and takes over humanity and gets rid of the system that tried to destroy him. Yes, the author himself intended this as a bad thing, but most of the readers didn't, which caused him consternation until the day he died.
I don't think so. Some of them will complain about there being a "toxic masculinity" angle but characters getting corrupted by power isn't an inherently partisan message. In fact, I expect some of them to compare Paul to whoever the Democratic Party presidential nominee is when the movie comes out.
24:16 omg this little transition was so delightful, I laughed so loud because YES for anyone who has tried to contend with the full Herbert anthology and then stumbled into online debates about Dune 2 at some point a person familiar with the whole anthology will disassociate and start thinking about The Worm King 😂😂😂
i hate the mentality of "people need me to be absolute evil in order to be good" in media. sure it sounds cool and edge for like 5 minutes until you think about why it makes no freaking sense. its a fallacy at best and mind-benidngly stupid at worst
It depends. Dude talking about the pandemic killing millions and asking whether or not it brought us together... of course it did not. You DO see this more noticeably in the wake of direct human violence: After 9/11, libs and conservatives took pride in being American for revenge... for like two years. Then it went back to normal as the lies came out and the "War on Terror" dragged on. The US killed over a million throughout the region already with Desert Storm combined, and that's nothing to say of regional intervention for decades prior. Most American only knew of that around the edges, but mainstream news did not report these things often if at all. And with the CURRENT developments, you are seeing a large chunk of the planet getting quite angry at Western Hegemony as they're no longer kept ignorant of facts, seeing the atrocities and lies in real time through social media. So while it IS dividing us, it's specifically along lines of imperialists/idolaters/fascists and mutual respect/iconoclasts/humanists.
But you don't understand, humanity requires me to eat all the ice cream my roommate bought while he's at work and then watch UA-cam in my pajamas for four hours. The fact that what humanity needs happens to coincide with whatever I wanted is just good luck.
I have to agree, as it was one of my problems with one of the antagonists in Gundam Wing. Not that I'd call it bad writing, but his goal was to bring about an era of peace by basically pulling a Dune and leading the worst vile militaristic government of all time. It worked in-universe but doesn't make much sense IRL: we often just fear that specific form of government and their weapons, but that won't stop us from just repeating their mistakes while changing up our tactics. Even in the Gundam franchise, Zeon led to the Titans, which led to Zeon again alongside copycat groups. Being horrible won't stop future people from just repeating your actions, even if they fear you.
I think Zizek aptly sums up the current situation in people's beliefs, and extension their media literacy. He said that, it's not that people are ignorant to the structures that govern us, it is exactly that we know and yet we continue with our lives as if we didn't know. Cinema is the ultimate artform of disavowal, what we see are fictional events and yet we take them as perhaps even more real than real. I don't think people are getting dumber, it's just that ideology works in such a way that it sustains itself even through disbelief. Recall the meme "He's too humble to say he's the Mahdi, even more evidence he's the Mahdi, AS WRITTEN." As such, right wingers will always find a way to make it about their beliefs, not despite, but BECAUSE of their disavowal of Paul's actions. I think Frank Herbert also fell for this (I could be wrong tho) in his implication with the Worm King. But since I haven't read the book, I think I'd rather point to a similar case with Eren and attack on titan S4. The inevitability of Eren's actions as ones that were enacted by a "knowing" individual is exactly what absolute power is. It's the power that justifies itself. Why am I powerful? Cause I know the Golden Path. Why is this the Golden Path? Because I am Powerful. Ik "golden path" wasn't mentioned in aot but it was heavily received by the audience that Eren had a "burden" in enacting a genocide, i.e. Eren had to do it, i.e. white man's burden, manifest destiny. Isayama managed to coax the audience into blindly following divine providence whilst outwardly expressing the horrifying nature of such act. This is because the kind of power Eren had is THE one that justifies. He solipsistically imposes what arbitrarily must (not) exist. It really didn't surprise me that this was the season finale Isayama came up with given his right-wing background.
I wonder how they'll feel about her pre-born consciousness causing her to become demonically possessed. Sure seems like maybe an abortion would've been preferable...
The one thing none of the movies were able to transfer from the books is that Paul actively tries to prevent his own path from happening. That he is in fact going against what he is achieving, that he is not trying to use the Fremen for his war-machine, but he is trying to not go to war at all. He is vengeful towards the Harkonnen, of course, but he is desperately trying to tell the Fremen that he is not their savior. He is desperately trying to prevent himself from conquering the entire Empire via Jihad. That Jihad, the bloody conquest of all Houses, happens right after the movies. He failed miserably at preventing bloodshed. That is the important part of Pauls story. The struggle. The fight against his own future. And that is the part the movies have problems showing, because the books do it via inner-monologue, which is a terrible thing to do in a movie. The "Paul is the hero" thing is especially funny if you think about how out of the way the book goes to show us that Paul is not the hero. That the Atreides are maybe better people than other houses, but they are still a noble house exploiting people, gathering power. Autocrats through and through. I don't think there is a hero in Dune. There are protagonists and antagonists... but that's pretty much it. But most importantly, Paul gives up. He gave into the future that was set up for him and just followed it. Giving up trying to make it better. At the end of the story, of the revolution, Paul gives up trying to do better. And that is not the usual conclusion of a heroes journey. The first part of the story, the first books, don't end with Paul being the hero, they end with him being a violent conquerer. Eliminating all opposition, everyone who does not bow to his will. And then he leaves, vanishes and everything gets worse.
Fun video! The comparison between people's misreading of Dune and Starship Troopers is apt. The ignorance around Starship Troopers in particular really made me question whether a work of satire could ever really be "too heavy handed," because apparently there's always someone in need of more weight! At any rate, if you're looking for more Dune content, I highly recommend the Spicediver fan edit of Lynch's Dune. It puts back in a lot of the deleted scenes, cuts out almost half of the inner monologues, and changes the ending. 3 hours well spent, I say!
Except… what we are shown be what the director tells us are two completely different things. Just admit Paul Verhoeven did a shit job at “satirising fascism” and move on. He presented an ethnically diverse, gender equal society with academic freedoms and employed disabled veterans and then stick some robocop-esque propaganda slides in between to try and shoehorn his ignorant take on the book into the film. He failed to do anything other than dress characters up in Nazi looking uniforms. If he wanted to satirise authoritarianism he should have actually added some of that cynicism into the plot of the film itself and not just the window dressing. That’s why there’s so many “someone’s who need more weight”, they understand the message they are being shown and it doesn’t correlate to what they’re being told by the likes of the director in a fucking article 😂.
@@HicklingStand This is a good example of a defensible, literate take. I happen to disagree, but it's obvious you've watched the movie and I appreciate your point of view!
It's just that most masses will never have the education, time off work or intelligence training to experience stories to the fullest, you'll always have the ones who need an illustrated version of the Bible because they are illiterate
It was when literacy was literally in the toilet and only three monks called Ignatius and four nuns called Dorothea could even find time to discuss literature.
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As usual I'm going to use this as a spot to reply to frequent comments/criticisms, will try to keep updated as more come in (DUNE BOOK SPOILERS);
1. "Leto II wasn't trying to 'unify' humanity, he was trying to scatter them/had other motives."
'Unify' was a phrase used more to talk about Ozymandias in that section but either way I think this is splitting hairs in full context. I don't mean Leto II wanted to physically unify humanity but I think it is inarguable that he saw in the Golden Path a potential to turn humanity collectively against 'great men', and that's the context I was discussing it in the video. I agree he had other complex motivations, but this was an attempt to simplify several books of Villain Monologue into a more straightforward point.
2. "Lady Jessica didn't actually know how to trick Mapes and lucked into it."
This is a lot more fair and would've been worth properly addressing beyond just the excerpt on-screen showing it - when I say that Jessica knew how to manipulate Mapes, this was a comment on her knowledge of the Missionaria Protectiva that she was trying to exploit from the start of her time on Arrakis. At the time of writing the video I was worried I was getting too granular in talking about that specific scene so I considered her 'maker' mix-up a less relevant detail, but it's definitely worth pointing out.
3. "Lawrence of Arabia is more critical of the white savior trope than you gave it credit."
As a fan of the film myself this was also a case of cutting down the script in a way that may have oversimplified it - I definitely maintain that Lawrence of Arabia perpetuated some ideas/aesthetics that Dune is a commentary on, but I agree that there is a surprising amount of commentary in the film and I think I'd like to delve into this further with a future video.
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I think in the end these people fought for Freedom from the machines And in the end There great God emperor is nothing but a organic version of their machine Overlords. This kid is nothing but a quantum computer Made of flesh and bone.
You could probably do a whole series on Warhammer 40k. Games workshop has taken on the idea that 40kis a send up of fascism, but fan base seems to fully embrace the message without nuance (the danger of any satire I guess) and is one of the most toxic fandom in my experience.
do you think reading "a kid becoming a leader" and then giving the camera a condescending look will make that interpretation any less correct?
i think you can both value the deeper meaning of the narrative and appreciate the surface parts. liking the "fear is the mind killer" line doesn't inherently make the reader shallow or blind to the moral of the story as a whole.
Chani in Dune part two is a masterpiece imho because she reflects Paul's hypocrisy and flaws but only in those soft, barely-noticeable, "romance flick" vignettes, subtly juxtaposition-ing his relationship to her v. perceived self-actualization. You cant really be an "equal" to someone when you call yourself the chose one; nor a leader of the people, when you betray your vows.
It is Chani who is the last scene on screen; not Paul and all his messianic glory. A very cool way to bring this into the next film.
gonna have to finish watching this video when i finish the 2nd book. but good stuff. subscribed.
So this was Code Geass and Attack On Titan BEFORE they even existed. Curious. A lot of people are going to be VERY unhappy if they live long enough.
God I love the feeling of finding out that I've happened to completly avoid everyone on the internet complain about something dumb
Same.
A small anecdote, i heard one of my friends the other day complaining about kids on twitter putting content warnings on honkai's spoilers and i was like 'bro you shouldn't care about that shit' but he seems to have felt it was outrageous for some reason. Indifference towards menial things can be good, actually
I'm feeling that. Saw stuff come about "media literacy" and I was like, "yeah I sorta agree with some of these talking points" but this feels like the exact same debate the internet's been having with itself for the last decade or longer. Like I increasingly realise some people, (not necessarily excluding myself) have kinda poor relationships with media, be it some nutjob who constantly sees wokeness in everything or people who lose their shit because someone on deviantart did a "ship" that they didn't approve of. It is kinda just the modern condition I guess at least for people who are more online.
2071 moment
You just failed by watching this video (him referencing the dumb people not him being dumb)
Saw a leviathan of discourse pass under my rickety little canoe recently when I read post that includes the phrase "I hope a favorite manga gets a seasonal anime of the year studio trigger adaptation and everyone starts doing the world war 2 of yuribait" and like that's obviously in reference to Dungeon Meshi and good god am I so happy I have no clue what "world war 2 of yuribait" even entails. This was posted almost a week before episode 12 came out as well, so I can only imagine the horrific cesstrench that has erupted like a beautiful forest of colorful cordyceps from the hyphae riddled corpse of an ant since then.
I think you've missed the forest for the trees. Fundamentally, the deeper and more human thread running through the Dune series is "Wow, cool, big worm."
The spice is the big worms poo? Crazy!
@Tasmantor yezzir that was in the mystique of seeing the David Lynch on local tv in the late 80s, when he goes "the worms are the spice" I was just all "so like worm meat?" I think it was when sandtrout poop mixes with water
False. The human thread through it all is to think immediately of Fatboy Slim and the best dance sequence ever filmed.
@@laurenwasinger9436 the Chrispoher Walken thing in a mall? Hell no, HELL NO
Wow cool big worm, and aren't drugs fun?
My reading of Dune's central theme ist that wherever you are in the universe, you can always find a good deal on a Duncan Idaho (slightly used)
Yes, Duncan Idaho never goes out of fashion!
They don't call him Duncan Donuts for no reason. He's around every corner.
What the fuck is a Duncan Idaho?
Warranty void, tried to return mine and he just whined and shot me
Easiest job in the known universe, Duncan Idaho reseller
Dune is a story about your boyfriend getting redpilled into starting a podcast that slowly grows a following because his mom is actually the one managing it.
Dune is a story about why boy moms and nepo babies shouldnt be trusted
Step 2. Jihad
Step 3. Worm God Emporer
Step4. ??????
Step 5. Profit
@@jamesn3122 arguably the worm god emperor is the ???? part
oh shit! huoashouashouashuohasouhas
The irony being that Leto the Second did what he did to save mankind from AI which is definitely a red-pilled cause for many a podcaster. Yup it actually follows
Paul: “These magical space drugs will DEFINITELY make things clear.”
Space Drugs: “You need to become a worm and genocide humanity to make it stronger.”
Paul: “The math checks out but I’m conflicted…”
Paul doesn’t become a worm
@@DR-es5ey if I remember correctly he is told that he should in his visions but then refuses because he views it too great a Burden...so naturally he leaves his son to do it.
@@kurtwagner350 I haven't read the other books, but I'm guessing his son is like "ok cool, no problem, I'll turn into a worm and wax philosophical in the fourth book"
@@grey_f98 something like that...
@@grey_f98GEod is goated.
My homie who is a lifelong Dune fan called it years ago when he said " I fear the nerdosphere is not mentally ready for Dune part 2."
Truly the voice from outer bubble
“Would you still love me if I was a worm?”
“Yes, dear.”
“What if I were a worm-god who suppressed human development for two thousand years?”
“Uhhh that’s a more complicated question”
but he was ensuring that the golden path happened and undoing the actions the bene gesserit took to gain control over humanity. :(
it was worse than suppressing development too, he effectively stranded everyone not only on their own planet, but made them serfs in their own towns.
@@therru5943 Epic mlm W
“That would make you evil, so no”
@@joshraid1550but that was the only way to ensure the survival of the human race. The golden path.
@@darkhobo But how????
I say it every single time - those “gurus” don’t actually want for the Matrix to crumble, they want to climb on top of it and replace the current “authority”. They’re not rebels, they’re pretenders.
Exactly. They are Agent Smith, not Neo.
that’s actually funny because in god emperor of dune leto the seccond literally word for word says the same thing
To quote Rom from DS9, "You don't understand. Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation, we want to find a way to become the exploiters."
In every rebel there is an aristocrat
"When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor" - Talarico, Tommy
11:40 The funny part is that, in the book, Pauls mother nearly failed the test and it was only due to dumb luck that she suceeded. The answer "A Maker" referes to the knive being the tooth of a sandworm, which the Fremen call 'Makers' for making the spice. However, in the book it was made clear by an inner monolog that Jesica didn´t just wanted to say "A maker-", but "A Maker of death" refering to the knives purpose as a ritual weapon. She would´ve answered the question wrong if Mapes breakdown hadn´t interupted her answer half way.
What's funny is that Paul is literally no one's chosen one. He's not the Fremen chosen one because that's a story manufactured by the Bene-Gesserit, and he's not the Bene-Gesserit chosen one because according to their plans he never should've been born.
I haven't read the books but what I got from the movies is that the Mahdi was created by the Bene Gesserit (as it follows their framework) and the Bene Gesserit did so because they wanted to control the Fremen. Paul's mother then decided to make him the Mahdi since she knew the plan
No one was the chosen one since it was supposed to be a role filled by a Bene Gesserit puppet, Paul simply got in that spot because of his mother
@@fra604the missionaria protectiva of the bene gesserit planted these myths on all planets outside of the imperial core as a security insurance for bene gesserit who should find themselves there. it literally is a security mechanism for bene gesserit. its explicitly stated in the movie.
In the books (and in the movie as well if i remember correctly) they contemplate leaving Arrakis and inform the Landsraat (the other great houses) about the highly illegal actions of the conspiracy between House Harkonnen and the Padishah Corinno, which would probably have led to civil war between them (with interplanetary nukes, so: multi-planet genocide). So: to leave the Fremen be and try to get their justice by means of the Imperial law and the core. It's Paul who decides, both because of his (at this point still weak, pre-water-of-life) preciense and the vague plans of his father about desert power, to stay and embedd themselves with the Fremen. Arrakis is literally the only planet in the universe they couldn't just glass from orbit.
He chose himself!!!
He did what had to be done. (In latter books, also to escape the future of "ChatGPT kills us all")
@@fra604the Bene Gesserit planted those prophecies and religious traditions in cultures across the known universe. It wasn't intended specifically for controlling the fremen themselves but as a way for Bene Gesserit to integrate and safely survive in those cultures as needed and to prepare for the eventually creation of the kwisatz haderach.
Jessica wasn't actually intended to have a son. She was supposed to have a daughter that would be married to feyd routha to end the feud between atreides and Harkonnen and then their son would be the kwisatz haderach. But Leto wanted a son and Jessica gave him one which upended the plan. He wasn't intended to be the kwisatz haderach but being one generation removed from their intended kwisatz haderach he was able to become one anyway. He and Jessica used the religious beliefs Bene Gesserit had introduced to survive out of necessity. And in the books she was much less eager a participant in making him the kwisatz haderach. Fitting into their legends for survival was one thing but she was actually terrified of what he became in the end. Which makes sense because an actual kwisatz haderach is terrifying. And the early arrival of one teaches the Bene Gesserit an important lesson in the end: despite millennia of meticulous planning they could never have controlled him. They're too powerful and too dangerous. And between Paul and his son they spend 3500 years paying for that mistake and learning that lesson the very, very, very hard way.
That lady calling Jessica a good mom is comical. She's my favorite
I think "that lady" is Jack Saint's mum. She has been featured in one or two other videos on his channel before this one.
she does whatever it takes for her son, which depending on your definition could be considered a "good mum".
I can't even bring myself to say she is a good OR bad mother. On the one hand, she does show that she cares for Paul's well-being, but then she contradicts herself by bringing the Reverend Mother to Paul, knowing full well that he could die. I understand that there was reasoning behind her decision, but it's a bad sign when the Reverend Mother herself ridicules Jessica for bringing her to Paul and reminds her that he is lucky to even be alive.
Especially as she looks at what she has done and runs away for Caladan right after the end of the movie, and is further present only via one letter in next book, bashing what mockery of the state Paul has build.
@@jessea4438if i remember correctly, she was less so ridiculing jessica for bringing her to paul to perform the test, and moreso ridiculing her for having a boy because jessica should have known that the odds of him surving the test were astronomically low due to him being a man. Shes criticizing her for gambling the fate of a bloodline on a whim, by putting paul in a disadvantageous scenario for his test, when she was ordered to have a daughter that would have near garunteed passed the test.
Paul magically summoning rain in the David Lynch one always made me laugh, because that would exterminate all of the sandworms and stop Spice production permanently. Water is a deadly poison to the sandworms.
to be fair it's a kind of parallel ig to Paul threatening the spice production at the end of the book
@@WalkthroughHorde Threatening to do it and actually doing it aren't quite the same, though. The threats were to force the other Houses to accept him as emperor as an alternative to the collapse of civilisation, but if he just does it anyway the other Houses might as well burn the planet with him on it.
actually, there was a mention of a flashflood and fremen drowning in Children of Dune. I think you need a lot of water to start the chain reaction that distroys spice production, more than one rain delivers into one area. The worms can go deep under the dunes so not get water on them?
@@1983pety in Children of Dune they had built a network of irrigation canals to supply water to the plants that had been cultivated. It was mentioned that they also very deliberately left an area of untouched desert for the worms to live in and that the worms do not enter the irrigated areas. The water canals are open to the air and sandtrout congregate near the edge, trying to envelop the canal.
the worm's life cycle can put water much deeper into the planet, so it wouldn't exactly kill the worms
Can we just lock all the "Dune is about traditional family values and good conquering evil" people and the "Dune promotes a white saviour" people in an arena and let them sort it out?
idk dude, there's something to be said about the fact that a large portion of the audience, even ostensibly "progressive" people, idolize paul or call him "Him" or whatever. Of course part of that's the culture we live in but there's more to it than that.
Yes the movie (like the book it's based on - maybe even more so) very clearly understands white saviors, and has a very coherent notion of religion's use to settler colonizers and how white allies end up centering themselves and their personal feelings in a situation where they should not be the primary focus but have outsize power to do so, but like, the eye of the narrative also kind of does that? Paul is very clearly the central character.
Anyways here's hoping the next part Chani's knife doesn't chip and shatter before finishing off a deranged and imperially-ambitious desert mouse boy; and we can get a whole lot of "woooow this part is so depressing and boring and ruined the story, " like we did with the endings of Goodfellas, Fight Club, the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc, etc, etc.....
@@bumfricker2487would be pretty dumb for her to kill Paul and would accomplish nothing, but you are free to write fanfic lol.
@@bumfricker2487Yeah....not what happens.
@@bumfricker2487ooooh boy are you in for a ride if you stick with this story
Without knowing the intricacies of the series, it doesn’t do much for me to flip the white savior Messiah thing on its head mainly because from my understanding, it still holds a patronizing relationship between the “civilized” and the “uncivilized” by way of the group of nun ladies “planting” the prophecy into that society. Not only does it give off Jewish kabal conspiracy vibes, but it maintains a lack of agency in the Arab stand-ins to develop themselves independent of string pulling so deep it literally becomes their belief system. That is still a pretty weird hierarchy of cultures vibe, but this is what I’ve only heard and read, I haven’t yet seen the second movie nor have I read the books yet, so I could be totally wrong.
Ah yes, Alia and Jessica's story is very pro life, with the mother who later genuinely considers whether she should have killed her daughter in infancy because of the horrendous atrocities she commits in her later life
Shapabeboo has no interest in context or plot. Pretty much any take on media he has is either surface level, or politically charged to the point of not actually referring to the media he's supposed to be commenting on. It's what his followers want, after all.
ah yes the pro life book where they refer to the concept of a sentient fetus as “abomination”
@@soggos732 You don't appear to be sapient yourself. Somewhere around the level of a dog or homo erectus.
the fact that they didn't show Alia as a 4 year old psychotic murder child and have people call her abomination, only to be instantly killed for heresy, is on the movie. the text does it legwork to show you how this is fucked.
@@soggos732 a sentient fetus that may or may not be posessed by your evil uncle
When Jessica calls the crysknife "a maker..." she was actually going to say a maker of death cuz she was bullshitting and thought it would sound cool, but the maid immediately cuts her off and misinterprets Jessica's words to align with the prophecy the Bene Gesserit have propagandized her with. In the movie, you can see Rebecca Ferguson has more lines after "maker" but her words trails off after the maid interrupts her, and then you can see on her face how she just goes along with it. Just shows how carefully Villeneuve paid attention to the words and themes of Dune.
Seeing Dune subreddit posters ask why Paul in the movies made them feel a little uncomfortable is kinda beautiful. Boi are they in for a treat 🥲
If I were them and messiah is of the same quality the first two films have been; I think that'd be the strongest anti-authoritarian lesson I could experience. This is OG StarWars tier of quality.
Is that happening? That's kinda weird since I feel like Paul is a hell of a lot worse in the books. Or is this non-book-readers going to the subreddit to ask the book-readers?
@@Nuvizzle I think he is referring to the un-initiated who are experiencing Dune through the contemporary movies. Yeah they better strap in 😅
@@Nuvizzle its been more or less confirmed at this point when hans zimmer gave an interview on another youtube channel about how he created the soundtrack for dune 2, he said denis came in his office slapped dune messiah on his desk didn't say a word and walked out of his office so YES its coming
@@mrgoob76but not until 2027.
I just thought it was a really weird way for the Wonka series to go
The Chocolate must flow
@@Leopoldshark Fizzy Lifting Drinks are the mind-killer.
About time we got to see the Oompa Loompas tell their story.
Wait I haven’t seen the movie yet. Did they at least give The Unknown an appearance???
Eat without rhythm and it won't attract the Loompa.
I feel a lot of people should watch herberts interviews about Dune before he died. He talked about how he had a journalist fanboying about paul as the hero and wanted to see what great feats he would achieve next, Herbert then essentially said 'im going to kill your hero and you should too because paul isnt a hero, he's a villain made of good intentions which lead to the absolute worst outcomes for everyone.'
People get too caught up in the more minute narrative moments of Dune often imo rather than the grander narrative meant to make you question your own beliefs. The central philosophical dilemma of dune is the necessity and evils of power. Paul uses his power to avenge his family and try to make the universe a better place, in doing so he releases a tide of bloodshed across the galaxy not seen in ages, his actions make this happen and he chooses to follow the path knowing full well the reprocussions but doing so with a naieve hopefulness. We are asked to think of the actions of the god emperor, he is a brutal tyrant who intends to break humanity in order to save it against even worse tyrants. Once again a figure of power which justifies their good intentions while commiting heinous actions against the innocent. We must ask given the universe, are these tyrants right or wrong? Do they actually reinforce the power of those that eventually break them down? Essentially the book asks us to put ourselves in the heads of heroes and tyrants, to understand their justifications both true and not, to understand their intent and to understand the consequences of following power as both an actor and a puppet.
I think you missed something in Letos goal, his goal wasnt to unify humanity against tyrants like him, it was to break humanity into a million independent and deeply paranoid segments, essentially he wanted to balkanize humanity over such a massive gulf and with such divergent technologies and power that no one tyrant or god or alien could wipe them all out, that there would always be some pocket with the the distinct paranoia to counter the threat against man.
I remember when Paul told Chani "lol you have no media literacy, of course my visions mean that, get ratio'd"
Really sigma of him
Haven't completely finished watching the video yet but I just had to say that "media literacy is not about being the best at knowing what an author said about their work" is an absolute banger quote. It's generally very refreshing to see an approach of using media literacy as a tool to think about things more deeply rather than a tool to Win at Twitter
plus with Dune, having read the first 4 novels, I don't really get the impression that Herbert really didn't have a specific moral message so much as it's one big, complicated exercise in hypotheticals and a meditation on human nature and the cycles of history. it's not "based and redpiled", nor is it "woke", it's just a honest work with a lot of stuff to think about.
I have a rebuttal... shouldn't we listen to authors when they tell us what their book is about??
Hypothetically say you're writing an essay for your English professor on a book & you go off on a tangent about something that just doesn't seem to be there like their pro life claim for Dune. Wouldn't that essay get a bad grade for an interpretation not really there?
@@DioBrandoWRYYYYYYbeing honest is woke. I just think deeming something woke makes it seem stupid to ppl when being woke is actually good lol
@@craigmusa2254 I think of it as authors being good as an additional reference, but what they say outside of the text doesn't change what they actually wrote, and any interpretation should originate from what's actually written. Something an author says about what they meant can be good as a sign for other places to look in the text that you may not have considered otherwise, but it still needs to actually be in the text to begin with.
Additionally, as Jack said in the video, authors can subconsciously or accidentally include additional elements without realizing it, sometimes even ones contrary to what they actually intended.
So that essay would get a bad grade, but not because the author disagrees with it.
@@craigmusa2254I mean what an author intended *can* be important context or Jack wouldn’t be playing clips from an interview with Herbert, and someone pulling their own beliefs out of a work where they’re not present would probably get marked down for having extremely shallow or limited examples to make that point with, but there is also an extent where an author may inject things unintentionally through tropes or shortsightedness. That extent is going to vary depending on the work. The Room, through incompetence or shortsightedness, is far more interesting as a way to read into the creator’s views of relationships and women than whatever the original point was supposed to be. Loss is an infamous meme not because it’s an effective communication of tragedy, but of completely tone deaf writing. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between what the author intended or says it means, and what was made. You still take that intent, but you ask whether that’s the work they produced. (And sometimes if your like the creator of The Room you pretend that the popular fan reading was your intent all along to save yourself from embarrassment)
I think one of the biggest reasons why there's such a divide among audience's response to Paul is because his archetype isn't nearly as familiar with in pop culture. Paul is not a hero, or villain or even anti-hero. Paul is a tragic hero, and that's a very different thing than most of the discourse surrounding the character and ultimately what Herbert is trying to communicate within his work. The whole "Paul is good guy vs. Paul is bad guy it just depends on your perspective" perspective misses the point.
Paul is very deliberately written as the Mary Sue of Mary Sues; he's raised from birth as a mentat, an order that represents all of the sacred aspects of the masculine. He's surrounded by alpha males who love and guide him. He's trained in the Bene Gesserit way by his mother, representing all the cunning power of the feminine. Paul's mother loves him and his father so much that she disobeys a sacred order of her own sisterhood. Paul is raised as a ducal heir and learned in the ways or war and politics. He then goes on to live among the most robust, resourceful and pragmatic people in all the imperium and eventually becomes their legitimate ruler after succeeding in all of their rituals and besting all comers. At this point the missionaria protectiva is moot, Paul has fulfilled all of the prophecies that no other person in the imperium ever could, he literally is That Guy and proves it. And that's all before becoming the goddamn Kwisatz Hadderach, the supreme being who can see in all places at once. The most capable human to ever live. And yet, even this supreme being is unfit to wield such monopolized power because no one is. The jihad is inevitable, violence sings its own song.
This understanding of power is demonstrated in all the surrounding characters and subplots. The Bene Gesserit have the hubris to think they can control humanity and even the Kwisatz if they just patiently plan in the shadows long enough, the Fremen think they are ready to fulfill their dream of the "green paradise" which they do, but at great destructive cost to themselves, and so on.
Herbert once stated that his favorite president was Richard Nixon as Nixon taught the American people to distrust presidents.
And also, I fully understand the necessity to make Chani the voice of opposition when adapting this book into a movie. The book grants the reader access to the consciousness of its characters and through Paul’s consciousness, we experience his conflict with his ascent to power and the upcoming jihad, his attempts at stopping it until he realizes it’s much bigger than him and that he can’t. This kind of complex internalization simply isn’t the domain for cinema. Not fluid cinema anyway. So it’s necessary to bestow this conflict into an external source. And because the only character suitable to impose this upon is Chani, she’s the one who gets fundamentally changed. The movie version of Chani is a complete invention of the filmmakers and does not represent Herbert’s vision in any meaningful way. Again, while I understand that narrative necessity of this action, it comes with the tradeoff of erasing the original purpose of this character.
In the book, Chani is Paul’s internal peace. The two of them both lose their fathers to this campaign providing the opportunity for these characters to comfort each other. Chani understands Paul as an outworlder as her dad was also an outworlder and has her outworlder father was in a leadership role within the Fremen, she sees Paul being the rightful man to take that position. Chani and Paul’s relationship is born out of deep empathy in this way. Chani becomes Paul’s ride or die, she too wishes for the freedom of her people, she provides her lover with valued counsel during his times of crisis. She understands the politics of marriage as all Fremen women do.
The movie version of this character just has none of this. She’s little more than an avatar to voice Paul’s conflict and I consider this to be a substantial downgrade for her character. She’s vastly less interesting and complex and so is her relationship with her people and her lover.
When I hear people say that this adaptation is an improvement to the character, I really think those people don’t know what they’re talking about.
@@cambodianz it made me existentially sad when I realized that Chani was used for this literary purpose. I understand the need, but poor late game Paul only has two things to bring him any kind of joy; without Chani there will be Duncan Idaho front and center I guess? Idk he’s a tragic hero and Chani is one of the only things keeping him Human in my opinion, and one of the only characters that can make god Paul make any kind of human decision, not because she “tells him to” but because he actually can’t emotionally. It’s more romantic by a long shot.
Beautifully put, this is literally the exact thing I’ve have been saying since the movie came out. It really seems like people think they are being clever and insightful when they try to claim Paul is a villain or antihero, but they totally miss the message that Frank wanted to convey in his books. Paul is not a villain, he is a hero, and that is what makes him so dangerous.
I love to go back to the final conversations that leto II has with Duncan idaho. The realization and the attempt to free humanity by being THAT guy and knowing that he shouldn't exist.
Great summary and analysis, friend!
In short, Paul transforms into a figurative monster that shouldn’t exist.
“we just lived through a global event that killed millions of people. And did that unify humanity? The answer, like humanity itself, is messy and unclear. All I can say is I definitely wish those millions of people were still here.”
~Jack Saint, Kwisatz Haderach
yeah i was hoping at least the "essential workers" would bargain a better deal, instead the exploitation only increased with small business closing and creating massive unemployment
@@devforfun5618just as planned
Btw I’m not saying it’s fake I’m just saying opportunist are gonna opportune
@@devforfun5618 this ain’t your dad’s Black Death, it’s worse
@@timtim6373 OMG yes thank you. "opportunists opportuned and the unfortunate unfortuned" is how imma sum up the covid period to my children when they'll come back from school really confuseds by it in history class lol.
@@devforfun5618 it really consolidated the big corpos's powers
Movie: *shows Paul walking through the crowd in slow motion while Reaper horns blare and ominous drums beat and Johnny Mar's guitar screams in agony*
Me, a person who has never read the Dune books or seen other adaptations or knows much of anything about it beyond quotes and sandworms: "Huh, this is a bad thing. A bad thing has occurred and is presently occurring"
Bless you, Hans Zimmer, and your Garth Marenghi-esqe disdain for subtext.
'Garth Marenghi-esque disdain for subtext' is a phrase I need to use much more often in my life, that's pretty damn accurate to Hans Zimmer' way of scoring, he's great, but is very much prone to a John Williams directness when it comes to what's bad and what's good. It's a great way for the audience to be clued in in all the chaos
Hans Zimmer's Dark Place?
Ah yes, "Reapers".
@@optillian4182 Hmmm, the same term once used by a disgraced Commander Shepard to refer to a theoretical enemy?
Subtext can be boring when used often. Why settle for a nod when you can go for a Ah-ha moment instead? The same sort of logic why pure evil villains with no greater goals or reasons is universally loved despite their being much more clever options available.
I used to be fed up with people thinking of Paul as a great hero. Now I'm fed up of people overcorrecting and practically painting him as a villain. The beauty of Dune is that it's much more complicated than that.
Shhhh, Dune is too smart for idiots that can't comprehend nuance.
Yep. Dude saw a million terrible futures, including a bunch where Feyd or some other cousin awakened and seized power, or multiple cousins awakening and waging wars over things that never happen because they're reacting to prescient visions, and then he decided that the LEAST harmful path forward was to make sure no other prescients awakened. He says he sees "a narrow path" and it clearly agonizes him. Audiences should identify with him for seeing what must be done but being too moral and just to do it. (Leaving it to his son, for better or worse.)
That's not shades of grey. That's the entire damn color spectrum. But 9 out of 10 people I've talk to about the plot and themes of the movies and books miss this entirely.
@@NiteSaiya It's only the case if you assume he is prescient and not simply delusional and justifying his own dictatorship.
He only really becomes fully morally complex once Leto II is presented as the alternative that he kind of was the lesser evil of. He manages to do everything Leto II does but less severely; also a lot of what he does is ultimately out of pride as he mentions multiple times there is a path open to him that's more boring and stagnant. He and his son are ultimately addicted to change (Leto II ironically so), which I think is an effect of spice addiction.
Folks who just saw the movies, which is most folks at this point, don't have the mirror of Leto II and the depth he provides yet.
i cannot wait for the Dune Messiah movie and for all these people to claim that Frank Herbert went woke in 1969
And ending of Dune 2 strongly hints that Dune Messiah movie is being considered to be made
It's going to be so funny. Because the reason Dune Messiah exists is precisely because Dune fans lacked media literacy. Herbert basically had a "No, what the fuck, Dune is a tragedy, cult of personality figures like Paul are bad, for fucks sake."
Although to be fair, he did come at that from a rightish perspective being very put off by Kennedy's personality cult.
@@petermann673 I don't think that has to be rightish, cults of personality are just cringe. There were plenty of good reasons not to like Kennedy even if you were progressively-minded back then, transparent nepotism being the least of them.
69, uh-huhuh huh... you said 69. This said, they'll probably say Villeneuve misinterpreted Herbert because of Hollywood Woke money.
@@petermann673 I don't think right wingers are gonna complain that a group of people who resemble islamists are seen negatively NGL but go off I guess
"[Dune] is a holy war against liberalism" man that is surely a quote from a video on a platform
Liberalism... imperialism
imagine missing all the Dune inspiration in history class. what religious leaders of desert civilizations could it have possibly drawn from?
The pre-Islamic Iranian empire, but you probably already knew that. Hell, they're lead by a Padishah Emperor.
I've never seen a movie this jewish
@@electricangel4488 Perfect example of the horseshoe theory lmao
Shortly after Akira Toriyama's passing, I had a Redditor tell me in no uncertain terms that the only reason I no longer enjoy Dragon Ball Z as much as I did when I was a child, is because I lack ✰media literacy✰. I imagine this is becoming some sort of buzzword circulating around BookTok or something.
Other people: Dune is super fun and holy wars are great
Me: Why didn't they include the super intelligent talking baby
Fr i was expecting that part when i saw the movie
@@priscilavazquez3422 They kinda did, but it was honestly more tasteful
Because kid fighters are so fucking complicated
They did...with a very good presentation.
Because dubbing a fetus is easier than making a 4 year old act like a badass intelligent warrior.
The bene-gesserit propaganda was so good they even convinced real life conservatives.
What if this story starts a real jihad
@@hvitekristesdod That would be funny ngl.
@@CloseingStraw97 Trump and Paul have some similarities
@@hvitekristesdod Disagree-able. Paul is a kid who was chosen and then never really made a choice in his life.
Trump is a irl human being who is currently a deeply controversial figure in the center stage of a culture war. That war is currently causing massive divide between two groups who cant stop screaming and think critically because "Our tribe always good, Other tribe always bad"
@@CloseingStraw97 I think Paul definitely made his choices whether he was forced towards them or not
i like to think dune is about chocolate guy getting really high and taking over tatooine
And gets into a knife fight with a ripped bald psychotic Elvis Presley.
you're implying he wasn't already zooted oompa style off the loompa
I personally always saw dune (especially alongside Messiah and Children) as having three layers: 1) the savior - the face reading, where Paul is the savior, the Atreides are good, the harkonnens are evil; 2) the lie - the fremen are being manipulated by the colonial aspirations of the empire and Paul is manipulating the fremen into following the messiah myth; and 3) the machine - every character, even Paul, even the Baron and the Padishah Emperor, is a cog in the machine of history without true autonomy. I think all of these readings have value and are interesting, and all of them are expanded on and subverted throughout the books. In my opinion, the third layer sort of shows us Paul’s tragedy - he never had any choice in his path. By the time the Atreides land on Arrakis, he’s lost any agency in his life. I think the presence of both genetic memories and prescience are indicative of the total destruction of agency brought about by prophecy. But hey that’s just me
Nope. Ya got it.
"By the time the Atreides land on Arrakis" I'd say by the moment Jessica falls in love with Leto, as that is probably the only free-will thing that happens in books 1 and 2. Afterwards yeah, it all set in stone. Personally I blame the Ben Guess-ain't-it witches.
@@ofgreyhairwaifu4089 Or at least chooses to have a boy (because she loves Leto).
Even that is iffy, because its part of the atreides mystique that Leto attracts fanatical loyalty from his men, and perhaps love from his women. Its part of what makes the atreides dangerous.@@ofgreyhairwaifu4089
The way I currently interpret it, Paul did have an element of free will depending on how you define it. He explicitly stated his other options that did not include taking over the Fremen and kicking off the Jihad, but he chose to go down that path because he wanted revenge against the Harkonnen and the Emperor more than anything else and was willing to sacrifice billions as collateral damage to his goal.
But at the same time, I think most of us would do the same thing or worse if our entire family was slaughtered and our enemies were getting rich off of it.
Reading the books I always read Paul as more of a victim of circumstance than anything. I think his character specifically speaks on how even with unlimited power anyone is susceptible of drinking their own kool-aid. Leto works better because while he feels guilt about his role, he was more prepared to accept who he is and his role. Which Paul was just never able to do himself.
Bingo
Yep. Those gu less circumstance and more the conspiring of your whole family and every organization that is connected to them. Paul for most of his rise to power was more a tool than a user ironically enough. In their hubris seeking a solution machine in the Kwisatz Haderach. But what they made was a monster, a tortured monster that was very angry at the witches with the whip, which was them. Paul's tragedy is of a man never knowing freedom given power and ultimately enslaved to it all the same.
I took that it was the difference between Paul and his son Leto. Paul grew up human, among a loving family and with real human connections. It was his human desire for revenge and the injustice of the fremen oppression that prevented him for diverting off the path to jihad. But that same humanity that kept him from going all the way. He could never fully commit to the golden path because it would cost him more than he could give, his humanity.
Leto on the other hand was born with his connection to spice and prescience. He never had the untampered childhood that Paul had, he was already on the golden path before he was even born. Whilst he cared and took comfort in others, he was never at any point ever fully human even before his transformation. That was why he was able to do it. He never had to give up his humanity, he had only to follow the golden path already laid out for him, even all the while every step of the way knowing exactly what it would cost.
At least that was my interpretation.
Finally someone is speaking sense
Well said. I'm a long time Dune fan (the novels and the films). As a bit of an amateur Dune "scholar", I think it's like Dune 101 that the stories are absolutely meant to be ambiguous in it's political message. Is Paul bad? Sometimes. Is Paul good? Yea, that too. All human endeavors benefit some and harm others. Even the Baron is far more "gray area" in the novels than in the film adaptions. He is greedy, ruthless, hedonistic, and a sexual deviant, but so are a lot of people. He isn't cartoonishly "evil" so to speak in the novel. God Emperor Of Dune is Frank's real philosophical masterpiece, and I'd guess it's the closest we get to Frank's personal thoughts on politics, religion, and even the reception of the messages of his own previous novels. "Iconoclastic" is absolutely the right word. Dune is not black and white. Dune is deeeeeeep.
by Jove
nuance? in my modern media? what will they come up with next
Yes, God Emperor is definitely the most telling and insightful look we get into Herbert's mind. It's also the start of the very weird sexual stuff that inflitrated then dominated the stories. The...proclivities of his contemporary sci-fi authors and his own rumored personal life do make you take a second look at the 'awakening' of the child gholas.
I feel like the whole “media literacy” thing started in a good place where people genuinely wanted others to be able to understand art on a deeper level, which is a shame, because now it’s a buzzword to throw at anyone you disagree with.
yeah. the first time i encountered the phrase "media literacy" was last year, and i instantly clocked that it was being used as shorthand for saying "my team's political position is better than yours because we're better at understanding stories." yet another feeble, pathetic attempt to try and say "i am better than you" in the ongoing internet culture wars.
remember when people could just enjoy stories and appreciate their ability to speak to us on a profound, universal, human level without having to make it part of an argument? yeah, me neither.
tbh yeah, I first saw it when mfs were saying "patrick bateman is literally me frfr" which obviously goes against the point as he is consistently portrayed as a loser but i think its sort of come down to the same level as "woke" in the sense that it can be used as a descriptor of "an opinion i dont like"
I think it's a natural outcome of the internet's lack of a "filter". People have no clue what is a "good opinion" or a "good argument" because our standards are so low now. The media we consume nowadays isn't vetted or go through a reputable pipeline of quality. Our information is tainted. A well-made article by a practiced journalist mixes with a blogpost by a reader on a fringe newssite. The extremely stupid aren't caught in the filter and moderation of quality.
I think it 100% has turned from "hey guys we all really like this thing lets dig into it on an academic scale" to using it as yet another political bludgeon "putah -spits on normie- you fucking idiot dont you see that your favorite story was actually making fun of you this whole time. Youre disgusting. Oink for me piggy -kick kick- your author doesnt love you he loved me all along"
Maybe, but almost every time I hear someone bring up media literacy, I know I am about to get a lecture from someone with dumber than average takes who is so sure they are right that they are up on a high horse about it. Their "deeper level" is actually our entire societies default opinion and untrue more often than not regardless.
One very unrealistic thing in these movies is how voluminous some characters' hair manages to be while on a dry, desert planet.
I actually found this the most (unfortunately) realistic side of dune, Paul's hair was stiff and dry and Chanis looked frizzed out from the oppressive heat, when I'm reality idve much preferred her luxurious curly locks were atleast looked after (realism being damned) she's a very pretty girl and the effort they took to "roughen her up" was toomuch imo
As a guy with thick hair from a dry place, you understand the tenacity of some of our follicles
@@specialknees6798Same
@@o-wolf Women have to look pretty in completely unrealistic contexts in so many other movies. It's hard to name any movie where women are allowed to look 'un-made' and like they actually live in the context they are written in. Let us have this one
Dude, my hair is a CLOUD when it's super dry and hot. Like, frizzed to the hell and stiff as a deadbush. So no.
Just waiting now for that last movie scene where the Giant Sand Worm final boss says ,'I am all the Sandworms' and Paul says 'No I am all the Dune' and then uses a stick to beat the Evil Sandworm back into the dirt. It'll be a happy ending because it reflects contemporary family values
Throw in a crush 40 song, flash giant sand worm name on the front and put a giant healthbar at the bottom.
And then book 3 Leto 2 says "Why not both?"
Using Duncan Idaho as a spokesperson for a service to stop people from using your personal data without your consent is pretty apt
You might even call it intentional xD
sadly no single mention of 'beef-swelling' so only 7/10.
“Please stop cloning me, I am literally just a guy”
“Sorry you’re just too sexy”
@@merrittanimation7721 evil worm man tortures sexy chad for millenia, turns him into kwisatz haderach v2.
I'll be honest, the second Dune movie made me realize an amazing trope in history/fiction, which is: *"Omniscience erodes humanity"*
After drinking the Waters of Life, and re-awakening from the experience, Paul becomes "monstrous". He sees the pathways of destiny, and aligned with his interests, he plots a course through the sands of time to arrive at a fate which holds no surprises to him.
To all others, he is an ascended being, but really (and I will give the movie incredible merits for Paul's portrayal in this) he is now something that I hesitate to call "human", because now the power balance is completely shifted between him and anyone else. He no longer sees people, he just sees pieces on a chessboard and their possible moves.
Life no longer holds any surprises, there is no more chaos, benign or malignant.
All there is left are "the moves".
The cold calculations and sterile decisions that he must take to arrive at his foreseen "destiny".
Yes. And this also seems contrary to Paul's vision of Jamis from Part 1:
"The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it."
He's no longer experiencing now, and he's not part of the flow, as he sees the past, the future and is only concerned with plotting a course through events to arrive at a destination.
Obviously, he does later realise prescience is a curse.
Tbf I think that still says more about power than it does specifically omniscience. You see billionaires acting like this, people aren't people just chess pieces and power plays.
Kings
Billionaires
Company conglomerates
Unless you don't consider those humans either.
@@MrFrankEast Oh yes, I understood that it is almost an extension to the "power corrupts" trope, but here I think it is more in-line with a metaphysical aspect that is explored in storytelling.
In fiction, religion and legend, there are many stories where a character catches a glimpse of the future or a destiny is foretold by an Oracle, and in those stories the character does what he or she can to avoid it, only to ultimately fail and the prophecy fulfilling itself in the end regardless.
But that's the curious part isn't it?
Why aren the characters NEVER shown the "whole" reality of what will happen?
Because to see the "whole picture" of the fates is something reserved only to the divine itself, it can only be shared (in its imcomplete form) with humanity.
And that's what so interesting about Dune, it's a story of a character to reaches that level of (what some may call) divinity and becomes something antithetically human.
This is reflected very explicitly with Jessica earlier in the film. She drinks the goop and for the rest of the movie, interacts with the other characters purely through shows of power. Whether that be using the voice on people, trying to strongarm them into situations, or even bragging to the other Bene Gesserit at the end of the movie.
It's very much a story about loss of humanity. About how individual figures can be elevated to gods and how that destroys the individual, and then the individual kills everyone else. Whether they're a Messiah or an Emperor, they're still always the same: completely detached from the people they are supposedly there to serve.
I really really like Dune. I'm so happy the movies exist. I'm even more happy that they're incredible. Shame that people have decided to push an agenda onto it, but their voices will fade out pretty soon, while the story itself will stay alive and speak for itself for a whole lot longer.
@@chetmanley1885 In Dune Messiah, in the assassination plot line, it's mentioned that the Bene Gesserit lady and the Tleilaxu both internally despise the Guild navigator, and think he's essentially a prisoner, trapped in a room full of spice for eternity. The same guy, who like Paul, can literally chart the course of the future through being hideously tortured into it via spice.
It's Herbert, doing that the thing where he's looking into the camera and saying "omniscience fuuuucking suuuuucks"
Thats the beautiful thing about Dune, the fact that Paul becomes a monster over time and his son Leto 2nd becomes the greatest Tyrant in all of human history, ON PURPOSE
I kind of feel for Colbert's take. He lost his Dad and I did too before encountering Dune. It was only on reading Dune Messiah that it really made me encounter the horror of Paul's rise to power. But that original work with Paul's perseverence after losing his Father and old life really helped me through a really rough patch in life so I do feel for Colbert in his take on that first book.
In the 60s, a lot of Sci-Fi were released in chapters through magazines, and early on the appeal was definitely vicariously living through Paul as the protagonist, and the power fantasy was becoming a super-being. It became the text, more or less, of the 1984 movie (the literal rain falling at the end there) and so on. It's totally understandable to see how people got into that power fantasy reading of the first book.
Any chance that Colbert was being sarcastic?
You know, as that has been his whole shtick for years.
@@ErebosGRNo, I think that was his genuine take. His interviews normally don't have the same sarcastic tone as his stand-up bits or The Colbert report. Even in the Colbert Report he sometimes broke character (as in from the satirical politically conservative version of himself) and talked more like he did in that Dune interview when a subject he really cared about came up. I do think Jack bringing up Colbert's perspective is very interesting, because it presents a counterpoint to both of the politically entrenched sides of the culture war discourse around Dune. Colbert is unabashedly liberal, so both sides of online culture war discourse would automatically think he sees Paul as an explicitly colonialist monster, but he has a much simpler interpretation of Paul as a brave individual overcoming adversity to be become himself, an interpretation that the culture wars would declare is conservative territory. Is Colbert media illiterate? Well I struggle to say that someone who knows literally everything about Tolkien's work is media illiterate. He just had a much, much different takeaway than Herbert intended- but that interpretation meant a great deal to Colbert and helped him grow personally. Is that wrong because it isn't what Herbert meant? I'm no fan of Death of the Author, but I don't think I can say Colbert's interpretation isn't valid or legitimate.
i feel like its a shame that the film adaptation of dune didnt explain the butlerian jihad or do much world building around the actual roles that mentats and melange play in the dune universe because then it would probably be a lot more obvious that the kwisatz haderach isnt ACTUALLY meant to be a messiah, but more like a prescient super computer who would give the bene gesserit total control of the galactic economy and the reason they reject him isnt because he "isnt the one" but because he doesnt work for/have undying loyalty to them
The thing is Dune is not only long, but also dense. Even without those elements, many people still found it hard to follow. I think Denis is doing a great job at unveiling just enough at a time to keep it less taxing for a general audience. Best examples: leaving Feith Rauta and the emperor out of part one, barely mentioning the guild
0:45 “the story is about family and conflicts between good and evil”
Great to see people really missed everything about Dune and are confident enough to farm content on its back
What do you think Dune is about? It feels like it's just about politics to me, but I've only seen the Villeneuve movies & read the first ~100 pages of the first book
@@burpie3258 It's a story about a lot of things. Of course there is a lot of politic discourses, trying to show the good and bad in all of them
But there is also a great theme about religious fanatism, how religions are constructed and distorded by the powerfuls to keep the power over the masses.
Paul is a purely constructed Messiah. The Benegesserits fabricated its myth to keep power on Arakhis, to allow themselves, through thought control, to manipulate their behaviours and everything.
For example : water. The Fremen already have more than enough water to make Arakhis green again. But because of their religions and beliefs, instead of releasing it, they keep more and more water in vaults as they die, ensuring against themselves that the planet stays a dry desert that can harvest the spice more easily.
Frank Herbert was really marked by WW2 and its humanitarian horrors. He didn't see a good and a bad side anymore, he saw powers growing and competing with each other at the expenses of the people below them.
@@arkohnlock4409 Thank you so much for the in-depth reply!
I would add that it’s definitely also about moral responsibility to some degree. a lot of the situations Paul ends up in aren’t technically his fault - Jessica and the Bene Gesserit, the imperial conflict with the Harkonnen, the Fremen mythology, all of that are things that are more or less just thrown at Paul, and his life depends on being able to handle all of that somehow.
he does have good reasons for the things he does and how he goes about them, but still, it’s undeniable that he’s exploiting people and the trust they place in him for his own goals, sees terrible consequences for his actions coming, and chooses to go along with it anyway because he considers it justified.
and drawing the line where exactly that responsibility started is difficult.
i personally think that it makes a point about power and how people and organisations general should not be trusted with (to much of) it, in a lot of ways, but that’s a little more debatable.
@burpie3258 also for the 'conflict between good and evil', Dune is actually far more morally grey, as 'good' characters do evil things and 'bad' characters do good things
Anyone know that comic of the ogre tearfully lamenting his lack of capacity to engage in literary analysis and only being able to grasp stuff largely on the surface level? Man, I relate to that so dang hard.
The joke of the comic is that the ogre is reading James Joyce (a famously difficult to read and understand author) and is actually being way too hard on themself, u prob pick up on more things than you realize.
@@freddiekruger3339 Not knocking you but I find it amusingly ironic that you're explaining the deeper point of a comic to someone specifically to tell them to not be hard on themselves for not grasping the deeper point of stuff.
@@roddorfjfor real😂😂
Dear op, it doesn't have to be this way, read some philosophy and you'll find the clues. Maybe you'll have to reread to understand at first, but it's doable and even fun. Then you get to feel smart 🤙🥸
What's actually kinda funny is that by acknowledging his inability to grasp the concepts, he's being more introspective than chuds ever will be.
Lol, the idea of "teaching humanity a vital lesson by being the worst possible leader" is completely bonkers once you look at actual history and see that humanity never learns anything.
Yeah and why would pain and suffering be a great teacher anyway.
@@SuperPal-tr3go Exactly! It only brutalizes and barbarizes people.
@@SuperPal-tr3go You know who's a great teacher through pain and suffering? MY MOM!
i guess in this magic hyperfuture, there are literal human computers at the right hand of every major leader, so maybe its banking on essentially a new subspecies of human thats able to think truly logically
@@Saibellusthat's a good point, but most people are nowhere near as smart as a mentat, and mentats themselves are too indecisive to make decisions without ALL the information.
Paul had some mentat training, which allowed him to deal with the multitude of vision he had very efficiently, but otherwise everyone else is nearly as smart as the average car mechanic
Something that I've noticed in a lot of cases of "media literacy" is less 'this is the only good interpretation' and more 'your interpretation is so horrifying and awful why do you even think that?' Of course, that's a matter of opinion and very case-by-case.
well i think that your interpretation is so horrifying and awful, why do you even think that?
Leto II wasn't trying to unify humanity, he was trying to divide it. A divided, unleased humanity, released from the "Known Universe" and spread across the stars unrestrained by any one power was the only way for humanity to survive.
Yeah he was waiting for a complete "revolt" against all known structures of society. Only then would the wheel be broken.
Yes, I also understood from Herbert's books that this is the end goal of "The Golden Path". Humanity so diverse, and so widely settled across the galaxy, and so de-centralized, that no single threat can wipe out the whole species.
your reading of larence of arabia was really brief but i think you misunderstood it to be honest. lawrence of arabia is deeply critical of the idea of the white savior, lawrence is constantly depicted as being lost in the fantasy of being the messiah, while none of the arabs buy into his messianic persona (even ali who's probably the most pro lawrence character). The scene which you described as him "heroically riding into battle" he's chasing down and massacring a retreating turkish column and within that "battle" he exclusively executes unarmed surrendering people. in fact every time lawrence kills someone in the film its an execution. In the end lawrence isn't able to save the arabs or help build an arab state, he was nothing but a tool for the british and the ottoman empire is divided between the french and british. Lawrence goes home and dies in a motorcycle accident and a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about or have stated political agendas tell the press he was a "great man"
lawrence of arabia is a much more complex and thoughtful film than people give it credit for
I think this is a very fair take, I actually really liked the film when I was younger and I agree it is critical in a lot of ways, on reconsideration I think it is more of its influence which was negative and certain ideas/aesthetics, but I think getting into the complexities of that just didn't fit right in a video that already took 10 minutes to start talking about Dune lol
@@LackingSaint I think the response from most people to lawrence of arabia at the time was very similar to the Conservative response to dune which you touched on in the video, I think it's difficult to make a film which is critical of this narrative in a way which doesn't get misinterpreted sadly
Also keep in mind that the real Lawrence never even saw himself as a messiah to begin with. He was traumatized by the war.
Nailed it.
this 37 minute video took me like an hour to get through because I kept pausing to read the text and mulling over what you said lmao. absolutely packed with thoughtful commentary, it was a blast to watch. thank you so much.
The issue of media literacy has plagued me ever since I read Lolita and then saw the way other people talk about Lolita
:(
Ok, since you're read it, I have to ask. On Red Dwarf season 3 episode 2 "Marooned" it's mentioned that there was a naughty picture on page 61. Is it true?
@@danvzare6201 Not in my copy
@@EmissaryofWind Thank you, you just answered a lifelong question for me. :)
@@danvzare6201
🤨
So much of what is called criticism on the internet now is just rage bait and literal nonsense trying to drive clicks. Entirely surface level critiques about the way characters look and nothing about the themes or plot or dialogue its so boring always the same "wokeness" or "bad writing" with zero substance behind it
can people stop doing this? i'm a millennial that's too tired to get upset over trite nonsense like this anymore
...no? _sigh_ ok then...
I think a big portion of it is people have to run moral defense for something that they genuinely like, basically believing that if something like Starship Troopers or Helldivers is found to be morally questionable then that reflects on them poorly for liking it.
The thing is though you can just...like bad things. You thinking Starship Troopers is a cool action movie or Helldivers is a fun game to play doesn't make you a fascist or a xenophobe, you don't have to argue and defend the morals of these series as if it would.
@@PocketpigeonPocketpigeonLiar.
Beetle, i've seen your comments for years and i am 100% certain you know the only people who act this way are chud grifters.
soooooooooooo you know.
@@PocketpigeonPocketpigeonok critical drinker watcher
frank herbert literally wrote Dune: Messiah because people misinterpreted Dune. the same thing is happening with Denis' dune duology, people do not understand it.
And that's why a third movie could have the same impact as the second book.
No he did not. Stop believe BS you see on the internet without checking it. Herbert conceptualized the storyline for ALL THREE books before the first book was even published.
@@derek96720 yeah i'm aware that this has been debunked buddy
@@poopooman-q7r not my problem you left bad information on a public forum, buddy
@@derek96720 bad information, you're very articulate.
I remember seeing an article with a title something along the lines of "Dune is another example of Hollywood's obsession with the White Savior Narrative", right after Part One released. There isn't a quicker way to tell me you either didn't read the book or didn't get the message the book was trying so hard to convey. like how many times do you have to hear the main character say they are going to commit Jihad before you start to question who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. I think the interesting thing about Paul is he isn't just a Villain in a story filled with Villains, he is a tragic villain. He does the the wrong thing for good reasons, and as a reader going along with him it's easy to try to justify his individual actions as they come, one by one. It's not till things go to sh!t that we see those individual actions had major longterm consequences, and that he knew where the story was going before he made them.
incredible how hes both a tragic hero and tragic villain
It's notable that Chani is the daughter of Liet-Kynes so it makes sense that she would not only be more skeptical of the 'teachings' of the Missionaria Protectiva but also someone who aspired to be a leader among the Fremen.
If you really linking something in book that the movies hadn't even mentioned, Let's talk about Chani being a Sayyadina. Chani protesting about the prophecy is like a Priests protesting and not believing to the religion he is teaching. Paul is a prophet to the religion she leads. And more importantly, yes it's the fact that she is the daugther of Liet-kynes, a man that devoted his entire life for his dream and by extension, all of the fremen's dream to terraform Arrakis. This dream is so important to them to the point that, even if someone is in dire need of water, they wouldn't even dare touching the collected pool of water allocated for that dream. So I don't really get what's chani getting angry about when her father's dream and her people's dream will be much closer to achieve when Paul becomes the Emperor.
@@ragingtomato04yeah, I agree. I feel that the movie sidelining Kynes and the ecological aspect, made things make less sense and honestly made the Fremen seem dumber than are portrayed in the book. They make the collected water look like some woo woo stuff as opposed to a centuries long plan to terraform arrakis. I think they could have still achieved making it more obvious that Paul is not a hero if they’d harped more on that aspect. E.g. Kynes’ hallucinations of talking to his father about ecology and prophecy (maybe that would have made it too much telling or something). Just my thoughts though.
though her father totally bought into every aspect of fremen culture, so im not sure if kynes would impact her that way.
@@flyingfoamtv2169 Liet was a Fremen. You're thinking of his father, Pardo Kynes, that took the the culture. Liet-Kynes was born into it.
@@TheDalisama oh yeah, i guess hes half fremen genetically, but fully fremen culturally.
Jessica actually didn't know much about the significance of that knife. She intended to call it a "Maker of Violence," it's only by coincidence that she is cut off and thus misinterpreted as making reference to the Worms as Makers. She openly admits such in a monologue immediately after that line.
I really enjoyed this video. What people don't seem to pick up on with Paul's story is that he is ultimately powerless. He can't really do anything to stop the jihad once he's taken the step to survival. Him surviving that storm is the whole reason all those billions of people die: because Paul wanted to live and he thought he could be smarter than the universe. In that way it's a very classical story about ambition and hubris, the protagonist continually pushed into their kismet, appearing to have ultimate control and really having none. The same can be seen with the bene gesserit. They lost control of their breeding program, their methods of controlling the messiah failed. The missionary protectiva, the lies and propaganda they spread to help themselves in the future, turned out to be true and what the bene gesserit believed was shown to be flawed. There's lots of instances of this happening in Dune, people believing they can outsmart or understand the universe and ultimately being foiled by some baseline expression of humanity, some instinct or urge.
“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
It's not as simple as if Paul and Leto II's visions are correct or not - they are definitely seeing possible futures, but in doing so, possibly blinding themselves. It's stated that looking into prescience with any bias or subjectivity (which can't be avoided) affects what futures you will see and can obscure some from you.
Oscar Wilde once suggested that "All criticism is a form of autobiography" because criticism tells us at least as much about the critic as the work being criticised
He wouldn't have known this but it's probably particularly true for criticism epic sci-fi franchises
The real problem with online media literacy is the view, shared by people in all parts of the socio-political spectrum, that any sort of deeper thought about a piece of media is antithetical to fun.
Bro the amount of times I have seen someone make an incredibly cogent analysis of a piece of media only for these mfs to come out of the woodworks like "it's not that deep bro just turn your brain off and enjoy it" is crazy.
I know people like this in real life and I don't think it's an attitude they have specifically toward media, but rather that these people just find deeper thought about anything to be boring/painful/undesirable.
I feel really bad for not enjoying deeper though about media all the time, but to me it really can be antithetical to fun. Sometimes people just straight up ignore or refute what is said in the text to make a point and then simultaneously refute what is obviously implied because it’s not explicitly laid out. Other times people attribute malice where there is none and get worked up over imaginary messages in their head, (I.E. the folks who endorse nonsense like how xyz is apparently in actuality an attack on masculinity and white people). And at the same time I don’t see the merit in applying deeper analysis to literally every single story and then getting mad at the author(s) for imaginary readings that don’t actually exist.
@@jimjimson6208 There is an issue with interpretations in general, that you usually only see patterns you are familiar with, and tend to want to see things that support what you already believe.
If a movie would have an underlying message that goes against what you personally believe, you have total freedom to ignore that, and interpret your own meaning into it. A meaning you agree with.
You can deconstruct stories in many ways, you can put weight into any aspect of your choosing.
This makes these sort of interpretations much less a exercise of actually understanding what is being implied, and much more an exercise to make it about whatever you personally care about.
This is why it's so tiring to see peoples interpretations. I'm not actually readjng anything meaningful or useful, I'm reading what you care about and can make fit. You WHISH it was about those topics, you WHISH this is what was being expressed and implied. In reality, it probably wasn't. In reality, you are just taking part in a huge circlejerk, trying to prove to your peers how "not racist" you are by saying Pinocchio was actually about how terrible slavery was.
People have their personal philosophies and ideologies, and they try to cram them into absolutely everything. Add to that that there are a few very common ideologies, and suddenly EVERY movie is about a small set of socially critical topics.
But they aren't. It's a pirate movie about pirates. It's an alien movie about aliens. It's not about wokeness, it's not about colectivism, it's not about colonialism, you are just obsessed and lack creativity, trying desperately to make any work of fiction revolve about those topics you love to think about all day.
It's not that deep, and you are not that intelligent or virtuous. Watch the movie and please stfu. I don't want to hear YOUR personal values expressed using the plot of some movie as the vehicle.
@@DuelaDent52 All meanings are imaginary duh. If you think there are obviously implied themes that aren't directly stated then I don't see how you can be as bad at seeing deeper meanings as you're claiming maybe you're just surrounded by pretentious people who are secretly jealous of you or something.
The guys who argue that media is secretly attacking masculinity aren't making imaginary nonsense they're trying to push a fascist definition of masculinity to make young men feel bad about themselves and be vulnerable to fascist recruitment. If someone's idea of masculinity is that men can't have character flaws then basically every piece of media outside of Steven Segal filmes are an attack on their idea of masculinity so its a technically correct piece of media analyis if one also happen to completely suck as a person.
If I was the first person to discover that The Hungery Caterpiller was secretly an anti-semitic allegory I would be a weirdo. If perpetrators of anti-semitic hatecrimes kept refering to The Hungery Caterpiller as the lynchpin of their ideology then maybe I'd have a point about the children's picture book promoting hate crimes maybe not more likely I'd just be being trolled.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to view media as a form of consumption to waste to, which to me is kind of sad.
I can understand what kind of messages a piece of media is trying convey and still have fun. In fact it just makes me appreciate it more, even media that I happen to disagree with. I can't imagine watching something and NOT wanting to understand what the creators wanted to tell us.
I (a bi man) was very interested on whether they’d keep the Baron Harkonnen gay panic bit in. They avoided it and I went “it would’ve been funny but I’m glad they took it out” and then WHAM out of fucking nowhere Austin Butler gives Stellan Skarsgård a simply prodigious smooch and then mogs the audience.
It was beautiful
"then mogs the audience"🗿
It is very understandable that the movie left out the baron's gay pdf tendencies even if I'd normally say that bad guys are allowed to have bad takes
@@CRSB00 yeah it is just a plain and simple good thing they decided to leave it out, I just thought it would be really funny if they did. Turns out we got the best of both worlds
@@CRSB00 Gay pdfs? God-damned woke Adobe
hey i know that guy
the bad dune takes montage killed 70% of my brain, expect to see a letter from my lawyer soon
Slight nitpick: Jessica saying the knife was "a maker" was by accident. If you watch the clip you see Mappes interrupts her, and in the book it tells you she meant to say "its a maker of death" but obviously Mappes reacted before she could get the rest of her sentence out.
That dude calling it a pro life movie is hilarious considering whats about to happen with the holy war in the 3rd movie.
Oh but those people have already been born so they don't count.
Those people love holy wars. As long as it's their god who is winning.
I mean, chaos and warfare are an affirmation of life. Stagnation, gerontocracy and stifling of violent impulses for convenience are the opposite to that. Dune portrays cycles of both.
@@LoveProWrestlingPersonally I'm more of a race war enthusiast
@@LoveProWrestling Not much different than ethnic wars. Not many people condemn those though.
if you take it at face value, both the matrix and dune are just warnings about AI
"I'm sorry I had a big burrito and had to go to bed" ~jack showing off the humility paul lacked
As is written.
"Muad'Dib is too humble to admit he is the messiah."
I read the books after I watched the movie and the miniseries and was struck by how little they pulled from the inner thoughts of the characters - I learned that Paul is swept along just like everyone else - for example, when he goes to the desert and sees his last chance to prevent the jihad, he doesn’t (can’t) because that choice would lead to his death, and who could expect a child to make that choice - in a way he was a pawn in the game too
30:14 oh dang, you’re talking about it right now - re: prescience: I always interpreted it as more than just an educated guess, because we saw it had supernatural features: seeing despite being blind, having consciousness in the womb, “persuading people” of things no one could ever actually persuade that person to do - at least Paul, and the pre-born crossed into the supernatural for me
It's a very hard thing to translate from books to film if you want to show, not tell. Internal monologues are often very clunky. Another good (bad?) example is Annihilation (and the entire Southern Reach trilogy) which is absolutely steeped in the thoughts, emotions, and mindsets of its characters. The inner lives of the characters is what pulled me into the books, and while the film is certainly very good, there's precious little that survived in translation.
@@Paroex yeah, it’s one of those things that makes you see the need to turn books like that into movies and wonder: why? That said, Fight Club managed to improve upon the book, and that was very much in the head of the Narrator - as I am an internet nobody, I will direct you to a more respected source for this insight: Chuck Palahniuk
He believed that even if he died, the legend of the mahdi would grow, and reach the same end.
Yes, tho there is a point where he sees himself at a junction that is kind of the “last off ramp”
50IQ: It's about a magic guy who conquers the galaxy
100IQ: It's a subversion of the hero trope and societal system's fault etc. etc.
180IQ: It's women's fault
200IQ: It’s the drugs fault
300IQ: ... he had to do it
400IQ: biker’s fault
1000IQ: Dune is about worms
😂😂😂 the comments are gold
You forgot to mention in the Jessica maker scene that she completely wings it and gets lucky, she was meaning to say "maker of death" but lucked into the right word
Yeah he started and then forgot to finish his point by "the context is missing" unless by excluding that portion of the script he showed that "context missing" is frustrating
What was the right word?
@@kurtwagner350 maker (the Fremen call the sandworms 'makers', and a crysknife is made from a sandworm's tooth)
@@saoirsedeltufo7436 thx
@@shth34d57the bene gesserit didn’t name it, the freemen did. Jessica knows the fremen calls the sandworms makers and thought the knife used to bring death was the maker of death. She was completely winging it.
The one thing that bothers me about people who regularly use the phrase "lack of media literacy" is the fact that, more than half the time, what they are describing is not, in fact, a lack of literacy. Literacy is a skill. It is the ability to analyze a story or speech and grasp themes that may not be expressed explicitly. But that's not where the issue lies with online media discourse. The issue is one of agendas (and I do mean it neutrally here). A dudebro who idolizes Rick Sanchez or Walter White or that guy from Fight Club isn't reading the story "wrong" because of a skill issue - he is CHOOSING to tune out any subtext that would come across as critical of a character that resonates with their own ego. They don't WANT to engage with media critically. That's not a literacy problem. It's an intellectual honesty problem.
(and yes it does also bother me because it reeks of equating lack of education with regressive politics and I refuse to engage with that sort of nonsense)
as a former stupid teen, this idolizing can absolutely not come from a choice but inexperience. Not knowing that characters being manly badass heroes and them being bad people and criticism of those things absolutely can be a skill issue. Person is a protagonist ^ protagonists are good => person is good is a correct take in 99% of normie media so i don't fault anyone for falling into it AT FIRST
@@maciejglinski6564ok, I will admit me using the word "choose" led me to say something inaccurate. But I still don't think it being an inexperience problem contradicts the point I was trying to make. Ego gets in the way of critically analyzing media. How well educated you are doesn't necessarily dictate how capable you are of putting aside your personal and cultural bias when analyzing media. Obviously lack of intellectual honesty can coexist with poor literacy, and that may well be the case, but I still heavily dislike the emphasis that is put on the literacy part as if education alone were enough to make biased interpretations go away (and it really isn't, there are plenty of intellectuals and academics out there with outstandingly awful takes about literature)
yeah even framing it as a choice is incomplete
the expectations and assumptions that make up our capitalist, patriarchal culture are impressed into people from a very early age. I'm paraphrasing but bell hooks describes the socializing of young boys as emotional mutilation, and we as individuals don't really have a choice but to play by the rules of capital and so "buy into" its idea of success
That isn't to say resistance isn't possible, especially in building a community that cares for you and shares your commitment, but well "resistance" is certainly the right word for it.
I'm not even sure they need to ignore anything, most of the time. Very often, peoples who consider themselves politicaly progressives tend to think that everyone must adhere to the same hierarchie of values than them, and so, when they see a character or an action that they deem condamnable, that everyone else will either have the same moral analysis, or be delusional or ignorant in any capacity.
Reactionnaries however, who adhere to a completely different system of values, where might makes right and in which the most admirable caracteristic is power in various forms, will not react to a Walter Whight or a Paul Atreide by condemning the damage they're doing to other, but by desiring the power they posses.
Of course, they won't outright admit it, simply because they don't want to bear the social stigma that come with treating other people as human carpet.
Good point well made
As someone who considers themselves as a conservative, has read the Dune novels up to Children of Dune, and who has read and watched multiple essays on Dune and Frank Herbert, it is absolutely hilarious to me that so many conservative spokespersons completely miss the point of Dune in ans of itself. And I will laugh at those morons along with everyone else.
I think Duncan put it really well: "Dreams make for good stories, but everything important happens while we're awake."
But he died, proving Paul’s predictive dreams right. 🤔
@@mhawang8204 ( there far more to this … but i wont say any spoilers.) 😂
@@mhawang8204Dune Messiah
Dreams, as aspirations, make for good stories.
Literal dreams are nonsensical.
People who think the first Dune is a wholesome pro-life story with Jessica have NEVER read the sequels.
That precocious telepathic fetus becomes a cruel tyrant, basically the heir to her Harkonnen heritage. Saint Alia of the Knife.
But, like, she’s a cool character so it’s chill
Right-wingers unironically do support cruel tyrants though
forget about Jessica and the sequels, Paul has practically gone mad with power by the end of the first book and is starting an intergalactic war, because of a position he was pushed into against his will and going with out of both revenge and desire for power. His mild-mannered father is dead, his mother's gone full religious oracle. There is literally no message about family in the story that could also be considered wholesome.
*Unless you already have a very twisted or shallow view of family @@maxmocs5008
@@maxmocs5008 It's only that way if you go into it looking for pro-life family values.
I think you can and should read most of dune both ways.
Offering Paul up for torture is terrible.
Paul overcomming that struggle is inspiring.
The multi-generational manipulation of the fremen is horrible.
The effort Paul makes to intergrate into a new situation is laudable.
Paul adopting the roll of messiah to achieve his ends is aweful.
The Fremen defending their culture by rellying behind a fremen cultural symbol is wonderful.
Overthrowing a galactic tyrant and system of cast and oppression is great.
Galactic war, genocide, and death is bad.
No situation is not one dimensional, what elevates Dune is that you're asked to look at a character in every situation they find themselves in and ask, are you the protagonist or antaginist in this scene? The media screams this at the reader every time a character within the text blatently fails to.
yes this!
for every bit of media you interpret
2 sides to every story
SORRY im right and youre wrong fuck you
The scene with Shadout runs even deeper Jessica was going to say "Maker of Death" when the right answer is "Maker of the Deep Desert" Mapes could have caught her out as a fake but was so eager to see her faith confirmed that she jumped the gun and tricked herself.
36:13 "I just said the genocidal worm man was my favourite character in literature"
- Jack Saint -
this was certainly a line to experience.
So wait, is the joke that Leto II is your favorite character, or the way you presented him?
@@startingfromlevelone9510the humor is he IS a worm man and IS an amazing character. Someone without context telling you the worm is the best character is amusing.
I basically worship these books lol (as works of art I dont try to live by them lol I'm not an idiot but I have read them like.... 50 times?) you read them at the age you are. When I read them as a kid I read and loved the power fantasy, the chosen one the other more exiting lonely teen. Now I read for the political drama, the philosophy, the dystopian setting and sociology. Fyi this is how my reading changed over more than 20 years.
haaa I love that you mentioned star ship troopers because that is the other film I've always loved but why has changed over the years
That steven colbert bit is absolutely wild. I read Dune in highschool as a summer reading assignment. And ultimately had to read something else because one of the questions on the assignment was "which character do you identify with the most" ? Which was impossible to answer. So to hear that someone read it and decided that they specifically came away with "I identify with the guy who exploited a race of minorities using fake myths planted by his mother's relatives in order to start a massive holy war", is crazy to me. I enjoyed the book, but 'relatability' was not one of its aims.
I think there are ways that you can still find Paul relatable in spite of those things, and I don’t think finding him relatable means that you aren’t aware of those complicated aspects of the character. A lot of his internal monologue humanizes him and might speak to a reader’s own inner conflicts, and like the video pointed out, one can still vicariously enjoy the hero’s successes even while knowing it has darker implications and ends in disaster.
Colbert doesn’t strike me as someone who lacks MeDiA lItErAcY.
@@phuctifyno1 Okay, but "vicariously enjoy the hero's successes" etc =/= relatable. I enjoy most heroes in media, I identify with very few of them.
I didn't say Colbert lacked "MeDiA lItErAcY", I just marveled at the idea of someone who identified with a character that was written to be likable in a complex way, but not at all relatable to me.
For perspective, the book I read afterwards was Lord of the Flies (another somewhat unfortunate pick for that question imo haha), and I ultimately picked 'Piggy' for lack of better choices. Which should explain why I find identifying with Paul so mystifying.
I mean, I've never photosynthesized, but there are times I can relate to a plant. Empathy is more than just deciding "welp, xyz doesn't fit me in one *or* all-but-one way, so therefore I can't relate or identify".
Probably helps if you're not a literal child with no clue about what politics is.
I feel like that Colbert’s experience was that of a lot of Highschool. It was my favorite series and Paul and Leto were some of my favorite characters even if I didn’t agree with everything they did.
The worst part about the "media literacy" debate is that many assume that all books and films have articulated their intended message with absolute competency. If you want to criticize Starship Troopers for the flaws in its thematic intentions, with its utopian authoritarianism and lack of any attempt to portray the war with the Bugs as anything other than in Humanity's best interests, then you're "not media literate".
It's not? Starship Troopers was Heinland expounding the grounding for his political positions for a controversy in the 1950s (I believe nuclear testing). Hence the political system is what he thought was good, but it isn't intended to be utopian or feature much focus (it is basically an info dump).
The political side of the war with the bugs doesn't get focus because the book is from a grunts perspective; Heinland was more interested in the weapons systems and men who used them. It is idea science fiction, where the plot is just a wrapper for getting the concept across (orbital dropped space marines).
@@samuelskinner7704 I'm talking about the film, which claims to be a satire of the book's alleged fascism but instead presents an extremely idealized, ethnically diverse, and sexually equal setting that - while militaristic and authoritarian - has very few flaws. And there is SUPPOSED to be a manufactured conflict between the Bugs and Humanity, but the Federation explicitly banned colonization in the Bug Quarantine Zone and we outright see the asteroid headed for Earth nearly destroy a human ship. There are so many "Well, actually, this is supposed to be interpreted this way, trust me on this" in the film it's no longer satire and instead unironic. That's where this whole "media literacy" debate stems from; but somehow everyone who actually saw the film and interpreted as presented instead of what the director said in an interview is wrong.
@@hydra7427The movies does fake propaganda so well that most of the people actually believe it because it mimics how real politician or media host talk.
It's ironic, anyone who have basic knowledge on the subject of how propaganda works can see it, it's obvious and funny like the sketch "are we the baddies?".
But here's the problem, most of people don't understand propaganda, so they believe the ironic part of the movie, and when someone believe that part of course humanity is right and the bugs need only to be exterminated, no question.
You see "very few flaws" because you are blind or want to be.
For example:
In the fake ads part, a supposed murderer (if I remember correctly) is captured in the morning and the execution is live streamed the same night.
If you think even a millisecond, how is this even remotely possibly fair. How can you do all the trial and investigation in just few hours?
It's simple, you don't.
So, when you say "very few flaws" you are hugely underestimating them
@@hydra7427 On one hand I agree that you have to be able to criticise satire and whether or not it was effective and something can be both satirical and counterproductive. But I don't think you don't understand Verhoven's Starship Troopers its not supposed to be a critical look at a Fascist society but a satire of the Fascist themes in American cinema. Its not a satire of fascism as it exists in fully fascist countries. Like all of Verhoven's work its a satire of America the fascism references are just there because that's the kind of insult that gets under American's skins due to the cultural role of WW2.
The Federation is ethnically diverse and utopian ON THE SURFACE because so is America as it idealised began itself in film and TV from the 70s onwards. There are no flaws because its not about societies but about image and propaganda.
The irony is the deliberate bad taste and shitty acting. The satire is that its bad on purpose and the intended commentary is that fascist art is bad but also fun if you embrace the tackiness in itself while rejecting the messages. The joke is that if you can embrace the absurdity you can simultaneously find it fun while also seeing everything it represents as absurd and not worth taking seriously. This is just how most educated Europeans view American action films its not obscure or hard to understand if you're not from the USA.
If you don't get it its not because Verhoven wasn't clear its because the film's take on America is somewhat mean spirited. The people who don't get Starship Troopers are part of the experience of the film because its for smug anti-American European intellectuals. If you don't get the joke its because its at your expense.
The film is ironic, the characters and scenes are all unironic. Satire is more complicated than yes/no style binaries.
@@AC-dk4fp I'm not going to debate to heavily - because I think this whole debate has run its course in other circles - but my overall point is that Verhoven operates on a lot of assumptions throughout the movie that aren't actually in the movie or even possible given what the audience is shown. "Actually the Federation false flagged the asteroid attack, the bugs have no way to launch the asteroid" has been an "um actually" for as long as I can remember, but that's not what happens in the movie. It could have happened, and that would have been a very neat twist, but it doesn't and thus the Federation's war is justified. Arguments like "well actually it's a satire of how war is portrayed in movies" is moving the goalposts; the movie was allegedly a critique of the book, and going off of that it's not good satire. There are plenty of anti-war comedy films that do not have these problems. Helldivers 2 itself lacks these problems, and is pretty much what Starship Troopers should have been.
How can anyone‘s takeaway from Dune be „This is about the fight between good and evil and the Atreides are the good guys“
Even the people who act like 'Media literacy' just means 'Knowing what the author's intended message was' don't *actually* believe that, because if they did it would mean applying that standard to media that has intended meanings they might not agree with. It's purely a rhetorical tool used for cheap dunks.
It can't be both "The Matrix can only be read through a progressive lens because that's what the Wachowski's say is correct" and "My reading of The Lord of the Rings as a queer romance between Frodo and Sam is as valid as any other reading."
you have a point, but there is a difference between knowing (or, having an accurate supposition based on the work) the author's intent, and considering the author's interpretation most or exclusively valid
Like your example makes sense in itself but I haven't heard people say that a trans allegory is he exclusive valid interpretation, more that the themes are definitely there and anyone who entirely dismisses the queer reading of the story is spitting nonsense.
Then again I can't speak for everyone; there probably do exist people who treat the author's intent as the one true canon interpretation.
@@bumfricker2487 I have heard of people say that the trans allegory is the true interpretation before…
Yes it can.
Because a queer reading of the lord of the rings is understood to be a particular lens on a story that was not explicitly about that, it's not mutually exclusive, it relies on acknowledging the intended meaning and choosing to interpret the material through a different lens to the author.
Most people who are accused of lacking media literacy are not using a particular lens to reinterpret the work, they are asserting that their (mis)interpretation IS the intended meaning of the author.
It would be like someone saying that Tolkien intentionally wrote the books to be a queer love story of Frodo and Sam and that any other themes represented in the story are not what it's actually about.
@@kaylemathewcomendador6964Well they didn't put the trans allegory in there by accident, but it's not the only theme and allegory in there, it's about a lot of stuff
@@itcouldbelupus2842 Yeah, but the trans allegory is still a pretty big part of it.
Really weird how Chani was such a big focus for so many. To me the real protaginist is lady Jessica
Probably because she's played by Zendaya and conservatives love making women of color the villain.
@@EternalGuardian07 that makes sense, her character is very understated and kinda only exists to give the audience a reason to be skeptical of Paul, yet people are still mad because the WOC is expressing opinions contrary to the white saviour.
I'm pretty sure Herbert wrote that the Fremen were mixed race because they were descended from displaced slaves forced to live on Arrakis? The slaves were mostly Black and Arab.
@@EternalGuardian07
@howareyoualiveifyoudonteatbeef Tell that to them. These would be the same types that were mad about the Black character in The Hunger Games was played by a Black person in the movie.
@@EternalGuardian07 I know but you can't force a horse to drink... You can't educate people who don't want to learn. 🤷🏻♀️
This was phenomenal, I was expecting some light-hearted joking about funny-stupid tweets or podcasts or alpha-male influencer rants about Paul Atreides, but instead we got some great content about the books itself, death of the author theorising, just exploring the ideas of Dune itself and how we can best go about thinking/debating about them rather than subscribing to just one conclusion. Also the statement you made about the pandemic is something i'd never thought of before, we did go through an extremely horrific period and instead of giving us some grande new purpose, like it might've in a Dune book, we are overall worse off now. Reading the book we kind of get sucked into the delusion that the Golden Path might be a net-positive by the very end. I think World War 2, however horrific it was, made it so that the next few decades after it seemed like genuine progress, genuine progress towards democracy and liberalism and freedom, or at least the war create fundamental morals and ethics for people to strive toward. It was never worth the death of all those millions though. And now I struggle to see whether WW2 really changed much in the long run, we're backsliding pretty damn quick, and the morals I thought were concrete thanks to the devastation of WW2 are now no longer set in stone.
i only found dune difficult to read because i’m probably dyslexic 😕😕
So you read Nude instead?
@@Leopoldshark No it was probably Uden😅
I haven't got the mind to sit down and read a book because I get very, very fidgety... So audiobooks are my way of 'reading' books.
Yo you could listen to the audiobooks
I can't wait for dune messiah to get an adaptation and we get to the part where Paul compare himself to Hitler
Confused Stilgar noises.
"Six millions? pretty good for those days"
"Dune 2 is Pro life because Jessica talks to the feotus" did they watch the same movie ?
"this is Paul movie, he becomes the hero" YO WAT ?
I mean, all conservative media analysis is about forcing media either into the “conservative is good” box, or the “other than conservative and evil” box.
That’s it. It’s all about forcing things into boxes and power.
Reminds me of the American wing of evangelicals/Christians, the way they need to make "parodies" of songs or movies to fit into Christianity or else they seemingly cannot interact with it, It's all Christian puritanism in a different coat
@@kanjonojigoku8644 Media literacy among conservatives seems very similar to Bible literacy among evangelicals: cherry-pick from the "sacred texts" what supports their believes, ignore the rest and condemn any other interpretation as blasphemous.
It obvious, Donald Trump is Paul and Stormy Daniels is Chani.
Get this to the top of the comment section
It’s all so clear now
Paul is Barron after he deserts to Hamas idiot get real
🤣
life has never made more sense. thanks bro
"But we just lived through a global event that killed millions of people, and did that unify humanity? The answer, like humanity itself, is messy and unclear. All I can say is, I definitely wish those millions of people were still here."
What a poingant and sobering thought. A great piece of evidence that collective suffering does not always lead to greatness, and sometimes to suffer is just that: to suffer. It can be easy to become swept up in grand ideals that if people could just rally together, the world would be a better place. Context breeds thought, and thought changes context, and so on and so forth in constant dialectic, but the future remains ultimately unpredictable in any certain sense. But a *vision* of the future, a desire for something to *be* in place of what *was*, is what changes context to allow new thought and modes of living to come into existentence. Change comes from the will, and who can say what truly galvanizes the will? And who has the right to implement their vision, and lord it over others, or to cause suffering because of an *ought to be*? I think its fair to say no one, because we *all* have visions of what ought to be, and though some have more reasonable visions than others, the basic ability to imagine and *will into being* (even if our ability to manifest our wills are restricted by external forces) is the great equalizer. Sorry for writing a manifesto in the comments, but this prompted a deeper understanding of ideas I've been wrestling with for quite some time.
My favorite version of Dune and Starship Troupers are the Billy and Mandy and Futurama episodes
WHY DIDNT I BRING UP THE BILLY AND MANDY EPISODE
@@LackingSaint I love that episode and it really makes you think about how things look like when its someone of a different gender but also just as morally dubious, still as a kid I just liked the cool worm aesthetic. Much love and the video was still great! :3
@@LackingSaint How could you forget the cinnamon mines
"We've all seen too many body bags and ball sacks"
Billy and Mandy has a TON of random dune references. “Gom Jabbar!”
all these people who idolise the "not woke" dune are going to have a bad time when the second book is adapted lmao
Paul goes on a massive galactic super war and takes over humanity and gets rid of the system that tried to destroy him. Yes, the author himself intended this as a bad thing, but most of the readers didn't, which caused him consternation until the day he died.
I don't think so. Some of them will complain about there being a "toxic masculinity" angle but characters getting corrupted by power isn't an inherently partisan message. In fact, I expect some of them to compare Paul to whoever the Democratic Party presidential nominee is when the movie comes out.
24:16 omg this little transition was so delightful, I laughed so loud because YES for anyone who has tried to contend with the full Herbert anthology and then stumbled into online debates about Dune 2 at some point a person familiar with the whole anthology will disassociate and start thinking about The Worm King 😂😂😂
There's an entire PBS crash course on the topic of Media Literacy.
So unknown, so needed.
shut up nerd
i hate the mentality of "people need me to be absolute evil in order to be good" in media. sure it sounds cool and edge for like 5 minutes until you think about why it makes no freaking sense. its a fallacy at best and mind-benidngly stupid at worst
Very true!
It depends.
Dude talking about the pandemic killing millions and asking whether or not it brought us together... of course it did not. You DO see this more noticeably in the wake of direct human violence:
After 9/11, libs and conservatives took pride in being American for revenge... for like two years. Then it went back to normal as the lies came out and the "War on Terror" dragged on. The US killed over a million throughout the region already with Desert Storm combined, and that's nothing to say of regional intervention for decades prior. Most American only knew of that around the edges, but mainstream news did not report these things often if at all.
And with the CURRENT developments, you are seeing a large chunk of the planet getting quite angry at Western Hegemony as they're no longer kept ignorant of facts, seeing the atrocities and lies in real time through social media. So while it IS dividing us, it's specifically along lines of imperialists/idolaters/fascists and mutual respect/iconoclasts/humanists.
But you don't understand, humanity requires me to eat all the ice cream my roommate bought while he's at work and then watch UA-cam in my pajamas for four hours. The fact that what humanity needs happens to coincide with whatever I wanted is just good luck.
@@levibee9451 Kisama...I'LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU!!
I have to agree, as it was one of my problems with one of the antagonists in Gundam Wing. Not that I'd call it bad writing, but his goal was to bring about an era of peace by basically pulling a Dune and leading the worst vile militaristic government of all time. It worked in-universe but doesn't make much sense IRL: we often just fear that specific form of government and their weapons, but that won't stop us from just repeating their mistakes while changing up our tactics. Even in the Gundam franchise, Zeon led to the Titans, which led to Zeon again alongside copycat groups. Being horrible won't stop future people from just repeating your actions, even if they fear you.
I think Zizek aptly sums up the current situation in people's beliefs, and extension their media literacy. He said that, it's not that people are ignorant to the structures that govern us, it is exactly that we know and yet we continue with our lives as if we didn't know. Cinema is the ultimate artform of disavowal, what we see are fictional events and yet we take them as perhaps even more real than real.
I don't think people are getting dumber, it's just that ideology works in such a way that it sustains itself even through disbelief. Recall the meme "He's too humble to say he's the Mahdi, even more evidence he's the Mahdi, AS WRITTEN." As such, right wingers will always find a way to make it about their beliefs, not despite, but BECAUSE of their disavowal of Paul's actions.
I think Frank Herbert also fell for this (I could be wrong tho) in his implication with the Worm King. But since I haven't read the book, I think I'd rather point to a similar case with Eren and attack on titan S4. The inevitability of Eren's actions as ones that were enacted by a "knowing" individual is exactly what absolute power is. It's the power that justifies itself. Why am I powerful? Cause I know the Golden Path. Why is this the Golden Path? Because I am Powerful. Ik "golden path" wasn't mentioned in aot but it was heavily received by the audience that Eren had a "burden" in enacting a genocide, i.e. Eren had to do it, i.e. white man's burden, manifest destiny. Isayama managed to coax the audience into blindly following divine providence whilst outwardly expressing the horrifying nature of such act. This is because the kind of power Eren had is THE one that justifies. He solipsistically imposes what arbitrarily must (not) exist. It really didn't surprise me that this was the season finale Isayama came up with given his right-wing background.
Dune is about Pepsi Blue just doing that to people
I fucking knew pro-lifers would have weird takes with Alia
I wonder how they'll feel about her pre-born consciousness causing her to become demonically possessed. Sure seems like maybe an abortion would've been preferable...
The one thing none of the movies were able to transfer from the books is that Paul actively tries to prevent his own path from happening. That he is in fact going against what he is achieving, that he is not trying to use the Fremen for his war-machine, but he is trying to not go to war at all.
He is vengeful towards the Harkonnen, of course, but he is desperately trying to tell the Fremen that he is not their savior. He is desperately trying to prevent himself from conquering the entire Empire via Jihad. That Jihad, the bloody conquest of all Houses, happens right after the movies. He failed miserably at preventing bloodshed.
That is the important part of Pauls story. The struggle. The fight against his own future. And that is the part the movies have problems showing, because the books do it via inner-monologue, which is a terrible thing to do in a movie.
The "Paul is the hero" thing is especially funny if you think about how out of the way the book goes to show us that Paul is not the hero. That the Atreides are maybe better people than other houses, but they are still a noble house exploiting people, gathering power. Autocrats through and through. I don't think there is a hero in Dune. There are protagonists and antagonists... but that's pretty much it.
But most importantly, Paul gives up. He gave into the future that was set up for him and just followed it. Giving up trying to make it better. At the end of the story, of the revolution, Paul gives up trying to do better. And that is not the usual conclusion of a heroes journey.
The first part of the story, the first books, don't end with Paul being the hero, they end with him being a violent conquerer. Eliminating all opposition, everyone who does not bow to his will. And then he leaves, vanishes and everything gets worse.
Fun video! The comparison between people's misreading of Dune and Starship Troopers is apt. The ignorance around Starship Troopers in particular really made me question whether a work of satire could ever really be "too heavy handed," because apparently there's always someone in need of more weight! At any rate, if you're looking for more Dune content, I highly recommend the Spicediver fan edit of Lynch's Dune. It puts back in a lot of the deleted scenes, cuts out almost half of the inner monologues, and changes the ending. 3 hours well spent, I say!
Been holding out on that... guess I'll watch it tonight
The internet has proven to me that satire/ironic behavior is never properly interpreted and often breeds earnestness in communities.
Except… what we are shown be what the director tells us are two completely different things. Just admit Paul Verhoeven did a shit job at “satirising fascism” and move on. He presented an ethnically diverse, gender equal society with academic freedoms and employed disabled veterans and then stick some robocop-esque propaganda slides in between to try and shoehorn his ignorant take on the book into the film. He failed to do anything other than dress characters up in Nazi looking uniforms. If he wanted to satirise authoritarianism he should have actually added some of that cynicism into the plot of the film itself and not just the window dressing. That’s why there’s so many “someone’s who need more weight”, they understand the message they are being shown and it doesn’t correlate to what they’re being told by the likes of the director in a fucking article 😂.
@@Virjunior01 I hope you enjoy it!
@@HicklingStand This is a good example of a defensible, literate take. I happen to disagree, but it's obvious you've watched the movie and I appreciate your point of view!
I remember reading a twitter thread where Todd in the Shadows asks when the supposed golden age of media literacy was.
There wasn't one. Does that mean media literacy is worthless?
Humans just never learned
It's just that most masses will never have the education, time off work or intelligence training to experience stories to the fullest, you'll always have the ones who need an illustrated version of the Bible because they are illiterate
It was when literacy was literally in the toilet and only three monks called Ignatius and four nuns called Dorothea could even find time to discuss literature.
Back when "Death of the Author" was published (that was new media literacy pushing against old media literacy)
Obligatory reminder that Jeremy Hambly (The Quartering/Unsleeved Media/ MTGHeadquarters) was banned for life from a children's game for his toxicity.