Diversity in Dune
So I watched Dune last Sunday. It is a good movie. I enjoyed it. The scale, the scenery, the tech, the aesthetics… I enjoyed it all. I honestly think you should all go see it. There are just a few things I had issue on, but today I’m going to focus on one of them.
The Good
Dune is an incredibly diverse movie, even if white is the most common color (Hollywood, what can you do?). Our emperor (who remains unseen) uses black envoys, positions clearly indicated as great honor. The Harkonnen are ivory skinned, inbred, and oppressive, in keeping with the source material. The Fremen are a completely mixed lot, skin tones from Hispanic to middle eastern to African. A myriad of color, so clearly they had access to and used diverse cast and extras. It pushed the norms of scifi as a white only space and gave splashes of human color to the galaxy.
This is some good stuff. Wherever one can add more humanity to the humans in scifi, one should. Space is not and will not be white. It shouldn’t be portrayed as such. It’s quite possible that we’ll have extensive ethnic mixing, and that’s not a bad thing to portray. There will likely be ethnic enclaves, but overall, space will be diverse. Any population leaving Earth will need sufficient genetic diversity to prevent inbreeding and genetic damage from having a limited stock. That’s a challenge we’ll need to overcome and it will require either a much larger colonization population or a very carefully curated group selected specifically for genetic diversity. In space, every gram counts, so a large population is actually going to be optimized against, so one should expect that colonization efforts will generally be incredibly diverse.
Pulling this back to Dune, this means that the Harkonnen are an anomaly. A very white, narrow gene pool should be avoided, and the natural outcome of incredible deformities if on full display in the most notable figures in the cast portrayed. (they’re, of course, the bad guys, so Evil is Ugly is excusable (not as ugly as they could be… but it’s Hollywood. Even Ugly is Pretty)) Then we have the Atreides. There are lots of things to love about the Atreides, but they’re possibly the most problematic portrayals in the entire movie
The Bad
I love house Atreides. They’re the good guys. Duke Leto is fair and just. The leadership is loyal and competent. They’re industrious but conscientious. All around a great people. They mastered air and naval doctrine on Caladan, making them a military powerhouse. They’re going to Arrakis to gain the desert doctrine from the Fremen, hoping to forge an alliance that will allow them to gain security from the emperor.
The big problem is that they’re incredibly white. Duke Leto is, appropriately, clearly Grecian, with olive skin and classic Greek features. But nobody else shown in their entire military is.
Now this is from Caladan, the Atreides homeworld, where they have ruled for generations. There is no way, not even by magic Bene Gesserit breeding programs, that you get Duke Leto being Grecian, and every other officer looking British, French, or other Western European descent. It doesn’t make sense. Ruling families have to breed with their local populace at least some of the time. Is someone pretending that there have never been second sons of a previous Duke who ended up in the military, had kids, who then served, and that the dynasty of the second son (which should be rather Grecian looking) is not a significant portion of the Atreides military?
I just don’t buy it. Not from a practical standpoint (genetic diversity is important to colonization efforts), not from a lore standpoint (Herbert makes a point of referencing various ethnic traits present in people), and not from a sociological standpoint (people like leaders who look like them. There’s just no way that there has never been a bad Atreides ruler who maintained his power over his military who looks very different from him). And this had to be a somewhat conscious choice, as I said, they used diversity quite well elsewhere in the film.
Now I suppose it’s possible, maybe, that nobody looked at this scene and thought twice about the racial element. But they clearly were very conscious of it elsewhere, so that just seems wrong. I want to say they decided that House Atreides is just white, but their casting of Duke Leto pops that bubble. So I’m left with just the question: Why? Why is house Atreides so damn white? We can have diverse Fremen who are all different shades, but house Atreides doesn’t get to have some Greeks? I just can’t understand this.
In Conclusion
None of that detracts from Dune as a movie. It’s a fun ride, a cogent portrayal of the novel, and a cinematic experience. It plays with scales in a way that I rarely see in films, and almost never with man made structures. Watching those ships land on Arrakis… Mmm. I could watch things like that all day long. The fact that house Atreides being overly white bothered me is a sign that the movie was incredible. In my experience, the more a minor detail bothers you, the better the overall quality.
Go see the movie. Judge for yourself. Let me know if you think I’m off my rocker. But until then
Keep living the good life
-Wo’ah the Wise