The book Dune starts with an old woman. The first sentence reads: “In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, and old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.”
Notice that you have met two women before you meet Paul. These are two interesting women who play key roles in the book, especially in scenes that are erased in the movie. The movie gives Jessica a small role, and hides the Reverend Mother behind a veil. The movie, like all of Hollywood, cannot depict a powerful woman.
Frank Herbert was looking for an alternative to traditional power structures. How would the interaction between a powerful woman and her female protégé differ between the interaction between a powerful man and his male protégé? Chapter 2, with its interactions between Jessica and the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam is fascinating, particularly its last sentence—all of it omitted from the movie.
Dune is seen as the first environmentalist work of science fiction (though there are others). In the story, the Emperor Shaddam Hussein IV controls a vital substance (spice) without which civil society cannot function. The parallels to Iraq were obvious. The analogy to oil was blunt—and insightful.
These insights are omitted from the movie.
Late in his career, Robert Silverberg said that before he wrote his book, Lord Valentine’s Castle, he went to a bookstore and looked at what was selling. What was selling was stories about a noble born young man raised in poverty who earned his nobility.
If you choose to remove the feminism and environmentalism from Dune, you are left with a story about nobility and men. But the movie eliminates key elements of the nobility of Duke Leto. For example, Leto kept the head of the bull that had killed his father. His father died in the ring, entertaining the people and risking his life, an end not terribly different from Duke Leto’s, dead in the arena of politics, forced from the safety of Caladan into a vulnerable position as Duke of Arrakis. The book makes all of this clear. The movie does not.
I worry about what a movie about the second book, Dune Messiah, would look like. Frank Herbert wrote that it was his meditation about demagogues like Nixon and Hitler. I doubt that progressive message will come through when Hollywood is done with it.
I wonder how they will hide the concern about demagogues and continue to erase the women.