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Don’t be fooled by the futuristic uniforms of Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet, “Dune” has long ceased to be simply a fantasy about the future. Today, the film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s prose is viewed as a reportage about the modern world plunged into an ecological crisis. This is not a gloomy fairy tale, but our dark everyday life.
On April 22, 1970, Earth Day was celebrated for the first time in history. Two American cities, New York and Philadelphia, organized pompous celebrations. Speakers at Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park included: George Wald, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist from Harvard University, and Allen Ginsberg, poet, writer, voice of the beatniks, conscience of the counterculture. And Frank Herbert, the guy who had published his first great novel five years earlier. Before he wrote Dune, he had published short stories in fantasy magazines and had a solid reputation among literary critics, but he made his living mainly by writing speeches for a conservative senator. “Dune” launched a successful career as a short story writer and publicist, while the alarming story about a desert planet earned Herbert the sympathy of environmental activists. On April 22, 1970, at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, Frank Herbert used a poetic metaphor to encourage everyone to “entertain a fiery love affair with the planet” and publicly vowed never to buy a new car. The crowd gathered in the park also encouraged people not to buy cars. The writer was convinced that consumer pressure would force automotive corporations to look for new, more environmentally friendly solutions and produce ecological vehicles.
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“The Chronicles of Dune”: The Painful Realism of Forecasting the Future
Malicious people may claim that Herbert, hungry for applause, spoke to those who wanted to listen to him. That, after all, when he started inventing the epic universe of “Dune” and subsequent parts of his saga, he was not guided by activist zeal, and only when his novel was read as a prophetic story of ecological destruction, he decided to develop this particular thread in his books. Or to put it even more bluntly: because his book was more popular among environmentalists than among science fiction fans, he began to say in interviews that “Dune” was an ecological manifesto as a warning. In a collection of interviews he edited and which was published in 1970 in the book “New World Or No World”, Frank Herbert wrote: “I definitely do not want to tell my grandchildren: We have used up the world and there is nothing left for you.” . So in the mid-1960s I wrote a book that I hoped would be a signpost to greater ecological awareness.” And almost 60 years since the premiere of the first of the books that formed the “Chronicles of Dune”, the state of knowledge and intentions of Herbert when he began writing his saga are of secondary importance. It is the pro-ecological message of his books that makes “Dune” still resonate so strongly – today perhaps even more than before, because this vision, once considered a work of unbridled imagination, today resounds with painful realism. Frank Herbert predicted the future.
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“Dune”, or great cinema: The set design is overwhelming, the content is painful
– The next generations will judge us. I still don’t lose hope, but I think we need to act immediately – said Canadian director Denis Villeneuve during a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, where the first of two parts of the powerful film adaptation of Herbert’s prose premiered three years ago. – I don’t want to sound moralistic, but this is about our survival. That’s what this book is about: survival. When “Dune” was released in cinemas, the media reported a wave of fires that were difficult to control and consumed many places around the world: from the United States through France, Greece and Italy to Turkey and Australia. The fire broke out and refused to be extinguished during periods of record heat and prolonged drought. The climate catastrophe has become a fact. Villeneuve wisely and with great respect for the multidimensional universe of Dune emphasized on the screen the most important and at the same time most current threads from Herbert’s visionary literature. In the conflict between two privileged families, the Atreides and Harkonnens, over the rule over a planet rich in deposits of a powerful spice, the sad truth rings out that a greedy and power-hungry man is behind the degradation of life-giving biodiversity. After all, “the spice has to flow.” Villeneuve reminds that the deficit of natural resources leads to the escalation of armed conflicts – an example of a war whose intensity is directly related to climate change is the war in Syria. And from the story about the fierce fight for control over a desert planet, at the expense of the freedom and safety of its indigenous inhabitants, comes nothing more than a forecast of the forcible appropriation of places suitable for life and a metaphor of violent migration policy. “Dune” directed by Denis Villeneuve is not only great because of the grand scale of its scenography. It overwhelms with its visual and sonic brutalism, but also with content that is uncomfortably close to our reality.
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Awaken the ecologist in you, urges Frank Herbert
Besides, Frank Herbert didn’t really make anything up when he wrote “Dune”. Sure, he created a world in which you can travel between planets, but the starting point for creating the saga was the belief, provoked by current politics, that large industry, operating beyond any ethical interpretation, would lead to the extinction of humanity. When Herbert was a young boy, he met a man he referred to as “Indian Henry.” Henry was a mentor for Herbert, he told the writer about the history and trauma of the indigenous people of America – the appropriation and abuses of people who considered themselves white saviors and the degradation of the natural environment in the name of technological progress. Everything he learned in his friendship with Henry was supposed to make him take up the topic of ecology in “Dune”. “It is no coincidence that in the 21st century >>Dune< przeżywa absolutny renesans popularności. I nie chodzi tu wyłącznie o sukcesywne poszerzanie obecności treści z gatunku sci-fi w mainstreamie” – pisał Ryan Britt w wydanej jesienią 2023 r. książce „The Spice Must Flow: The Story Of Dune, From Cult Novels To Visionary Sci-Fi Movies” (Przyprawa musi płynąć: Historia Diuny, od kultowych powieści do wizjonerskich filmów science fiction). „Herbert porównywał apatyczny stosunek do aktywizmu ekologicznego do prób wybudzenia kogoś z głębokiego snu. Ale wierzył, że ludzie się zmieniają, a uśpionych można obudzić. >>Diuna<< zuchwale rozbudza w nas niechęć do bohaterów, ale i wękteća do spojzerenia na mistakes kóre sami pełenliśmy, mimo dobrych cji. Rzuca nam dzijezne, bysmy wyobrazili sobie świat wykraczający poza naszów kodzieńsość, w krzyem kropla wody jest cenniejssa od słowa”.
Frank Herbert believed in activism and the effectiveness of consumer protest. He believed in action. Years later, narratives about individual responsibility have taken on a harmful, reality-distorting form in which the future of the planet depends on the everyday behavior of an individual – and we know that without precisely formulated and ruthlessly enforced laws regulating the activities of global businesses, we will not minimize the consequences of climate change. This does not mean, however, that Herbert was a naive who overestimated the power of a single person. “Dune” is intended to provoke an examination of conscience, but also to restore faith in each of us’ own agency. Even if the one who restores it also sinned. The author of books about the desert planet Arrakis reportedly loved driving around the city in a limousine and flew first class whenever he could. But at least he kept his promise at the Earth Day celebration at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia and never bought a new car.