Bonus: The Deep History of Dune

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rund and Ramtin speak to sci-fi writer and Princeton historian, Haris Durrani, about why the lore of Dune still proves so relevant and the ways in which the 2021 film succeeds and fails to convey its messages.

"Dreams are messages from the deep." Those are the first words that appear on the screen in Denis Villeneuve's 2021 film, Dune, a cinematic adaptation of the iconic 1965 sci-fi book by Frank Herbert. The book contains dreams within dreams. Dreams of a future humanity in all of its flawed complexity. Dune takes place about ten thousand years from now with humanity having spread across the galaxy, populating planets and evolving in myriad mysterious and fascinating ways. But Herbert's vision isn't unrecognizable to our contemporary eyes. In fact, unlike many other similar sci-fi stories, Dune projects Islamic belief and philosophy into the future, placing it right at the center of future events. It uses Middle Eastern history to paint a dream of a future which is both futuristic and ancient, exhilarating and full of tension. It is a story about the perils of imperialism, messianic beliefs, and environmental degradation. It is a story about us.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for all the folks who have logged on. Just a heads up we're recording this so this
0:11.6	might end up being an episode. Also, there's likely to be some spoilers so just the spoiler
0:18.0	alert ahead of time.
0:20.1	Last week after watching the new Dune movie, Ron Tinenai could not stop talking about it.
0:36.6	The visuals, the sound design, how good it felt to be watching it in an actual movie theater.
0:47.7	Their cruelty to my people is all life now.
0:51.6	And pretty quickly, we were geeking out about all the subtle and not so subtle Muslim
1:06.0	elements of the movie.
1:07.7	There's the Fremen who look a lot like Arab Bedwins.
1:10.6	The Desert Dunes which look a lot like the Middle East. Much of the movie was actually
1:14.6	shot in Jordan. The Spice Melange which is fought over a lot like oil is.
1:19.7	And the language Arabic and Persian words pop up throughout the Dune universe. Things like
1:24.8	Mahdi meaning prophet, Lisan al-Qaib meaning hidden tongue or Padishah meaning master
1:31.0	king.
1:32.0	We devoured a bunch of articles about the movie and one name kept coming up.
1:36.5	Do you pronounce your name for me real quick as soon as you're on it?
1:39.8	Sure.
1:40.8	I got to do it through my interest in science fiction initially as a reader. I'm also
1:45.6	an author. My science fiction novel is called Technologies of the Self. It's very duny.
1:51.4	And then also it intersects with a lot of my doctoral work now at Princeton University
1:57.1	and the history department there on the history of law, technology and empire in the 20th
2:01.9	century United States.
	...

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