HOLLYWOOD, FOR YEARS: hmm dune has the bones of a great franchise, but, ah, the jihad stuff. political/cultural dynamite. how do we work around that.
DENIS VILLENEUVE'S AGENT: hey you guys are never going to believe who denis thinks the fremen are www.npr.org/transcripts/...
GUY WHO GREW UP IN QUEBEC HAS NOT BOTHERED TO LEARN ABOUT ANY OTHER CULTURE OR POLITICAL SCENE, WHEN READING THE NOVEL DUNE: hmm, getting a lot of quebec vibes from this
Or he has, but is choosing to draw on personal experience to help create his art. This is fine? There's nothing in what he said that implies that he is unaware or even disagrees with other interpretations of Dune.
That's really how allegorical Sci-Fi works, by exploring themes that are broad enough that people are able to relate to them cross-culture and cross-society. His interpretation is just as valid as anyone else's.
That's how I read it too. The power of Herbert's creation is how it speaks to deep human truths of colonialism and subjugation, and you can find echoes of those truths in just about any culture.
The part about Hollywood being afraid of the Jihad stuff is also untrue. I remember flipping between the SciFi Channel's Children of Dune miniseries and the Iraq invasion. One channel was discussing Paul's fanatical Feydakin, the other Saddam's fanatical Fedayeen.
All I'm saying is, there aren't a lot of sandy beaches in Maine, but these Hommes du Fré are prone to wallow in the environment, so maybe Denis has a point. @hodgman.bsky.social
GUY WHO HAS NOT BOTHERED TO LEARN ABOUT QUEBEC: wow i can't imagine why anyone would draw a connection between a novel about theocracy and the history of quebec in the 20th century. this guy must just be dumb
TBF, he says he's thinking of them, like drawing from his experience. But more importantly isn't that the point of it being a sci-fi book and not a book about Arabia? to make you think about the underlying human observations and why they're relevant to you.
This is like my favorite rumor that the Ewok forest moon of Endor was originally supposed to be the Wookee planet except it made some of the racial underpinnings of Star Wars a little too clear.
I honestly believe Lucas’ version in this instance - that it wasn’t working with them because the intended metaphor was the arable Vietnamese beating the high tech US, and we’d just had two films of Chewie being a brilliant engineer who kept the Falcon running.
George Lucas envisioned The Empire as the US and the Rebels as the Viet Cong, especially as the films are the story of how the technologically superior side gets defeated by guerrilla warfare, so the racial underpinnings are that the heroes are the nations subjugated by US imperialism
