[COLUMN] The Compelling Ambiguities of Dune: Part Two | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

For all the scale and spectacle of Dune: Part Two, director Denis Villeneuve loves a reaction shot. The film has impressive scale and majesty, but it’s interesting how frequently Villeneuve will cut to an intense close-up of one character reacting to another. Most of the time, characters like the Fremen leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem) or the loyal soldier Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) are watching Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Their faces reflect awe, pride, wonder, and sometimes fear.

In many ways, Dune: Part One was a story told from Paul’s perspective. It opens with narration from the Freman warrior Chani (Zendaya), but for most of the movie Chani is only glimpsed through Paul’s vision and dreams. He imagines her so completely that he talks to the Atreides’ ambassador to the Freman, Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), and with Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling). The audience spends a lot of time close to Paul, inside his head.

Appropriately enough, Dune: Part Two flips that dynamic. Paul is still a central figure. His actions and decisions drive the plot. However, he becomes a lot less knowable to the audience. If the first film was driven by Paul’s dreams about Chani, then the second film is much more interested in Chani’s idea of Paul. The camera spends a lot of time on Chani’s face, as she watches Paul from a distance. It invites the audience to empathize with her as she grows closer to the outworlder.

In Dune: Part Two, Paul is many different things to many different people. He takes different names. When he joins the Freman, he takes the warrior name “Paul Maud’Dib Usul.” To Gurney, he is “Duke Atreides.” To Stilgar, he is the prophesized “Lisan-al-Gaib”, “the Voice from the Outer World.” To his religious followers, he is “the Mahdi.” To his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), he is “Kwisatz Haderach”, the product of a generational breeding program to produce a messiah.

Paul becomes fundamentally unknowable. When Rabban Harkonnen (Dave Bautista) goes hunting for Maud’Dib, he confronts him as a specter in a sandstorm, a vengeful apparition moving through the dust. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) never even considers the possibility that Paul and Jessica survived the Harkonnen massacre of the Atreides, to the point that Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) mocks his lack of knowledge. When Paul storms the palace, he masks his face.

To a certain extent, this is just how power operates. The Bene Gesserit, who seem to pull most of the strings in Denis Villeneuve’s interpretation of Dune, speak from behind veils that conceal both their faces and their intent. Shaddam IV travels in a giant reflective sphere, a ship that reflects the outside universe back at itself. In Dune: Part One, Paul was just a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. By the end of Dune: Part Two, he is an Emperor. There is a distance implied in that.

Discussing his performance in Dune, Christopher Walken recalled asking a fellow actor how he should play a king. “Don’t worry about it,” this actor told Walken. “The king is seen by reflection. You’ll be a king by the way people treat you.” This is one of the central themes of Dune: Part Two, and is key to the film’s understanding of power. Indeed, Dune: Part Two argues that characters like Paul and Shaddam IV are ultimately vessels through which power flows, with no real agency of their own.

Dune is often compared to other sagas like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. Like in those stories, there is a sense in which Dune is an epic story that has been written and is being told. Star Wars opens with a scroll, as if quoting from some official history. In The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) serves as a dispassionate observer. In both cases, the narrator is treated as objective and perhaps even omniscient. The audience is never invited to see Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) or Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as contested figures.

In contrast, Dune understands that every story comes with a perspective and that history is some objective truth, but instead a series of competing narratives. Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) keeps a history for her father, but draws attention to the gaps in the official record. She talks about “secrets” and her father’s silence. Stories about Paul spread outside his reach and control, fanned by Jessica and even whispered by Gurney. Paul is less a person than he is a character in other people’s stories.

The decision to put Paul at a remove from the audience generates some interesting narrative tension. There’s an ambiguity that ripples through Dune: Part Two, as the audience watches Paul through Chani’s eyes. In particular, the film leaves open some interesting questions about Paul’s motivations and his true feelings, leaving a lot of room for the audience to reach their own conclusions about what is driving his decisions in a given moment.

On the surface, Paul’s arc is quite straightforward. After their family is murdered, Paul and Jessica seek refuge with the Fremen. While Jessica begins building a cult around Paul, drawing in the religious believers among the Fremen led by Stilgar, Paul tries to earn the respect of the younger secular warriors led by Chani. Jessica is convinced that Paul can travel to the South, win over “the fundamentalists” and then lead an army back to the North that will defeat the Emperor.

Paul seems to reject this. At one stage, he gets into a heated argument with Jessica before she heads South to prepare the way for him. He claims that he only wants to be “equal” to Chani. He insists that he is not the messiah. He is haunted by visions of billions starving. He laments to Gurney that he feels alienated from the tribe as he grows in stature, “They were friends, now they’re followers.” He admits to Chani that he’s afraid to go South because if he does he “might lose [her].”

Of course, events conspire to push Paul go South. Feyd-Ruatha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) launches a devastating campaign that destroys entire villages of Fremen. “The world has made choices for us,” Chani tells Paul, underscoring the sense that he has no real agency in the matter. Indeed, Paul seems to be forced by a confluence of factors. All alternatives are worse: he imagines Chani dying in nuclear fallout and a wounded Stilgar instructs Paul to take his life so he might become leader.

Paul goes South. He drinks the Water of Life. He unlocks his ancestral memories and a clearer gift of prophecy. He organizes battalions of Freman to attack the palace. Stilgar leads his soldiers under the banner of House Atreides; this isn’t salvation, it’s subjugation. At the end of the film, having defeated Feyd-Ruatha in hand-to-hand combat, Paul demands the hand of Shaddam’s daughter Irulan in marriage so that he might claim the throne and rule the Imperium.

“I want you to know,” he assures Chani in the moments before this drama plays out, “I will love you as long as I breathe.” It’s a sweet sentiment, and a callback to a moment of intimacy that the pair shared in the tent, before all of this went awry. In the film’s final moments, as Paul leads the Fremen into “Holy War” as Emperor and Messiah, Chani walks away. She walks out into the desert and summons a sandworm. Stilgar’s faith has been validated. Hers has been broken.

This is a fairly straightforward narrative and character arc, but Dune: Part Two cannily leaves shadows and lacunas in its narrative. As Chani walks away into the desert, it’s clear that she feels some sense of betrayal. It’s likely that she feels like Paul has betrayed her, but it’s also possible that she feels like she has betrayed herself. She cleared love Paul, or her idea of Paul. However, as the ships full of warriors fly into orbit, it’s easy to wonder if that version of Paul ever existed at all.

Pointedly, there are several indications that Paul’s journey ended where he always expected – and perhaps even wanted – it to end. He has harnessed the Fremen as an army, the “desert power” that his father Leto (Oscar Isaac) coveted in Dune: Part One. Indeed, his plan to marry Irulan and usurp the throne was actually seeded towards the climax of Dune: Part One, when Paul proposed the idea to planetologist Doctor Liet Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster).

Throughout Dune: Part Two, there are indications that Paul is keeping his options open. As Jessica points out, he never marries Chani because he needs to remain available for the most advantageous match. Although Paul removes his Ducal Signet shortly before his first kiss with Chani, he doesn’t throw it away. He puts it in his pocket, as if aware that he is going to need it later. When he puts it back on at the climax of the movie, Gurney’s eyes swell with pride.

Indeed, it’s possible to look at Paul’s actions in Dune: Part Two and construct an altogether more cynical read of his character. At the start of the film, Paul is obsessed with revenge. “Your father didn’t believe in revenge,” Jessica tells him. “Yeah?” Paul responds. “Well, I do.” Noticing that the Fremen are divided between religious and secular groups, Paul instructs Jessica, “We have to sway the unbelievers.” What does Paul do over the rest of the film but “sway the unbelievers?”

Paul first refutes his status as messiah after Jessica drinks the water of life. This comes directly after Paul has tried to ingratiate himself to Chani and the younger Fremen. He idly asks them what they are talking about, and Chani dismisses him, “Don’t bother.” As such, Paul’s repudiation of prophecy is a canny political choice. Stilgar will believe in Paul no matter what, but the only way to convince the younger members of the tribe is to reject the mantle. Then he can ingratiate himself.

Paul repeatedly asks Chani how she perceives him. In particular, he keeps checking whether or not she believes that he is Fremen. It’s entirely possible that Paul is just invested in what Chani thinks of him, but it’s also a useful gauge of how much power he holds among those Fremen who don’t believe in the prophecy. To a certain extent, Chani grants Paul legitimacy. She is the one who takes the time to teach him how to sand-walk or build water-traps. She believes in him.

To be clear, it is entirely possible that Paul truly loves Chani. He may be postponing his inevitable journey South so that he can enjoy their time together. Dune is a grand tragedy, and Paul is a mirror to his own father. Leto never married Jessica. According to Shaddam, the fact that Leto “believed in the rules of the heart” is what made him “a weak man.” In Dune: Part One, Leto laments in his final conversation with Jessica, “I thought we had more time.” Paul likely wants that time with Chani.

In its own weird way, Dune: Part Two is part of that recent wave of movies about how intimate relationships are inherently dangerous things because the other person is fundamentally unknowable. Christopher Nolan has done a lot of press with Villeneuve recently, and there’s an interesting overlap between Dune: Part Two and Oppenheimer, even beyond Paul’s use of atomic weapons. Both films rely heavily on close-ups of inscrutable faces and focus on unknowable leads. “Nobody knows what you believe,” Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) tells Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). “Do you?” The same question might be asked of Paul.

There’s a powerful symmetry to the two halves of Dune. In the opening scenes of the first movie, Chani explains how the Fremen have suffered for generations under Harkonnen rule. “Who will our next oppressors be?” In the final moments of the second film, Chani realizes that it’s Paul. Indeed, one of Paul’s big realizations on drinking the Water of Life is that Jessica is the daughter of Vladimir Harkonnen. “We’re Harkonnens,” he tells his mother. “So this is how we'll survive, by being Harkonnens.”

Chani has just watched her culture erased, her people turned into religious warriors under an imperial banner in service of a man who shares the blood of their colonial oppressors. Paul was only able to do that because of the trust that Chani placed in him. Dune: Part Two shrewdly avoids being overly didactic or over-explaining Paul’s motivations or his thinking. He is “a black box”, his inner workings decidedly ambiguous. At the start of Dune, at the behest of Mohaim, Paul places his hand inside the gom jabbar, a mysterious black box that contains only “pain.” Maybe Chani has placed her heart inside a similar construct.

Throughout Dune: Part Two, the audience is asked to form their own opinion of Paul, about his intentions and his motivations, and even whether that ultimately matters. Perhaps there is no Paul. There is simply an abstraction or an idea, a concept reflecting whatever those looking at him choose to see. It’s a bold choice in a big blockbuster like this, but it’s part of what makes Dune so compelling.