Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ Brings Ceremony To The Cinema
Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s cult sci-fi novel expresses and exploits the human appetite for ritual gestures.
Early in Denis Villeneuve’s film Dune, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the teenage scion of a politically powerful family, is breakfasting with his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), on their lush, rainy homeworld, Caladan. She tells Paul that his father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), wants him dressed in full uniform today.
“Military?” Paul asks.
“Ceremonial.”
Later, Paul stands on a podium alongside his parents and their key aides: weapons master Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) and Thufir Harwat (Stephen McKinley Henderson), the Mentat of House Atreides. Paul wears a crisply tailored black uniform with collar insignias and a gold braided aiguilette, his trousers tucked into knee-high boots.
Banners flying, military forces ranked behind them, they watch an imperial delegate spaceship slowly descend. Its passengers disembark and process towards the podium. With great pageantry, the Herald of the Change (Benjamin Clementine) reads an official announcement from a scroll: the Emperor has granted House Atreides fiefdom over the desert world Arrakis, where the precious psychoactive spice melange is sifted from the dunes and used to power interstellar travel.
Duke Leto ritually accepts the appointment — “We are House Atreides; there is no call we do not answer!” — and seals the deal with his ancestral signet ring. “Atreides! Atreides! Atreides!” shout the assembled troops.
House Atreides cares about its traditions — its noble necropolis; its love of bullfighting; the proud burden of leadership, passed from father to son. Yet underlying their display of power and fealty is a sense of anxious foreboding.
Later, Lady Jessica wakes Paul in the middle of the night and makes him dress again for another, private ceremony, a shadow twin of the first. Jessica, an acolyte of esoteric matriarchal order the Bene Gesserit, has trained Paul in her ways; and now her mentor, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), arrives in a different spaceship, in a different procession, to perform a ritual of testing upon Paul.
The way Villeneuve repeats ceremonial motifs throughout the film is itself ceremonious. The descending aircraft; the ranked and waiting staff and troops; the formations and processions in formal dress; the fraught moments in which risk and safety teeter in balance; the simultaneous possibility and doubt that there’s something special about Paul. The chivalric gesture of holding a blade vertically against the heart, then horizontally across the head: performed first by Atreides swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), and then, at the film’s climax, by Paul as he begins a ritual duel.
This isn’t a didactic film. Instead of explaining its feudal, courtly world, it immerses the viewer in that world’s formalist visual language. And the way it loops through fragments of Paul’s dreams and premonitions — which are relaxed, chaotic, un-ceremonial — builds a sense of anticipation… or dread.
In one of his most terrible visions, he sees himself alongside Chani (Zendaya), the Fremen girl from Arrakis who has haunted Paul’s dreams. Now they’re the ones slowly descending in a spaceship; and they turn a pitiless, spice-blue gaze downwards as fighters swarm Caladan. Will Duke Leto’s ceremony of peaceful power transfer become Paul’s ceremony of lethal crusade?
Humans are drawn to ceremony because it folds together contrasting ideas of time and space to create heightened, meaningful experiences. Ceremony takes place in an intense present moment, yet its events and gestures are traditional and unchanged, connecting participants to the long-ago past by the continuity of the repetition.
Ceremony is also intensely spatial: it meshes the subjectivity of human experience with the objectivity of place. It can be sublime in the Romantic sense, in that ceremonies often take place somewhere special that transports us from the everyday, provoking overwhelming wonder and an awareness of our smallness in the grand scheme of things.
Cinematographer Greig Fraser does amazing work here with bold contrasts of light in a film that would have been tempting to flood with warm gold at magic hour – indeed, Paul’s visions of Chani are a bait-and-switch, a teenage dream, a perfume commercial. Inside the Atreides stronghold in the Arrakis capital, Arrakeen, and in a later sequence in an environmental research station, light wells penetrate deep velvety shadows.
When a poison dart sent by the displaced former spice barons – the pallid, insectile House Harkonnen – seeks Paul in his bedroom, he hides in stillness and light like a desert mouse: sheltering in a projection of vegetation thrown out by an educational film he’s been watching. (Villeneuve returns to this motif of the mouse, muad’dib, which, as fans of the novel will know, becomes Paul’s nom de guerre.)
Ceremonies can also be mysteries in the sense of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece, understood only by initiates. Dune marshals the mood of such hidden power, represented here by the Bene Gesserit: I really enjoyed the film’s use of sound design to render “the Voice”, which commands its listener. The Bene Gesserit have basically weaponised ceremony: they have spent thousands of years secretly trying to breed the Kwisatz Haderach, a superman who can fold time and space practically, as ceremony does magically.
The eugenic and colonial politics of Dune are troubled, and this film has caught criticism for choosing soft, broad ‘representationism’ over either the source novel’s cultural specificity or a more radical revision. But it’s through Villeneuve’s emphasis on ceremony that we can sense the allure of cultural imperialism: it’s a practice that invites participation.
Pilgrims worship palm trees that, like House Atreides and their Harkonnen enemies, do not belong on Arrakis: the laboriously tended trees are thirsty for the scarce water, and compared to “twenty men”. The Fremen gesture of spitting, which Gurney takes as an insult, is a trust-gift of moisture. Most shrouded in ritual is the crysknife: a sacred blade, the Fremen weapon of choice, made from a sandworm’s tooth. (Another ceremony: “Walk without rhythm, you won’t attract the worm.”)
While the Romantic sublime was essentially solitary, lonely as a cloud, participating in ceremony can also be powerfully communal: a surrender of the separate self to a larger shared experience. Cinemagoing is also a ceremony: a shared surrender to darkness and dazzlement. And what are film tropes and genres but rituals, which draw their power from the way they call to their own past as they unfurl along paths made smooth from repetition and anticipation?
We don’t often express our spectatorship that way, though. We’ll talk about how some films feel more cinematic because they marshal spectacle on a grand scale, or because their deliberate framing, blocking and editing make small details and moments feel special and significant. Sometimes, we’ll say a moment in a film is “cool” or “awesome”.
Plenty about Villeneuve’s Dune is big and spectacular, but its small motifs and gestures were what stayed with me. I don’t think it’s accidental that hands are so prominent here: Paul must place his hand in a box of pain; he touches the shifting Arrakis sands as spice sparkles in the air; he and his mother share a hand-signed language; hands offer and wield crysknives.
I’ve never understood the hype about Timothée Chalamet, but I really enjoyed his performance in this film. Perhaps something about his acting feels at home in formalism, yet grates smarmily on me in a naturalistic mise-en-scène. Or maybe I, too, have been lured by the satisfaction of big-screen pageantry.
