☀️ I have problematic thoughts about Dune☀️
well, sorta
💖Motivation Meows💖
Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of The Black Cat.
As usual, here is some Good Black News. SheMatters raised $2 million to launch an app that will let new and expectant moms track symptoms that could lead to health complications. There is a fun game called “Are you Blacker than ChatGPT” that is not only fun to take but also shines a light on how far ChatGPT has to go when it comes to understanding the Black community. Meanwhile, Howard became the first HBCU to create a figure skating team. Their first competition was last weekend.
I decided to try out a twice-a-month newsletter for the time being, mostly because I am working on a cool investigation that I can’t wait for you all to read. The paywall fell at TechCrunch, meaning all of my work is now free to read. I’m still covering diversity, equity, and inclusion in venture capital so sent me tips, tea, and stories as usual. In the meantime, let’s catch up.
This month, I’m reading: Germinal by Emile Zola
This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: Simmer Down by Bob Marley & The Wailers
💢From the Chatterbox💢
I’m back, and I just saw Dune II.
The movie was beautiful to watch, but I couldn’t get over the blatant and obvious colonial overtones drenched in the whole movie. I had an inkling of that when I saw the first one on Sunday — a group of white nationals trying to conquer the desert where the natives happen to all be brown and Black. They repress them, abuse them, and exploit them. When the natives try to fight back, the nationals try to kill them. The white characters have their sovereign, their warriors, their gold, soothsayers, and a military general — I think that’s what that blob was — who looks like something RAID spray could get rid of. The chosen savior of the natives is supposed to be Timothée Chalamat, a skinny little white boy whose mother — wait, no spoiler alerts. Just know that when I was watching Dune II, her behavior made me so uncomfortable; the way she lied and manipulated the brown natives to take power from them and to have her son placed as their savior.
There is a secret they both harbor that makes it even more painful. I think I was supposed to see the world through his eyes, but I kept accidentally seeing it through Zendaya’s. Timmy and his mom came off as parasites who, at the flip of a switch, could easily evoke the white man’s ire, proving to be no better than the empower himself. There is at no point in time where the natives have control, even when they think they do. They are pawns in an imperial game, revenge for the throne. They live in the desert, they have rituals, they are supposed to be the contrast to the high-strung and orderly world Timmy and co. comes from. It was fun to watch the movie, even if I found it predictable on that front. In life, brown people never win these types of wars — and I knew that this movie would be no different.
In the first movie, every Black person but Zendaya died. In fact the first person he ever killed — both in the movie and in his whole story line — was a Black man.
In this movie, there are too many Black people to kill, though fighting does break out and many die in bombings, and conquest, while the imperial army destroys their landmarks, homes, and safe spaces. The imperials did this because the natives kept fighting back and nothing else was working — the army eventually had to kill them all. The first part of the movie made it seem like Timmy would save them from this, but it became clear that he only wanted revenge for the death of his father, and he was using the natives — rowling them up — under the belief that he was the chosen one that would lead them to so-called paradise when in reality he was leading them to a holy war that would hopefully secure him the throne, as he chose a bride suitable to rule alongside. For those who thought Zendaya and Timmy had a love story — no spoilers, but is that suitable bride ever a Black person?
The natives never found this plot out, which made it even more uncomfortable to watch. In the movie, Black people were guides and foils, while the rest of the natives were naive. I must also point out the fact that no one of MENA (Middle East and North Africa) descent seems to even be in the movie. Instead, there were dark Black people and light-skinned Black, Hispanic, and Latino actors hired to represent the natives in the desert. Thank you for finally hiring Black actors, but we didn’t mean for it to come at the expense of another minority group you easily could have found and hired. I saw someone online say they would quickly convert to whatever religion Timmy’s mom in the movie was head of — do you mean Islam? The clothing, the costumes, the makeup and designs, all felt out of place on what as obviously European white skin. Even I, who has little knowledge of Islamic culture, understood that when Timmy was told to watch out for the jinn in the desert, that was obviously and so very clearly a word that is used in Islamic culture to describe little ghost genies. I felt that the imperial themes in the movie and the obvious lack of MENA representation was a commentary in and of itself on how the West feels about the Middle East. I kept saying to myself that maybe this is the joke that everyone is in on but me. That movie was so obvious that it had to be a critique of just all that.
I was chatting to my friend who is a person of color, and she said that everyone knew these themes, that the exploration for spice in the movie was supposed to be symbolism for oil and how the Eurocentric world has used and abused the Middle East in a quest for extracting its resources. That made me feel better and perhaps it is true that everyone already knows this and I seem like someone who so obviously has missed the point. I didn’t know much about Dune before I watched the movies for the first time last week, and I still don’t know much about Dune even after skimming the Wikipedia pages of the book’s plot. But just knowing the West, I do not believe that everyone, that most people, I should say, is going to this movie believing that it is a commentary on U.S. Foreign Policy and are watching this as some form of justice or protest to stick it to the system.
It was clear the author was inspired by something, and that is fine. I didn’t read the book to know if he was giving any commentary on whether what he was inspired by was right or wrong. This book series for the most part is from the 1960s, and at times, I could tell. I went to talk at Lincoln Center and heard the director speak about Dune II, where he said that he gave Zendaya a lot more presence in the movie than she would have had in the book because it was a good way to understand Timmy’s character — she served as his foil. The movie did an excellent job at that, and I loved that he thought it was important to give her more of a role. At the same time, I was only slightly upset that the role ended up being one to help us better parse the actions of a man. That’s not the director’s fault though, it’s what the author’s text called for, which is why I am pretty sure there is not a hint of irony in the imperial themes of his work. I take it as a literal interpretation. Another layer to it all is, now that I think about it, I would have found it much more interesting, original — a breath of fresh air, dare I say — if for once a person of color was looked at as the imperal savior. It would have made the plot less predictable for me and added new sociological themes to parse. I would have loved for, like, Damson Idris or Taylor Zakhar Perez to play Timmy’s role to mix it up a bit. Zendaya can stay, but I also think Bailey Bass from Avatar and Interview with a Vampire could have given the cast a run for its money.
Overall, believe it or not, I loved the movie. I thought it was beautiful to watch. And because it was so beautiful, it made me sad. My favorite characters were the sandworms.
💫Kitty Talk💫
Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met:
Slate, “TikTok Is on the Decline”
Town and Country, “Lord Lucan and the Enduring Mystery of Who Killed Sandra Rivett”
New York Magazine, “The Theft First, there was the burglary. Then everything went missing.”