These two articles hit my news feed this morning:
‘Dune’ appropriates Islamic, Middle Eastern tropes without real inclusion, critics say
“Dune” uses explicit Islamic imagery and cultural elements, experts say. But the main cast doesn’t feature a Middle Eastern or North African, aka MENA, actor in a prominent role.
“It’s an erasure,” said Serena Rasoul, a casting director and founder of Muslim American Casting.
“If you all love Dune so much please think about supporting Muslim/SWANA SFF writers and stories instead,” one user tweeted.
“You don’t cast MENA or Muslim actors, yet you profit off their culture,” she said. “That’s where it’s painful for us as creatives. … It means that we are not good enough to be part of the film.”
And this:
Use of Arabic, ululation in ‘Dune’ spark criticism of cultural appropriation
“It’s like we’re stuck in this creative colonialism,” she said. “Where our homes and foods and songs and languages are just right for Western stories, but we humans are never enough to be in them.”
Chalamet’s character as a “white savior” is something that bothered Rasoul, as well. She’s familiar with the source material for “Dune” and author Frank Herbert’s inspirations behind the character of Paul. He was intended to be a “Western” man, which itself feeds a savior narrative.
“To some audiences, that implies that it is a white man who has these messianic impulses to control other societies and inflict himself upon the environment,” she said. But, she noted, “there’s diversity in the West too,” so Herbert’s “Western” description didn’t necessarily need to be interpreted as “white” on screen.
Dear people, read the book and then promptly get fucked with a Crysknife.
Let’s take a look at the plot of Dune from 50,000 feet.
Two planets with governments modeled after feudal European states, one, a very wattery world that bears a striking resemblance to England, go to war over a desert planet with a sparse population of religious extremists, over a natural resource critical to interstellar transportation.
Holy shit, does that seem somewhat familiar.
One of the Europeanesque nobles then lead an uprising of local tribesmen against the more harsh and violent colonialist powers that attempts to take over the desert region for it’s unique natural resource.
I don’t know, but perhaps a cursory knowledge of Arab oil conflicts, and the history of T.E. Lawrence and the Ottoman Empire in the Arab peninsula might make Dune make a little more sense.
Then learn what the word “allegory” means. It comes before “appropriation” in the dictionary.
But I guess it’s just easier to lash out in ignorance and put your social justice grievances on display for victim points.
Which causes you to tear down one of the greatest science fiction stories and political treatises every written.
But because that is what you do, destroying instead of create and demand others give you what you are unable to do yourself, you can fuck all the way off into the Deep Desert to die in a Hulasikali Wala.
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