'Dune' Through the Lens of Edward Said: Examining Orientalism and its Impact

It has been repeated numerous times that art is a reflection of society but also a tool to reshape it. This strength comes with great responsibility for artists. While it can educate, raise awareness, and inform, a piece of art can also misinform by transmitting the artist’s judgments and prejudices to the public. By consuming an art piece, we consume the artist’s preconceived notions, and since it is a human product, this entails more complexity than we may think.

Nowadays, one form of art that is the easiest to consume from the very comfort of our homes is movies. Since Hollywood is the world’s biggest cinema industry, this is where artistic responsibility lies. It strongly reflects the American gaze, which, unfortunately, still holds its colonial past in some of its depictions. Dune may be the perfect example to explore the effect art can have on both reflecting and shaping society due to its extreme Orientalism. This can be done through the lens of Edward Said’s postcolonial theory, as proposed in his book Orientalism.

The Palestinian-American author wrote numerous pieces on the Israel/Palestine conflict and on a variety of topics related to the Middle East. These topics often challenge current perspectives moulded by a Westernized and white-dominated world, notably with his books Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and Representations of the Intellectual. 

His writings were disseminated around the world in many translations and they follow two United Nations Sustainable Development Goals; the first is Quality Education since the principal objective is to educate as well as rethink the main tools we use to educate ourselves in various fields. The second is Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions since it also requires us to strengthen our institutions by making them more inclusive and considerate of different perspectives in the world, but also by offering justice to oppressed groups.

Adapted from Frank Herbert’s novel, Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction movie tells the story of Paul Atreides and his family, the House Atreides. They control a futuristic desert planet, Arrakis, which is indigenous land to the Fremen people. At first sight, the adaptation offers a visually appealing staging, the beauty of the never-ending dunes, the greatness of the desert, and a fascination for the unknown. However, it is actually Orientalism at its finest, with a typical yellow-toned sepia filter used for every movie set in the Middle East in Hollywood and the typical landscapes this same region is always associated with.

The parallels can be easily made, and the colonizer’s gaze expresses itself through the cast. The House Atreides, mainly white and of noble descent, is represented by some of the biggest Western figures of Hollywood, the first being Timothée Chalamet, and depicted as wise and civilized. Contrastingly, the indigenous Fremen are represented as savage, tribal, and dark-skinned, with clothing elements extremely similar to the way Middle Easterners and North Africans are traditionally depicted in Hollywood. The usage of Arabic words can even be noticed at certain times, but of course, no main character is played by an actor who is either Middle Eastern or North African.

It is also extremely uncanny to make parallels with the typical colonial scenarios of Indigenous people showing hospitality towards the newcomers, even helping them trace their way on this newfound land, only to be attacked and “saved from themselves,” offering a typical white saviour narrative that has been criticized by many authors from Al Jazeera, TRT world, University of Kent, Bubblegum club, and 3 Quarks Daily. 

In his book Covering Islam, Said explains the concept of “communities of interpretation.” He explains how the coverage of Islam by media and experts, notably from America, shapes the way Muslims are seen worldwide, particularly in the West. He contests these notions, the way they have been presented, and most importantly, by whom. He explains how these experts who shaped the narrative around the Middle East, Muslims, and Arabs shared biased perspectives that affected everything from public opinion to politics. According to Said, the aforementioned Western experts (and consequently the public, too) believe their knowledge to be acquired through reflection and reason but do not include the lived experiences of the people in question. In Hollywood today, one sees this phenomenon repeating itself. It is a perception that is not based on the lived realities of those living in the Middle East, but rather on an accumulation of knowledge from sources that are disconnected from them.

“For Muslims and for non-Muslims, Islam is an objective and also a subjective fact, because people create that fact in their faith, in their societies, histories, and traditions.”

While challenging our view of classical experts (academics, journalists, professors, authors), he proceeds to explain how their work also serves as a reflection of their principles and values as well as their capabilities; comparison serves them as proof of their civility: “Orientalist scholars have tended to use their standing as experts in denying – and sometimes even covering – their deep-seated feelings about Islam with a language of authority whose purpose is to certify their ‘objectivity’ and ‘scientific impartiality.’”

He also explains how this leads to a hostile and extremely reduced vision of “an abstraction called ‘Islam’” when it is not quite something that can be defined this easily when it exists in so many different parts of the world, in so many different ways. The principle extends to several aspects that make up one’s cultural or social identity, such as gender or sexuality.

The concept of womanhood, for example, is fluid; not all women have breasts or menstruate, and they all have their own individual aspirations. The essence of feminism is to discard expectations of what a woman should be. The same applies to Muslims and most other marginalized communities, too. Muslims in India, China, Pakistan and Morocco all have different traditions, different cultures, histories, and faiths and even speak different languages. Essentialization remains a potent recipe for discrimination, demonization, and prejudice. This leads to an inaccurate vision of Islam since popular culture will push us to imagine Muslims as only veiled Arabs in the desert, similar to what Dune presents; a very limited representation of reality.

“The assumption is that whereas “the West” is greater than and has surpassed the stage of Christianity, its principal religion, the world of Islam – its varied societies, histories, and languages notwithstanding – is still mired in religion, primitivity, and backwardness. (...) Malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West.” says Said in Covering Islam.

The issue is that, whether these misrepresentations were intentional or not, direct or not, they engrain in the viewers’ minds a series of associations are applied to real-life people, places, and events. After watching Dune, one may see people who look like the Fremen and associate a certain lifestyle or behaviour with them. Contrastingly, the audience might feel a certain level of trust and comfort towards the House Atreides since they look and behave like Western people, which feels familiar as it is the “norm” of our Westernized world.

This is dangerous because the Fremen have many obvious similarities to Arabs. A series of Hollywood movies will lead to people seeing Arabs and Muslims as hostile, “savage” people who need to be saved from themselves. This rhetoric reinforces the idea of the necessity of the West to “civilize” the region in contexts of terrorism; Palestine should be saved from Hamas, Lebanon from Hezbollah, and Yemen from the Houthis.

Hollywood is integral to the Western world’s exertion of soft power across the globe. As Said explains in his book, this shapes the way Arabs and Muslims are perceived and consequently influences world politics as a whole. It is a vicious circle that cannot stop if not recognized or criticized enough. What makes it particularly uncanny is to see Hollywood’s romanticization and appropriation of Middle Eastern culture, its people, and its landscapes for economic benefits while simultaneously watching the same American perpetrator funding and encouraging genocide in the same region.

“The mere use of the label “Islam” either to explain or indiscriminately condemn “Islam,” actually ends up becoming a form of attack, which in turn provokes more hostility between self-appointed Muslim and Western spokespersons,” states Said in Covering Islam.

These depictions reinforce the vision of Arabs as naturally flawed, fundamentally sexist, misogynist, homophobic and inherently violent. For example, this paper from 2002 describes the “cruel reality of the Middle East” and refers to “Arab terrorism” as if these two concepts are interlinked. This is similar to the concept of “Islamic terrorism” that Said explains in his book. This is exactly what Said refers to when he explains that “General United States media view that whereas Muslim terrorists are fully capable of acts of deliberate violence against innocents, Israel, which is like us, is not,” according to Said in Covering Islam.

Consequently, growing racism against Arabs and a sharp rise in Islamophobia help justify current crimes committed in the region. These crimes are portrayed as a punishment or a “war on terror,” hiding the economic and imperialist goals behind them. These substantial consequences underline our collective responsibility, not only towards what we produce but also towards what we consume. The shaping of our minds and thoughts is merely the beginning of a larger and more perilous cycle of systemic discrimination and oppression.