would that i could put genre fiction back in the silo

dune...

I saw Dune: Part II. Anyone who has known me for any amount of time will be able to guess that I was not happy with it. 

Lately I’ve been having a strange feeling creep up on me, a sense of wrongness that comes about when I see sci fi or fantasy in the same space, and judged by the same standards, as literary fiction, or prestige cinema. The first time this happened was when I was reading the book Venemous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beaumann. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but something about the mass of pull quotes that decorated the book, and the design that evoked any number of similar lit-fic covers, brought about this sudden flash of longing: I wished that I was reading the same book, but in the form of a pocket sized trade paperback with some kind of weird watercolor cover art. I wished it looked like a science fiction book. This was purely a response to surface aesthetics, and did not seem very important until the Dune movie brought it out again in a more fleshed-out form. 

I hate the new Dune movies because I think they’re afraid to be truly strange in a way that takes the premise of the Dune series seriously. I would argue that they also refuse to engage with the world of the series as speculative fiction. This is related to their lack of strangeness.

Speculative fiction is special because it launches its inquiry from a place of strangeness. The premise of a sci-fi novel often requires a bit of buy-in. In this sense, there is a barrier for entry – the reader needs to take the novel’s terms seriously and agree to care about the implications of these terms. In the case of Dune, we need to care about genetic engineering and the questions it raises. What does it mean for personal identity if people can also be weapons of mass destruction? When plans are conducted across centuries, how much do individual personalities matter? What would people be like in this world? What about empire-building? The Dune films bypass these concerns entirely, presenting instead palatable, recognizable characters who go through palatable, recognizable moral arcs. Paul and Chani seem like people you might meet anywhere. The discourse surrounding imperialism which pervades the film slots neatly into our own contemporary discourses, shoving aside the fact that the books thematize imperialism within the context of the concerns I’ve enumerated above. 

There is no questioning from a place of strangeness – in fact, strangeness within the film is used to denote threat. The Harkonnens are uncanny and insectoid. They don’t move like humans we know. By contrast, the Atreides and the Fremen move like people you might see at the supermarket. Never mind the layers of strangeness that would separate someone like Paul Atreides from you or me – the long-term genetic manipulation, the Bene Gesserit training, his mentat status, his sense of hierarchy. Would it really be so terrible for audiences to have to encounter a main character who feels alien to them? People who foreground relatability when assessing media might say yes.

If it sounds like I’m just a fan lamenting the fact that the thing I like has hit the mainstream, whatever. But the fact that Dune is a major blockbuster series – the theaters were full when I saw both part one and part two – is emblematic of a wider popular interest in speculative fiction in general, which I’m sure we’re all aware of. Genre elements creep into lots of different things now, and it isn’t weird or uncool to like speculative fiction. I think this is bad because I’m not sure a general audience is willing to make that buy-in that I talked about. Within this model, speculative fiction drifts into magical realism – it’s a way to talk about our world, an elaborate way to use figurative language. That seems like a flattening to me.

Lots of genres are still siloed and doing fine. Romance is judged by its own intra-generic norms, as is crime. I don’t think it’s possible to dial back what has happened to spec fic, but I do think that this can teach us something about the importance of an audience’s relationship with a work or genre. The audience forms the genre. When the audience changes, the genre changes. I just wish that particular truth wouldn’t bring about things like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.