Two Desert Messiahs and the Ring of Power
Two Desert Messiahs and the Ring of Power
Dune, The Chosen, and Tolkien's dark vision of corruption
Last weekend, like many other people, I finally got to see part two of Denis Villeneuve’s sprawling, epic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune. I saw the first film with little to no context of the book and found it a little tedious but intriguing (liked it much better on the recent rewatch). But when the magnificent trailers for Dune: Part Two started dropping, promising a higher-stakes story, I was definitely in.
The film does not disappoint. It is staggeringly beautiful to watch, but also tells a complex and compelling story of a young man caught up in monumental forces of politics, prophecy, and war.
Messiah of Arrakis
What also makes the films so compelling is what they are doing with the protagonist, Paul Atreides. I’d say for about 9/10ths of the story being told in the two films, we are sympathetic to Paul and are rooting for him. After all, he’s a teenage boy who is the last surviving heir of his family, his father Leto having been murdered by their political rivals the Harkonnens, in concert with the Emperor himself. Caught up in the emotions of the story, we want to see Paul get justice, if not revenge, for what has been done to his family.
The catch however is that Paul is not just this. Through his mother Jessica he’s also the product of years of genetic cross-breeding on the part of the Bene Gesserit, a secretive matriarchal order in the Dune universe bent on manipulating humanity to their own ends. The goal of their cross-breeding is to create a godlike figure called the Kwisatz Haderach, who will be clairvoyant across time and space. They’ve also spent centuries seeding prophecies of a messianic figure throughout many cultures across the galactic empire, including the Fremen culture on Arrakis, which is where House Atreides and Paul end up at the beginning of Dune.
When Paul arrives on the desert planet of Arrakis with is family, he is hailed by some of the Fremen as Lisan al-Gaib (“The Voice from the Outer World”), the messiah of Fremen prophecy. When Paul and his mother become part of Fremen society on Arrakis after the assassination of his father, more and more of the Fremen start to look to Paul as their savior. Jessica herself leads Paul to believe that he is the long awaited Kwisatz Haderach that her order has long been planning for. This seems to be confirmed when Paul undergoes a ritual that grants him greater prescience than any Bene Gesserit heir yet.
The thing is, Paul knows that the messianic prophecy of the Fremen is a fabrication on the part of the Bene Gesserit. But as the noose tightens around him and conflict with the Emperor and the Harkonnens approaches, Paul has to decide if he will use the fabrication to manipulate the Fremen for his own ends.
As Paul contemplates the future with his new prescient abilities, he sees a host of terrible possibilities. The least terrible option, apparently, involves him taking the throne of the Empire himself, but the terrible side effect will be that his zealous followers will kill billions across the universe in a holy war waged in his name. Yikes.
This is where that last 10th of the film comes in. In the end, Paul chooses to get his revenge on the Harkonnens and the Emperor and take the imperial throne for himself. When the other great houses of the Empire refuse to acknowledge this, he launches his new zealot army against them and the film ends with the ominous line, “the holy war begins”.
As I left the theater contemplating this dark vision, I couldn’t help but contrast it to the other theater experience I’ve had recently.
Another Desert Messiah
Along with seeing Dune: Part Two, my wife and I have been watching Season 4 of The Chosen as it has been releasing in theaters over the last month. The theme and focus of this season has been on Jesus as the Man of Sorrows, heavy-laden with the prospect of his impending suffering and death, and frustrated with the inability of his disciples to see that he is a different kind of messiah than they are expecting. We particularly see Judas’ story evolve as he gets increasingly disillusioned with Jesus.
It’s never portrayed in the show, but anyone familiar with the Christian story knows that Jesus had his own reckoning in the desert, told in Matthew 4:1-11. In this story Jesus is tempted by Satan to also use his messianic power for his own ends, rather than following the path laid out for him.
In some ways, Jesus is not all that different from Paul Atreides. Both are powerful figures burdened with the messianic expectations of those around them. Jesus also lived under the sway of a corrupt empire, and had followers pressuring him to take political powerful for himself, to make all follow his bidding.
But he chose another path, a path that we see at the end of Season 4 of The Chosen has him riding a humble donkey into Jerusalem at the beginning of Passover week, knowing the religious leaders have knives drawn, ready to use any means possible to have Rome kill him.
The Ring of Power
Something that brought these two stories together for me is a book that I’ve been reading this Lent season, The Wood Between the World: A Poetic Theology of the Cross by Brian Zahnd. In the book Zahnd has a chapter entitled “One Ring to Rule Them All” in which he analyzes the symbolism of the One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. One particular passage of the chapter stuck out to me:
At the cross Jesus Christ undoes coercive power as the means by which the world is to be set right. In the light of the cross the Ring of Power is to be refused, not coveted. The cross is the antithesis to the Ring of Power, but that does not change the fact that we live in the liminal space of now and not yet, of kingdom come and still awaited. Living between the resurrection and the parousia we must constantly choose between two ways of rectifying the world—the cross of Christ or the Ring of Power. And this is where Tolkien’s epic tale of Sauron’s “One Ring to rule them all” is so insightful. In The Lord of the Rings no one can use the Ring of Power—the capacity to dominate all others—without being corrupted by it. And here we cannot help but remember that famous proverb: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
While I don’t know if Frank Herbert was a person of religious faith, based on his writings I think he would agree with the last part of Zahnd’s statement. In Dune Messiah, Herbert’s second book in the series, we meet Paul twelve years after the events of the first novel. He’s still Emperor, but 61 billion people have died in the holy war conducted by his followers, and now there are political forces moving to depose him, just as he deposed the previous emperor over a decade earlier. As Brian Herbert, Frank’s son, writes in the introduction to Dune Messiah: “The second novel…flipped over the carefully crafted hero myth of Paul…and revealed the dark side of the messiah phenomenon that had appeared to be so glorious in Dune.”
Throughout the Dune stories, there is often talk among the messianic characters of a narrow way or “golden path” that humanity must find to prosper and flourish. What it often ends up being, and I think this is Herbert’s point, is the same old path of blood and destruction humans have been carving for centuries in the name of power. It is the One Ring holding sway over all.
But what if there were an alternative way? And what if that alternative way didn’t involved grasping the wheel of power for yourself, but letting yourself be crushed under it for the sake of others, exposing the whole wheel and its violence as a sham?
Who would take that path?
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