The connotations to western audiences carried by Arabic words and imagery in 1965 is vastly different to the connotations conveyed today. It would be incredibly distracting and offputting to modern audiences trying to grasp the core story.
I think this is the strongest reason to avoid it, and I would have done the same. It's just going to lead the audience to weird places and confusion. And distract from all of the other things Dune has going for it. Replicating the EFFECT on the audience of a book written in 1965 is really a big undertaking.
Even if you ignore the rather blunt stereotyping and selective aspects of Islamic cultures that Herbert injected. Or carried over from another story, as was highlighted earlier.
I assumed some of that was because they kept, and highlighted really, the fact that their religion was the result of deliberate manipulation by the Bene Gesserit. I can’t remember if they explicitly say “planted prophets,” but it felt more plain than in the book; I can see how making that statement when the culture is explicitly Arabic and the religion Islam would be more incendiary than science fiction is usually trying to be.
In the book they explicitly say that the Bene Gesserit planted stories and prophecies in populations so they could exploit them, if needed, later. That's what Paul and Jessica do.
But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune. The people who read it as kids and found its word-building novel either never watched Lawrence of Arabia or know nothing about the history of the Middle East.
That's not to say the book isn't enjoyable, or even great. It's just that it mashes together various real people and historical incidents and draws much of its power from them. If you know the real story, it's impossible not to notice the parallels. If you remove the parallels, you lose the story's power.
> But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune.
Hydraulic despotism. The pitfalls of manipulating religion. The trap that both present to those who use them. That’s what most of the book is about.
If you just focus on historical analogies you’re missing some major themes of the book. And that’s ignoring the thematic exploration of precognition and omniscience, the ecological themes etc.
Sure, but those themes are drawn out via the facts of the story which have direct historical parallels. It seems like the Arabic elements are just window dressing and you could swap them out without affecting the story. But because it is drawing on real world events, even if you aren't aware of the history, you lose something if you try to make it more generic.
The proof is the movie version (at least Part I). The fremen feel less like an actual society with a coherent culture because they removed anything that tied them to the Middle Eastern.
I think this is true of fantasy in general, because the progenitor of the modern genre was Tolkien, a huge history/linguistics/mythology nerd. And one can easily argue that he set the precedent of taking history (often the middle ages) and imbuing it with the mythic/religious elements that people told stories about.
Look at GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire. One of the subplots is basically, "What if Chinggis Khan was a chump who died but he had a blonde child bride that accomplished all the shit that he did in real life." Again, I don't think that makes his books bad, but in my experience, the more you study history, the more you realize how the real creativity of fantasy writers is what pieces of history and mythology they crib and recombine.
All stories of note have historical parallels, but I think it's fair to say that there have been new bits of history since then, that would heavily distract from the meaning of the work, if the window dressing stayed the same. AGOT would hit a little differently if it just so happened that there was a horrifying civil war caused by a poorly planned incestuous relationship sometime in the 2010s.
I've just seen the second film, and I think it does many of the book's messages justice (Great Man in particular). Perhaps you can criticize that removing the window dressing has destroyed some of the setting's cohesion. It's a reasonable argument.
But I do think that the film would lose more if was buttressed with an allegorical context for, uh, more recent world history.
if some social group today finds itself 'put off' by arabic words and imagery, does that make it more praiseworthy to omit arabic words from a story you are telling them, or to emphasize arabic words in a story you are telling them? i would tend more towards the latter; i don't think that kind of thing merits coddling
It's more: does it distract from the story. Did the Arabic bring anything specific to the story? Did the plot change with removal? Does it influence anyone's motivation or story? Not really, so unless you want to double down for pure shock value - removing it makes sense. That's being practical about where the value of that book lies, but coddling.
Quick test: if the original didn't include them, would you notice and say "this story really lacks Arabic words to be great"? If not, it wasn't ever necessary.
also, i find the idea that arabic, one of the world's five most spoken languages, has shock value, to be shocking. we aren't talking about a conlang invented by the manson family
Arabic doesn't have shock value. Arabic in an invented future culture of religious fanatics taking over the universe has a bit of shock value. Doubling down to have more of it and emphasizing it because it's slightly controversial definitely has shock value.
I'm not exactly sure who you're arguing with necessarily, though the acid in your words is quite plain. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental reality that the more capital is invested in the creation of cultural for-profit creation, the more tied the product is to commercial concerns. Books can be created without any sacrifice of artistic vision, Hollywood blockbusters with budgets as they are will never be divorced from the realities of commercial viability. I didn't present this as a "good thing", anymore than it's a "good thing" that my personal well-being is associated in some degree with my own financial outlook.
Ultimately I think Dune is packed with ideas, many of which are really point-in-time, and not everything can make it onto the screen in a coherent way. I thought they did a good job overall when viewed as a whole product.
Your apathy on the issue is a moral judgement. You think it's not a big deal. I disagree. We should not be "adapting" art to fit modern sensibilities. I don't care if they take artistic liberties with the space ship designs, but changing key aspects of how you interpret an old the story is bad. Maybe just make your own movie instead of misrepresenting a key cultural relic.
You sound like a real peach - angry at people for observing the world as it is, inserting moral judgments about them because they're not uselessly raging at pop cultural comfort food. I don't have to give you my bona fides on the ways I try to impact the world around me, but one cannot fight every battle. No amount of righteous anger I display here - not matter how performative it would be to you - would change the fact that a $190 million dollar budget fronted by a for-profit company is going account for commercial concerns of the end product in the society in which we currently live.
Also, "key cultural relic"? That's layering it on a bit thick.
This is not a strong justification. If you switched out "arabic words and imagery" for say "blackface" would it still hold? There was a time where seeing non-white actors in film would have been considered distracting and off-putting, but we seem to have moved past that as a society, so why are we holding on to this justification now?
Moreover, distracting and off putting to whom? This article, in part, is responding to how distracting it is for fans of the books and readers to see the source material changed in a pretty crucial way. As others have said, its not exactly obvious to me that the use of these words and language are even possible to separate from the core story.
I get that this is a film executive's decision looking at the commercial viability of their product if they whitewash the story (or not), but at the end of the day we can't really say what the commercial success would (or wouldn't) have been if this language were preserved. To me this demonstrates more the entrenchment of the people who are in the position to make these choices rather than what audiences are willing to consume.
After all, consider the fact that Dune has remained important enough, despite the claim that Arabic (and specifically Muslim) imagery is used throughout that someone decided to greenlight two feature film adaptations so far.
When we dumb things down for the lowest common denominator, we're just left with slop. I understand the economic incentive to reach the widest audience possible, but I wish our culture was better at telling idiots to go pound sand.
Maybe in the general case, but in this specific case? Inability to look past islamaphobic 'connotations' and prejudices to enjoy something like Dune seems like a affliction of idiots to me.
