The recently released "Dune", as the most anticipated science fiction masterpiece of this year, lived up to expectations and finally got rid of the title of "the most difficult science fiction to be put on the big screen".
Hailed as a science fiction spectacle, Dune is Frank Herbert's "first massive planetary ecology novel," and as the winner of the Hugo And Nebula Award for Outstanding Science Fiction, Dune is considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time.
Published in 1965, the novel is set about 20,000 years after human existence. Although the depiction of the future human epoch is surreal, most authors will make imaginary structures under realistic references, and various details show that if Dune has a historical archetype, it must have taken place in the Arab world.
Herbert wrote Dunes in the 1960s, when British colonialism opened the door to the Arab world and globalization led the world to pay attention to Islamic culture. Herbert also revealed that he had Arab friends, but there was no clue that he "loved Islamic culture" because the Freemans living in the desert needed a language and culture to support the story, and Arabic and Islamic culture met this need and were new to Westerners at the time.
What details can you dig into when you look at Dune from an Arabic perspective?
The Freeman language created in Dune novels is mainly derived from Arabic, but simplifies the consonants, pharynxes, and stops emphasized in Arabic and blends them with other contemporary languages. The authors reasoned that the Arabic language "probably survived centuries in a desert environment." But only the minimum Amount of Arabic required to tell the story is used in the film.
The story takes place on the planet Arrakis, which consists almost entirely of dry deserts, and the planet Arrakis may have originated in Arabic الرخيص (ar-rakhīṣ), meaning "cheap" or "unworthy". Metaphor For the planet had no real value until the "spice" was discovered.
The foreigners repeatedly refer to the Otherworld prophet Paul as Lisan al Gaib, "لسان" (Lisan) means "tongue", while "الغيب" (al Gaib) means "hidden" or "invisible". "Invisible tongue" is derived from "prophet."
After Paul demonstrated his prophetic abilities and fighting skills, many Freemans gradually began to see the young duke as Mahdi "المهدي", meaning "the rightly guided man", equivalent to the Christian eschatological Messiah (savior). According to the beliefs of Islam, Mahdi will appear before the end times to eliminate evil and injustice in the world. He has always been part of the Muslim creed, and both Sunnis and Shiites agree that Mahdi will rule the world and establish justice. When Mahdi arrives, rivers will begin to flow, famine will improve, deserts will give birth to vegetation, and palm groves will grow throughout the region. These descriptions coincide with the plot developments that follow the novel, suggesting that Paul will lead the planet's people into a rebellion.
The name "sandworm" in the story, Shai-Hulud, is the Arabic word for "شيء" (Shai, meaning "object") and "خلود" (Hulud, meaning "eternal"). Literally translates to "immortal", but this is more than just a descriptive term for physical entities. For the Freemans, "sandworm" is a sacred term endowed with belief, a physical embodiment of the God who created and ruled the universe, so the Freemans had a special affection for the "sandworm", reverence, fear and respect.
The Freemans in Dune are based on the Bedouins, a nomadic people who live in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula.
If you know the history of the Middle East, you will find many similarities between the story of Dune and the Arab uprisings of the early 20th century. During the Dune Incident, a foreign son of an old colonial order united the different tribes of the desert nomads to win their freedom.
When it comes to the Arab uprising, it is necessary to mention another film, Lawrence of Arabia. At first glance, Frank Herbert's Dune appears to be a replica of Lawrence of Arabia, which is decorated with sci-fi elements.
There is a saying in the film "Lawrence of Arabia": There are only two kinds of people in the desert who can survive, the Bedouins and the gods.
The counterpart in "Dune" is: Freeman and Sandworm.
If a work wants to add mystery, the most pleasing thing to do is to add ancient Egyptian elements.
The visual design of the movie "Dune" ᑐ ᑌ ᑎ ᕮ is not only a variant of the alphabet of Dune English DUNE, if the four letters are spelled together to form a ring, the ring symbolizes the reincarnation and eternity of life in ancient Egypt, also known as the "circle of kings", only the names of pharaohs and gods are eligible to be circled.
After splitting the four different directions of the open ring ᑐ ᑌ ᑎ ᑕ, corresponding to the four major families of The Etridi, Corinho, Haknen and Beni Jesserit in the dunes, respectively, implying the most critical secrets in the dunes, Paul combined the four bloodlines.
The duke's ring seal is also derived from the ancient Egyptian use of rings. Ancient Egypt combined the seal of power with the ring ring to form the ring signet ring.
● Pictured: A gold ring seal from Upper Egypt
The ring print is printed with the totem of the Ertridi family, the eagle. For thousands of years, the eagle has been a symbol of power in Egypt, from the god Horus, the symbol of power in the time of the pharaohs, to the eagle of Saladin on the flag of Egypt today, which proves the special and important position of the eagle in Egyptian culture.
The eagle was considered by the ancient Egyptians to be the animal closest to the sun, becoming the embodiment of the sun god Ra. In the story of Dune, the eagle also symbolizes the sun, eternal and immortal.
The inspiration for the three navigators in the film to hold the scepter is also derived from the time of the pharaohs, in ancient Egyptian frescoes and artifacts the scepter is the most frequent item that appears in the hands of gods and pharaohs, and the scepter held is regarded as a symbol of power, and the longer the length of the scepter, the higher the power it represents.
The three scepters in the picture correspond to the three most powerful organizations in the universe: the Sorority, the Astronautical Guild, and the Cosmonaut Chamber of Commerce, and the unified right-handed scepter is due to the ancient Egyptian pharaonic civilization in which the right hand represents life and the left hand represents death.
Thus, the pharaoh Tutankhamun, painted on the throne of the funerary artifact excavated in the tomb of Tutankhamun, has both left hands, representing the identity of his deceased.
Overall, Islamic imagery and cultural elements from the Middle East provide the material for Dune's artistic expression, creating a desert-inspired otherworld.
And what kind of perception does the Arab audience have about the movie "Dune"?
According to the author's summary of the discussion in the news media comments and foreign Tieba reddit, some viewers have great respect for this kind of film that shows Arab culture, believing that although it does not involve elements of modernity in the Arab world, it can alleviate the "Islamophobia" around the world to a certain extent and boost the understanding of Arab culture by the movie-watching masses. Another part of the audience believes that such "luck" is an affront to Arab culture. The most criticized by the audience is that the main actors of the film are not Arabs, but a large number of black actors are used, and the Washington Post wrote that "Dune" is deeply Influenced by Islam, but the film erases it (Arabs). Muslim director Serena Rasul said: "You don't choose Arab actors, but profit from their culture, which means we (The Arabs) are not good enough to be part of the film. Without the Arabs, the Arabian elements of the film become a stolen resource.
The creator of "Dune" said this with dignity: "'Dune' takes place in a fictional space world, not the Middle East. In the same desert, with scarce resources, full of symbols from ancient Egypt, and the familiar Arabic language. If you insist that it has nothing to do with the Middle East, it is really a cover-up.
In addition to the film's candidates, the clichéd "Revenge of the Prince" and "The White Prince Saves the World" core of the plot make the Arabs even more angry. For Islam, Mahdi refers specifically to the "guide" who saves the world before the end of the world, and the most important mission is to reshape the traditional values of Islam and help the people establish orthodox Islamic beliefs, such as eliminating discrimination, corruption, inequality, comparison, violence and other evils. The practice of arbitrarily appropriating islam's pre-famous names in "Dune" is chilling, combined with the plot later in the novel, the so-called savior causes endless killings in the universe, and the film's trade-offs are more worth playing. Some Arabs have commented that why there are always people who want to reform or influence the religious view of Islam, but no one dares to offend Judaism.
So, in the eyes of the Arabs, the polarization of the dune evaluation is like the reaction we have to watch Disney's version of "Mulan". Imagine if the synopsis of the next Hollywood movie was: In the barren land of China, black people in Hanfu live a life of hunger and cold, and a foreign white man descends from the sky and calls himself "Qin Shi Huang" to save the suffering descendants of Yan Huang... In the eyes of Arabs, the movie "Dune" is such an outrageous existence.
In fact, the random borrowing of Arab culture by Western movies is not a new thing, and the most classic is that the American drama "Westworld", which is known for its details, makes all the Arabic letters wrong. Just as we have long been accustomed to the crappy Chinese accents of Chinese actors in American dramas.
In essence, all the peeps and references of such films to exotic cultures are only to increase the exotic atmosphere, and the people who suffer in the foreign land are always the "rescued". In the mainstream values of the West, it is advocated that more black actors should be used, so the roles that should be played by Arabs are replaced by black people, and such humanistic sentiments are cheap.
We never deny the artistry of Dune, but we need to be alert and recognize how much culture is distorted and ignored behind such artistry.
Originally, The Dunes author Herbert's editors asked him to downplay the "Muslim flavor" in it, and who would have thought that the film version of Dune more than forty years later would have exceeded that requirement by drastically removing references to Islamic and Arab elements from the original book in order to eliminate the so-called Orientalist aesthetics of the novel.
The film could have hired research consultants on Islamic culture to further refine the freeman customs, to make the characters fuller, the scenes richer, the culture more diverse, to exploit the subjectivity of the Arab people, and to generously shape the characters and stories associated with their experiences. But unfortunately, you can never support the pattern and heart of some people, and in the end, the Arab elements are nothing more than an exotic corsage for the movie.
If film and literature are completely reduced to tools of political output, whether culture and history will one day be "hidden" by hegemony.
Borrowed from the archetypal character T. Lawrence of Arabia. E. Lawrence concludes with a passage from his autobiography The Seven Pillars of Wisdom– "Everyone dreams, but they are not the same." Those who dream at night wake up during the day and find that these dreams are nothing. But those who dream during the day are very dangerous because they will act to make their dreams come true. ”
Images are from the web
Author: Cui Keyi
Reviewer: Yang Wanying
Typography: Wang Zihan