Saw this with the fellas at Lincoln Square IMAX (thanks as always to Man, who does the hard work of scoping out these showtimes well in advance!).

I got a headache during the film (probably not about the film but about having slept poorly for a few days) so I wasn't about to cajole the others into hanging around afterwards. As a result, we only had a little time to catch up. Much of our shared news was about how hard things are. It can be an encouragement to see old friends, but you need enough time, to sit with the distress long enough to reach that "well, here we are" feeling. It's a poignant feeling but not humorless.

On the subway platform, I mused on my first experience with the story of Dune at fifteen or so. A teenaged boy is a sweaty mix of anxious desperation and a grasping for grandeur. Herbert's Dune was red meat for teenaged me: he constructed a whole galaxy that hung in the balance on the choices of just one young man. To have that morbid feeling — "my problems suck so bad, in such a unique way, that if I can find a way through I'll be the Chosen One" — captured in this sweeping novel was exhilarating.

It's been almost forty years, I'm different, the world is different, and Villeneuve's Dune is both Herbert's Dune and also something particular to our time. Both disenchanted and (possibly) re-enchanted.

Ursula LeGuin has an essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" in which she takes the reader back to early hunter-gatherer societies, and asks us to imagine their stories. Contrasting typical hunter stories (aka "the killer story") and typical gatherer stories, she spins a playful theory about the origins of fiction. Naturally she gets into the dynamic of how we learn to tell our stories a certain way, and then the stories we tell (shaping the way we see our world and choices we make) shape our own ongoing stories. "The trouble is," she writes, "we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story."

Part of the enduring appeal of Herbert's novel is that there's a holistic bias at its core, an inclination towards ecological and spiritual wholeness, but it's dressed up in traditional hero's journey moves and medieval skullduggery and intrigue. Paul is ultimately a killer in a classic "killer story," but the novel at times suggests a vision for how he could be otherwise. For some readers, the alternative vision is vivid and part of their experience of the novel, while for others, including me as a teen, Paul is more attractive as an object of identification. Fantasies of dominating the galaxy are seductive; it's a flavor that can overwhelm other flavors in the stew. That's not what novels have to be, but it's what we often expect from them. As Le Guin puts it:

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.

I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

It's the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, an interesting pivot point in the drama of the killer story trying to take over the novel. It's fitting for Christians to worship a God who was willing to become vulnerable, embodied as a heroic figure whose heroism was not based on killing but was based on healing, teaching and dying. Jesus dies, seeking forgiveness for his enemies with his last words. Then comes Easter. In the aftermath of Easter, Paul (the other Paul!) writes, "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." In a paradoxical way, Jesus becomes a destroyer! Easter is a beautiful holiday in many ways, but I've never been able to celebrate it without a queasy awareness that when Jesus returned to life, the possibility that he might someday become a killer again — our killer, the best killer — was also brought to life.

I would like to laugh off these concerns, but the current troubles make that impossible. I don't think the genocide in Gaza is a theological problem. I recognize that it's a political problem. But American Christians have done a lot of work, over a long period of time, to have influence on U.S. policy regarding Israel. And the fruit of that influence is that our State Department favors the nearly continuous and unconditional provision of arms. This is not a matter of lacking political efficacy: we (and by "we," I mean American Christians) have been effective at encouraging killing in Gaza and discouraging a ceasefire. My church loves an Easter hymn that includes the line "Love's redeeming work is done." Should we sing that the work is done indeed? The point of redemption is to buy people back from slavery. And in Christian theology, death, starvation and cruelty are forms of slavery.

There's not much use in blaming Jesus for Gaza. But I maintain that there are a lot of people who feel they love Jesus and yet are super comfortable with a hell of a lot of killing. That's the hazard of messianic narratives.

You'll have your own way of understanding Paul's ambivalence about claiming the loyalty of the Fremen by using the narrative that's been implanted among them. But this is what it makes me think about.

There's absurdity in the way narratives can come to mean the opposite of what was intended, and humor in the absurdity. One of my favorite bits in the movie was when Paul tried to counter Stilgar's enthusiasm with a humble statement of facts, and Stilgar said, "That kind of humility is exactly how the Messiah would behave!" Someone said it was a bit right out of Life of Brian, which sounds about right.

That said, after a certain point the humor drains out of the situation. The first half of Dune: Pt 2 is leavened with some humor, romance and even a kind of audacious eroticism (Lady Fenring, may I put my hand in your box?) As the movie gets closer to the climactic battle, it becomes a bummer. But a thrilling bummer. I ire Villeneuve for creating a spectacle so overwhelming that it definitely bears the surface markers of a work of entertainment. But underneath you feel the killer story and the life story wrestling. The Harkonnens are the ultimate bullies, so we can feel some satisfaction in their downfall. There's no moral complexity there. But Villeneuve won't let us forget that there is no easy distinction between Paul and the Harkonnens. Through Chani, too, he find ways to put his thumb on the scale in favor of the life story. I'm going to need more viewings (preferably without a headache) to know how I feel about the movie. Part One had a more delicious ambiguity: Paul won the fight with Janis, but his reluctance to kill gave it a melancholy air which left some satisfactions behind, both from the perspective of the hero's journey and the "fiction as medicine bundle" idea.

Part Two ends on a very different note. It ends up looking like the story of someone who was once personally important but more and more is compelled to fill a particular role to the degree where his own personhood seems irrelevant. He is conduit for forces larger than himself. The story becomes the opposite of a power fantasy. Or maybe that's just my perspective! In the short time that my friends and I had to talk about how our lives are going, we reviewed a series of ills: separation or divorce, disappointments at work, our kids are struggling, our parents are struggling, mortality and frailty breathing down our necks. This phase of our lives is not about discovering new sources of power. It's about taking blows with as much grace as we can muster.

It's Saturday. The work is not done.