Messiahs Or Floor Mops: "Jupiter Ascending" As Populist Alternative To "Dune"

"The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities."

--Theodor Adorno

Starting in 2000 I spent about a year and a half in Vancouver, B.C. studying computer modeling and animation at what was, at the time, a little school on Beatty Street, which shared space with a barber shop devoted to hip hop culture.

Besides the occasional trim, students would sometimes hang out to graze through CDs or peruse the latest issue of The Source during lunch break.  On one occasion I got to talking with the owner of the business about the school's program, my interest in CG modeling and how my latest project was progressing when the man, taking me in with an assessing twinkle in his eye, remarked, "How can I use you?"

Even if I didn't have to return to class, I still recall after all this time being too stunned by the crude entrepreneurialism underlying this facetious crack to respond.

What's Lost, What's Gained... And What Matters

Bad sign: moviegoers re-
ceived this explanatory sheet
before seeing 1984's Dune

Yet the weight of such bluntness doesn't just define the main distinction between the celebrated 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune (Warner Bros.) and its oft-ridiculed predecessor Jupiter Ascending (Village Roadshow/Warner Bros., 2015), but, as suggested later on, is related to the difference in how the two movies were critically received.

Eric Roth's streamlined script for Denis Villeneuve's take on the intricate space epic--in contrast with the overwhelmed, if stylish David Lynch 1984 Dune--reciprocated the lifting of numerous plot conventions from the novel for use in Star Wars: A New Hope by, in turn, adopting the pacy approach of Lucas' own 1977 saga.

In the process, however, the historical and geopolitical themes driving the plot of a callow nobleman thrust into a destiny-defining struggle between feuding institutions are watered down from the 1965 classic--mainly, how the prospects for the environmental improvement of an entire inhabited world are halted when powerful interests discover the unforgiving demands of its ecosystem inadvertently provide the only means of holding together an interstellar empire.

In the film adaptation (which, so far, covers the first half of the novel) the psychoactive melange, derived from the scat of the planet Dune's gigantic sandworms, alone imparts the ability to navigate hyperspace, making travel between star systems practical. Yet scant acknowledgement that the evolution of the worms, the shai-hulud, in forging an obligatory relationship with the desert world, renders water--the most precious resource to the native Fremen--poisonous to them.

A Planet Of Two Nations

It has been widely observed how the native term for Dune, Arrakis, is a loose anagram of Iraq, but in these later days of global rare earth mineral and petroleum decline, another candidate might be found in the recently-razed Libya.

Before "Operation United Protector", a 2011 U.S.-led NATO bombardment crushed the North African nation back several centuries, Libyans enjoyed equitably-distributed proceeds from the national oil industry, robust public political engagement at all levels of society and the overall highest standard of living in the entire continent. (1)

Of particular note was a program of desert greening in a region bordering Egypt, so expansive it was visible from space in 2004. (2) So threatening to the Western industrialized economy was a nation aspiring to establish Africa's autonomy from centuries of foreign influence through the introduction of a continent-wide currency, in a matter of months, it was reduced to establishing open-air slave markets.

The Radicalism Of Going Bonkers

Though a similar seesaw relation of human dignity and aspiration on one end versus imperial expansion on the other--with a crucial bio/organic resource base as the fulcrum--is in play in Jupiter Ascending, the Lana and Lilly Wachowski production goes one better by subversively expanding the range of  their own sprawling allegory to encompass the populist, as well as the plutocratic, upturning the standard fairytale conceit of opportunity being the sole right of the privileged.

Libyan Al Khufrah Oasis from
Earth orbit (NASA, 2004)

For those who have passed on the 2015 space opera because of the abundance of derisive reviews (interestingly, I read several different ones dismissing  the movie using the same specific, yet murky pejorative, 'bonkers'), it's worth entertaining the possibility that Jupiter strikes perhaps too honest a chord for some regarding how individuals become conditioned in competitive society to inevitably view one another as tappable resources, like the owner of the Canadian barber shop.

It only makes sense. To Balem Abrasax (played with patrician menace by  Eddie Redmayne), oldest of the three heirs to the House of Abrasax, one of several elite blocs maneuvering for dominance in the galactic order, "Life is an act of consumption" justifies his family's preying upon the collective living wealth of the populaces of hundreds of planets--including Earth--in order to maintain their longevity.

Far from the majesty of liberating prophecy haunting the trials of Dune's Paul Atreides (AKA Muad'ib), Jupiter Jones, a frustrated cleaning woman played by Mila Kunis, finds herself caught in the rivalry between the siblings when it is discovered her genome is an exact copy of that of their recently passed mother, meaning she could contest their claim to the throne.

From Cleaning Houses To Court Nobility

As an illegal Russian immigrant, Jupiter is used by her enterprising uncle in Chicago to work in the homes of the affluent when she is thrust into a realm of satirically arcane bureaucracy, Borgian intrigues and assassination attempts stretching from a secret fortress hidden in the eye of Jupiter to numerous worlds elsewhere in the Milky Way.

Grooming whole planetary populaces over the course of millennia so they can unknowingly be reduced to a glistening, life-extending distillate (comparable in political value to melange), may gloss over the fact that the nobility in this setting are, in an inverted nod to Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729) (3), cannibals, it also goes far to demonstrate the self-consuming social character of the prevailing economic arrangement, in our world.

With the exception of the Shadout Mapes, there is next to no day-to-day interaction between any of the powerful occupiers of Dune and the rank-and-file Arrikians. The cruelty of the prior Harkonnen rule to the Fremen is only alluded to in Dune, though we see it well enough when administered laterally against their peers of House Atreides.

By comparison, Jupiter ties the actions of the grasping Abrasax clan with those of Jupiter's own family, not just when an impatient Balem resorts to sending dragon-like Sargorn enforcers to abduct the Bolotnikovs but, in a more prosaic bit of foreshadowing, when Vladie, her scheming second cousin, anticipates Balem's defense of the status quo using less elegant language. When she wants to know why Vladie's entitled to the majority of the proceeds from the impending sale he arranged of her eggs to a fertility clinic, he quips, "That's capitalism, babe. Shit rolls downhill, profits flow up."

Just as Uncle Vassily unscrupulously takes advantage of his undocumented kin to operate his cleaning business (while indirectly being exploited, presumably, by those above him), Jupiter is forced to, after a fashion, cannibalize the wealth of her own body to get by.

Reaching For The Stars... Or A Remote

Though she wants the money to buy a telescope identical to that of her late astrophysicist father (killed by Russian mobsters), her cousin's comparatively shallow goals are dramatized to comically pathetic effect. Vladie panics when he realizes the big-screen TV he just bought with money that wasn't there might have to be repossessed when he learns Jupiter's eggs were not harvested, after all.

McTeague, filmed as Erich
von Stroheim's Greed (1924)

In fact, the fervor of this character for the extravagant bauble is comparable to the titular dentist's near-obsession with acquiring an expensive oversized gold tooth to ornament his office shingle in Frank Norris' naturalistic novel McTeague (1899), where a group of neighborhood characters in 19th century San Francisco are slowly torn apart by the brutally dehumanizing preoccupations with acquisitiveness, class envy and other factors propelled by the unrelenting pressures of the late Gilded Age. (4)

Of course, for followers of the timeline spanning the Dune universe (by now encompassing some 20 novels), this decay is evident with the once-upstanding Harkonnens before their debased appearance in Dune. Yet Jupiter's cross-class focus demonstrates how the avaricious priorities of a financialized economy reproduces itself as it goes down the line.

Licking The Hand That Slaps Us

Ironically, dedication to this abusive social relation is upheld in Dune at the cost of worthier ones. When the Saurdakar warriors of the deceitful Emperor Shaddam IV (whose career is related in the novel by Princess Irulan after Anna Kommene's 12th century account of her father, Byzantine Emperor Alexios I [5]) bring down the loyal Atreides and their entourage, the latter also sacrifice their lives to protect Paul and his mother near the end of the film. 

The Wachowski production calls this time-honored convention into question: what value is allegiance to a system by those living under it if its foundation is built on their own mutual exploitation for the benefit of the few who impose it on everyone else?

Jupiter Ascening transcends this contradiction by having the heroine emerge from a hard-earned education in the thrust-and-parry of the political/legal machinations leading into her post-Cinderella station by not automatically jumping to embrace all its benefits, but, instead, pausing to question if she is entitled to them if it means no one else is.

Princess Anna Kommene,

 author of The Alexiad

Conclusion

Despite its rich blend of dynastic history, ecology, resource politics, religion and Lawrencian messianism, the new theatrical Dune never demands of its powerful characters why they are entitled to their authority, consequently, neglecting the bulk of humanity by rendering it the object of the plot, rather than a subject in its own right.

Maybe my response to that barber's question, "How can I use you?" should have been, "How do we help one another?"

____

References:

1) https://www.mideastdiscourse.com/2021/04/13/why-nato-destroyed-libya-ten-years-ago/

2) https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/4998/green-circlesal-khufrah-oasis-libya

3) https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/872/modest.pdf

4) https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/culture-magazines/mcteague

5) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/485025.The_Alexiad