Quote from: Antonio Montagnha, Ed. D. on April 10, 2022, 11:22:18 AM
In the most recent adaptation of Dune some critics complained that it was a movie that once again glorified the idea of a white male Messiah rescuing native people from oppression. Anyone who would write that clearly doesn't understand the entirety of the initial trilogy of the Dune story, which is most aggressively anti-white male Messiah of any kind, and clearly shows the consequences of indulging in such fantasy.
The new Dune movie was amazing but also extremely about the nobleman white Messiah parachuting in to save the darker-skinned indigenous people. Hard to blame people for observing that and being bothered by it, even if the overall arc of the series suggests more complexity. The movie was a piece of art meant to be watched and enjoyed as a coherent whole, and so while it deserves to be watched with some context, it even more deserves to be judged on its own merits.
It wasn't a straightforward text-to-screen thing, since they put in scenes and dialogue and symbolism that wasn't in the original, so they could have fixed that flaw a bit. I know they were trying to keep it as true to the text in a larger sense as they could, so I understand why they didn't address it, but that does merit some scorn.
Quote from: Antonio Montagnha, Ed. D. on April 10, 2022, 11:22:18 AMIn other words, for a culture to change does it have to undergo such a massive crisis that it has no choice but to change, where even that change is still being driven by the environment, or can it change by thoughtful choice and intention? Are we do doomed to be a reflection of our environment forever?I think environmental determinism has fallen out of favor since the heyday of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, but there's a lot to be said for that broad view of history in explaining away some of the most fundamental aspects of global inequality. It sucks that so much of our world can be explained by regional geographical axes, but that does seem to be the case for a long time. But it also seems to point to an endpoint of that view -- maybe in the recent past, maybe in the future. Population density can explain an enormous amount, but as technology lessens that advantage, there's no reason to think that it will continue forever. Rome could spawn Ciceros and Caesars aplenty, but now Ciceros can wage words and Caesars can wage wars with less consideration of geography.
We'll probably have the answer in like a century or so.
