why Irulan is the best princess
Dune appears to be a book tailor-made for teenage boys. The main character is a lonely prince who discovers he has superhuman abilities. His parents move him to a far-off land for their own political reasons, while he mopes about, dreaming of an exotic girl who is fascinated by him. "Tell me of your homeworld, Usul..." Soon enough the political shit hits the fan and his father is murdered, their palace is sacked, and he runs off into the desert with his mother, where he meets and befriends the native people - including that girl from his dreams.
So far, so young adult novel, right? The Dune movie that was released last year stopped abruptly at that point, which means anybody unfamiliar with the story perhaps already imagines how it will all play out. Our young prince gathers the natives together to mount a guerilla campaign against the faction that took out his family, eventually liberating the planet and overthrowing the emperor himself! And, well, they're right, that is exactly how it plays out. But the devil is in the details.
You see, the trick our hero uses to bend the natives to his will is placing himself into the mythology of their messianic religion. He allows his appearance to be seen as a fulfilment of prophecy, and cynically capitalizes on that image. But it's even more twisted than that, because as the story develops (spoilers) we discover that not only is he the result of a millennia-long breeding project to create a superhuman, but also the religion they are taking advantage of was deliberately planted by the same faction that set up the breeding project for exactly the purpose of coronating their creation. Wait, there's more! His mother was part of that faction, and betrayed them by having a son instead of a daughter, which is what messed up their whole plan. This one choice, made by a concubine for love of a duke she could never wed, ironically set in motion the very events that got him killed!
But alongside the palace intrigue, Dune is also a story about a sprawling intergalactic society being entirely dependent on the production of a scarce natural resource. That resource is only found in one place - you guessed it, the eponymous desert planet. It's a fragile ecology, threatened by expanding human settlement and man-made climate change. Oh, and by the way, this resource, it's actually a hallucinogenic drug intricately tied up with the religion, used both by pilots to navigate between the stars and by seers to predict the future. And it's addictive. And poisonous. And turns the whites of your eyes blue.
So you get the standard hero story. You get politics and religion. You get environmentalism and economics. You get psychosis and addiction. It's got everything. And it's a universe that stole my heart, back when i was a teenage boy.
I read the books, of course, then watched the movie too. Movie buffs can (and have) written long screeds about the film David Lynch hates so much that he still refuses to talk about it. All i can suggest is if you want to watch it today, do yourself a favor and watch the Spicediver fan edit, which is available for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yw2nGCUPa4
But it was neither the books nor the movie that closed the deal for me. For that, it was the computer game. Two computer games, in fact, which came out almost around the same time as each other because trying to make a computer game about Dune is almost as cursed as trying to make a movie about Dune. There is an excellent series of articles covering the whole sordid history starting here: https://www.filfre.net/2018/11/controlling-the-spice-part-1-dune-on-page-and-screen/
The less famous but more artistically interesting Dune game was made by Cryo Interactive, who were famous in the 1980s for pioneering "French style" games. Back in those days if you bought a "French style" game, you knew it was going to be aggressively weird. Beautiful graphics, beautiful music, janky user interface, impenetrable storyline. Impossible to complete, perhaps, but always a mystifying experience. As a kid, i loved them, because they let you imagine a world that was much richer and more exciting than anything the computers of the time could actually portray.
Cryo's Dune was pretty accessible, in the end. You played Paul Atreides as he arrived on Dune and walked around sumptuous backgrounds talking to people from the book, who looked an awful lot like characters from the David Lynch movie. And this is the lasting impact of Lynch's Dune - the public imagination of the universe was influenced for decades afterwards by the visual designs of his film. In Cryo's game you got to experience a storyline somewhat closer to the book, but the colorful flamboyance of the nobility and dream-like nature of the world remained. Meanwhile the fremen did become less conspicuously white and the ornithopters actually had wings that flapped, which were both visual improvements, as were the unforgettable sunsets.
And the soundtrack. Forget Brian Eno. Forget Toto. Stéphane Picq and Philippe Ulrich are the celestial conductors of all things Dune. The soundtrack, the very first CD i bought in my life, became one of the most sought-after rareties in the fandom. The rights got caught up in limbo - it's the fucking Dune curse, i tell you - and the album vanished, never to be reissued, never available to purchase... But finally last year it seems like the rights somehow made their way back to the artists - or Stéphane Picq at least - and yesterday he dropped a remastered version on Bandcamp. I can scarcely believe it's available again after all this time. I imagine the eyes of Dune fans around the world brimming with delight. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and some megacorp to shut it down. Maybe they still will.
You can buy it here, before it disappears for another 30 years: https://stphanepicq.bandcamp.com/album/dune-spice-opera-2024-remaster
But none of this is what i actually wanted to write about. I actually wanted to write about Princess Irulan.
Dune has been close to my heart forever. I have used the in-universe "litany against fear" to comfort me in my real life. I think Dune is one of the reasons why i feel so at peace alone in desert landscapes. It's why i still hope some day i might find a way to visit North Africa and the Middle East, even as a solo feminine-presenting traveler. But, also, Dune is a product of its time.
To be fair, you can explain away some of the problematic aspects by accepting this is a distant future that in many ways has regressed from our current world. Yes, the evil villain has a thing for young boys, and that's the only gay representation you get. But maybe in a future where humankind rejected AI and computers, men and women really will form distinct sects of emotionless statisticians and scheming eugenicists respectively? Maybe feudal society really will reemerge?
But, come on, there should still be at least one woman who isn't just a love interest or devious antagonist, right?
Enter Princess Irulan, who in the first book most only exists as the narrator of an in-universe history. In subsequent books she becomes the wife of our hero, forced into marriage for political stability, but never able to win his love. I remember finding her a somewhat sympathetic character, insofar as anybody in this absolute clusterfuck of rich, violent, manipulative scumbags can attract sympathy. (I wonder sometimes if the moral of the story is that the only innocent victim is the planet itself, its ecology scarred by the endless wars of the humans who fight over it.) But in the books she never really becomes a main character. It's always about Paul and his bloodline. It's a man's story, and she's just in it.
Thank God for the John Harrison miniseries.
I recently watched it again as i gear up for whatever bleak, washed-out version Denis Villeneuve is going to unleash upon us when his part two finally hits the theaters this year. In the miniseries, instead of springing a shotgun marriage on the viewer in the closing scenes, they introduce Irulan from the start as a meaningful character in her own right. She gets her own story thread as a way to contextualize the conflict and drama escalating on Dune. She is witty and charming and whip-smart, finally a female role-model in this series that isn't entirely defined by her relationship to Paul.
I mean, of course this Irulan still has to marry Paul for the story to make sense, but it feels like an authentic piquing of interest. Unlike Paul's creepy relationship with Chani, where he knows in advance they're going to become lovers because of a premonition that he leverages into reality, Irulan admires Paul independently of prophecy. She identifies with his situation, born into a system that sets rigid expectations on the offspring of nobility. She sees and understands his flaws in a way that allows her to be an audience insert, a rational actor outside of the whirlwind of melodrama that surrounds Paul and his adoring sycophants.
This is the kind of fan-fic that you can only do after the original work came out, because it draws on what we learn about Irulan in the second and third books to flesh out her character in the first. And it makes the story better! The interesting thing is that David Lynch figured this out too, which is why he framed his movie with Irulan. That framing also made it into Cryo's Dune game, and then the miniseries perfected it. Trust Denis Villeneuve to fuck it up, right?
Still, i love adaptations and remakes and reboots for exactly this reason. There are so many fans who get hung up on the one true canon, and will endlessly pick apart and whine and moan about anything that didn't follow it to the letter... But why not try a different spin? Even writers themselves reflect on their own work and ponder how they could or would have done it differently. Each new interpretation just adds to what came before, nothing ever got taken away.
So, revisiting Dune, a story that over the years becomes ever less interesting to me, as my patience for stories about rich people being assholes wears thin... John Harrison's take on Irulan in a miniseries that came out 20 years ago revitalized my appreciation for the story. It made me excited about the world again. Here is a real hero i can identify with! The only person in the room who didn't get caught up in delusions of grandeur or epic power struggles. Her story is just as tragic as everyone else's - she sacrifices her freedom for the good of society, is never granted the respect she deserves and never finds love. But she writes the history, so perhaps over the long term she's the only one whose life actually mattered?
Well, until you read the fourth book, which is where shit gets really weird. There's a 3500 year time jump, for starters. I have to confess i never made it past that book. But maybe i would appreciate it more now, both as an adult with broader life experience, and having a new perspective, thanks to the miniseries.
Anyway, it's still cold outside (it snowed on the mountains round Taipei last week) and i am hiding in a blanky watching sci-fi and listening to French game music. I just wanted to write about Irulan and let y'all know Spice Opera finally got re-released. Life is okay.
So far, so young adult novel, right? The Dune movie that was released last year stopped abruptly at that point, which means anybody unfamiliar with the story perhaps already imagines how it will all play out. Our young prince gathers the natives together to mount a guerilla campaign against the faction that took out his family, eventually liberating the planet and overthrowing the emperor himself! And, well, they're right, that is exactly how it plays out. But the devil is in the details.
You see, the trick our hero uses to bend the natives to his will is placing himself into the mythology of their messianic religion. He allows his appearance to be seen as a fulfilment of prophecy, and cynically capitalizes on that image. But it's even more twisted than that, because as the story develops (spoilers) we discover that not only is he the result of a millennia-long breeding project to create a superhuman, but also the religion they are taking advantage of was deliberately planted by the same faction that set up the breeding project for exactly the purpose of coronating their creation. Wait, there's more! His mother was part of that faction, and betrayed them by having a son instead of a daughter, which is what messed up their whole plan. This one choice, made by a concubine for love of a duke she could never wed, ironically set in motion the very events that got him killed!
But alongside the palace intrigue, Dune is also a story about a sprawling intergalactic society being entirely dependent on the production of a scarce natural resource. That resource is only found in one place - you guessed it, the eponymous desert planet. It's a fragile ecology, threatened by expanding human settlement and man-made climate change. Oh, and by the way, this resource, it's actually a hallucinogenic drug intricately tied up with the religion, used both by pilots to navigate between the stars and by seers to predict the future. And it's addictive. And poisonous. And turns the whites of your eyes blue.
So you get the standard hero story. You get politics and religion. You get environmentalism and economics. You get psychosis and addiction. It's got everything. And it's a universe that stole my heart, back when i was a teenage boy.
I read the books, of course, then watched the movie too. Movie buffs can (and have) written long screeds about the film David Lynch hates so much that he still refuses to talk about it. All i can suggest is if you want to watch it today, do yourself a favor and watch the Spicediver fan edit, which is available for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yw2nGCUPa4
But it was neither the books nor the movie that closed the deal for me. For that, it was the computer game. Two computer games, in fact, which came out almost around the same time as each other because trying to make a computer game about Dune is almost as cursed as trying to make a movie about Dune. There is an excellent series of articles covering the whole sordid history starting here: https://www.filfre.net/2018/11/controlling-the-spice-part-1-dune-on-page-and-screen/
The less famous but more artistically interesting Dune game was made by Cryo Interactive, who were famous in the 1980s for pioneering "French style" games. Back in those days if you bought a "French style" game, you knew it was going to be aggressively weird. Beautiful graphics, beautiful music, janky user interface, impenetrable storyline. Impossible to complete, perhaps, but always a mystifying experience. As a kid, i loved them, because they let you imagine a world that was much richer and more exciting than anything the computers of the time could actually portray.
Cryo's Dune was pretty accessible, in the end. You played Paul Atreides as he arrived on Dune and walked around sumptuous backgrounds talking to people from the book, who looked an awful lot like characters from the David Lynch movie. And this is the lasting impact of Lynch's Dune - the public imagination of the universe was influenced for decades afterwards by the visual designs of his film. In Cryo's game you got to experience a storyline somewhat closer to the book, but the colorful flamboyance of the nobility and dream-like nature of the world remained. Meanwhile the fremen did become less conspicuously white and the ornithopters actually had wings that flapped, which were both visual improvements, as were the unforgettable sunsets.
And the soundtrack. Forget Brian Eno. Forget Toto. Stéphane Picq and Philippe Ulrich are the celestial conductors of all things Dune. The soundtrack, the very first CD i bought in my life, became one of the most sought-after rareties in the fandom. The rights got caught up in limbo - it's the fucking Dune curse, i tell you - and the album vanished, never to be reissued, never available to purchase... But finally last year it seems like the rights somehow made their way back to the artists - or Stéphane Picq at least - and yesterday he dropped a remastered version on Bandcamp. I can scarcely believe it's available again after all this time. I imagine the eyes of Dune fans around the world brimming with delight. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and some megacorp to shut it down. Maybe they still will.
You can buy it here, before it disappears for another 30 years: https://stphanepicq.bandcamp.com/album/dune-spice-opera-2024-remaster
But none of this is what i actually wanted to write about. I actually wanted to write about Princess Irulan.
Dune has been close to my heart forever. I have used the in-universe "litany against fear" to comfort me in my real life. I think Dune is one of the reasons why i feel so at peace alone in desert landscapes. It's why i still hope some day i might find a way to visit North Africa and the Middle East, even as a solo feminine-presenting traveler. But, also, Dune is a product of its time.
To be fair, you can explain away some of the problematic aspects by accepting this is a distant future that in many ways has regressed from our current world. Yes, the evil villain has a thing for young boys, and that's the only gay representation you get. But maybe in a future where humankind rejected AI and computers, men and women really will form distinct sects of emotionless statisticians and scheming eugenicists respectively? Maybe feudal society really will reemerge?
But, come on, there should still be at least one woman who isn't just a love interest or devious antagonist, right?
Enter Princess Irulan, who in the first book most only exists as the narrator of an in-universe history. In subsequent books she becomes the wife of our hero, forced into marriage for political stability, but never able to win his love. I remember finding her a somewhat sympathetic character, insofar as anybody in this absolute clusterfuck of rich, violent, manipulative scumbags can attract sympathy. (I wonder sometimes if the moral of the story is that the only innocent victim is the planet itself, its ecology scarred by the endless wars of the humans who fight over it.) But in the books she never really becomes a main character. It's always about Paul and his bloodline. It's a man's story, and she's just in it.
Thank God for the John Harrison miniseries.
I recently watched it again as i gear up for whatever bleak, washed-out version Denis Villeneuve is going to unleash upon us when his part two finally hits the theaters this year. In the miniseries, instead of springing a shotgun marriage on the viewer in the closing scenes, they introduce Irulan from the start as a meaningful character in her own right. She gets her own story thread as a way to contextualize the conflict and drama escalating on Dune. She is witty and charming and whip-smart, finally a female role-model in this series that isn't entirely defined by her relationship to Paul.
I mean, of course this Irulan still has to marry Paul for the story to make sense, but it feels like an authentic piquing of interest. Unlike Paul's creepy relationship with Chani, where he knows in advance they're going to become lovers because of a premonition that he leverages into reality, Irulan admires Paul independently of prophecy. She identifies with his situation, born into a system that sets rigid expectations on the offspring of nobility. She sees and understands his flaws in a way that allows her to be an audience insert, a rational actor outside of the whirlwind of melodrama that surrounds Paul and his adoring sycophants.
This is the kind of fan-fic that you can only do after the original work came out, because it draws on what we learn about Irulan in the second and third books to flesh out her character in the first. And it makes the story better! The interesting thing is that David Lynch figured this out too, which is why he framed his movie with Irulan. That framing also made it into Cryo's Dune game, and then the miniseries perfected it. Trust Denis Villeneuve to fuck it up, right?
Still, i love adaptations and remakes and reboots for exactly this reason. There are so many fans who get hung up on the one true canon, and will endlessly pick apart and whine and moan about anything that didn't follow it to the letter... But why not try a different spin? Even writers themselves reflect on their own work and ponder how they could or would have done it differently. Each new interpretation just adds to what came before, nothing ever got taken away.
So, revisiting Dune, a story that over the years becomes ever less interesting to me, as my patience for stories about rich people being assholes wears thin... John Harrison's take on Irulan in a miniseries that came out 20 years ago revitalized my appreciation for the story. It made me excited about the world again. Here is a real hero i can identify with! The only person in the room who didn't get caught up in delusions of grandeur or epic power struggles. Her story is just as tragic as everyone else's - she sacrifices her freedom for the good of society, is never granted the respect she deserves and never finds love. But she writes the history, so perhaps over the long term she's the only one whose life actually mattered?
Well, until you read the fourth book, which is where shit gets really weird. There's a 3500 year time jump, for starters. I have to confess i never made it past that book. But maybe i would appreciate it more now, both as an adult with broader life experience, and having a new perspective, thanks to the miniseries.
Anyway, it's still cold outside (it snowed on the mountains round Taipei last week) and i am hiding in a blanky watching sci-fi and listening to French game music. I just wanted to write about Irulan and let y'all know Spice Opera finally got re-released. Life is okay.