It's nerds only, from here on out folks. This week I’m diving deep into Dune 2, looking at the long-awaited film from both a Jungian and psychedelic perspective. Those who don’t know the story and haven't seen the film, avert thy gaze, for here be spoilers.
For the rest of you, I hope you enjoy my desert wanderings. It might all be a mirage, and I don’t pretend to know the way. But hey, I’ve heard the sunsets are beautiful.
Homo homini lupus (Man to man is a wolf)
-Roman Proverb
Like it or not, we’re having a cultural moment, as Dune, Part 2 graces theaters across the world. I’ve been waiting for this film for years, since I first saw the vast desert landscape of Arrakis unfurl on a small TV screen one night in a sweltering Jamaican bungalow. I’ve been smitten ever since.
Last week I went on a bro-date with three therapist friends to see the long anticipated sequel. I knew what to expect in terms of the story, having read the first two books and part of the third immediately after I saw the first film. (The first two are impeccable. The third is bad. The fourth and fifth, we do not speak of.)
Nevertheless, I was enraptured as Paul Atreides slowly became the Lisan al-Ghaib, the prophesied leader of the Fremen people. I felt the well-earned disgust for the Harkonnen colonizers and galactic elite. My heart raced with delight as Paul claimed his rightful place as the Mahdi, as he and his Fremen army smashed into the murderous Imperial troops. I felt the gratifying surge of imagined victory pulse through my veins.
And yet, at the end of it all, we’re left with a funny taste in our mouths, and feeling a bit torn. This is personified by the uneasy look in the blue eyes of Chani, Paul’s jilted lover. The viewer cannot leave Dune 2 with an easy sense of completion, a simplistic knowing that good conquered evil, or a hope for the bright future ahead. Because we’re not meant to.
That’s because Frank Herbert wanted to convey a hard truth: Paul Atreides is not a hero. (Dune’s director, Denis Villeneuve, has said so himself.)
That is a hard pill to swallow, especially for a culture grown accustomed to the vividly computer-generated, yet pathetically black and white world of the Marvel universe. We’ve all been bottle-fed this moralistic narrative that we will know the good guys by the color of their capes, and bad guys by the color of theirs. It’s a cheap thrill and an easy climax, and boy is it easy to sell to a culture desperate for any shred of certainty.
Dune is a powerful story precisely because it does not traffic in such ideals. Instead, it shows us in painstaking detail that a hero can become a villain, a righteous cause can become a destructive regime, and a blessing can become a curse.
A Psychedelic Perspective
“I’ve received a message, and need to share it with you... A higher dimensional truth has been revealed to me that is going to change the world... Everyone needs to hear this, experience this, and understand the message! I’ve been chosen for a sacred mission…”
Are these the sayings of a cult member, a religious fundamentalist, or someone freshly back from a psychedelic trip? When the messiah complex is at work, it’s hard to tell. That alone should speak to the dangerousness of this archetypal complex that lurks (like a sandworm?) underneath the shimmering waves of the psychedelic sea.
Herbert, whose experiences with psychedelic mushrooms and with Indigenous peoples inspired many elements of the Dune universe, understood the danger of messiahs and the fanaticism they can inspire.
In my work as psychedelic therapist, I’ve occasionally seen people emerge from their journeys with what can only be called a “messiah complex,” a phenomenon well-known in the psychedelic community.
Usually, a messiah complex looks like a self-inflated grandiosity that flares up to protect a fragile element in the psyche. This is more common with people prone to narcissism, as grandiosity is the easiest narcissist defense. Yet I’ve also seen people exhibit similar behaviors who I wouldn’t consider narcissistic at all.
To the best of my knowledge, the messiah complex emerges in people after a psychedelic journey as an unconscious method of avoiding suffering or pain that the psyche does not want to face. It might also manifest as a sort of mania, an inability to sleep or listen to other people. It is a state very similar to Stan Grof’s notion of the spiritual emergency.
But there’s a twist: the messiah complex is contagious.
Extremely prevalent in New Age circles, the messiah complex can enlist other people in its radically inflated mission through the inflation and charisma it lends the one who possesses it. This complex is dangerous because these are the basic ingredients of a cult leader.
(Nerd rant: Paul Atreides is tripping on spice for almost the entire story of Dune. When he finally drinks the water of life, a potent and objectively psychedelic sacrament, he finally becomes the prophesized Lisan al-Ghaib. So you tell me: is he simply “awakened to his true nature,” or does the spice accelerate and exacerbate the messiah complex dwelling in his unconscious, planted into both him and the Fremen by the far-seeing machinations of the Bene Gesserit?)
A Jungian Perspective
On the surface, Dune seems like a classic Hero’s Journey tale, which might account for its massive success. Yet I would argue that it is the opposite. It speaks to the danger of heroes, and the inevitable failure inherent in the role of the charismatic leader or savior.
In the words of Stephen Jenkinson, “Heroes don’t make things right. They accentuate what is wrong.”
Paul can see the desolate path laid out before him, the “holy war” and scores of dead it will lead to, should he follow that road. He tries with all his might to avoid it. He doesn’t want the job. And yet, finally seeing the inevitably of his fate after consuming the water of life, he succumbs.
Jung would call such a pathway a complex: an unconscious pattern of behavior or thought that can become activated and overpower us. Complexes are inhabited by archetypal forces, much like a riverbank is inhabited by a flowing surge of water. The banks determine the look, shape, and character of the river. The river itself is a force of nature, just doing what it does.
The hunger for justice, the desire for liberation, and a dream for a different, more equitable future are all good and noble things. But people, especially groups of people, in their blind and perhaps fanatical pursuit of these ideals, inevitably seem to fuck it all up.
Having lived through the Nazi and Stalinist madness of the mid-twentieth century, Jung (like Herbert) had a well-earned distrust of group-think. Jung wrote that seemingly normal, everyday people “[act] out [their] psychic disturbances socially and politically, in the form of mass psychoses like wars and revolutions. The real existence of an enemy upon whom one can foist off everything evil is an enormous relief to one’s conscience. You can then at least say, without hesitation, who the devil is; you are quite certain that the cause of your misfortune is outside, and not in your own attitude.”
Jung’s point (and I suspect Herbert’s as well,) is this: all of us are capable of such things, especially when we are surrounded by an impassioned mass of others all desperate for the same thing. The line between a hero and a villain becomes so thin that it perforates, leading to the inevitable catastrophes that history, and Dune, contain.
Jung wrote, “There is indeed reason enough for man to be afraid of the impersonal forces lurking in his unconscious. We are blissfully unconscious of these forces because they never, or almost never, appear in our personal relations or under ordinary circumstances. But if people crowd together and form a mob, then the dynamisms of the collective man are let loose––beasts or demons that lie dormant in every person until he is part of a mob. Man in the mass sinks unconsciously to an inferior moral and intellectual level, to that level which is always there, below the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it is activated by the formation of a mass.”
There is a solution though. Jung often wrote about “personality,” which is a confusing term for a concept that I believe even he was unsure of. Personality is a tricky thing in that it is composed of our idea of who we think we are, not who we really are. I’ve understood this to mean something like a spiritual inner compass that acts as a guiding voice, charting the path to the Self.
“Only the man who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality; but if he succumbs to it he will be swept away by the blind flux of psychic events and destroyed. That is the great and liberating thing about any genuine personality: he voluntarily sacrifices himself to his vocation, and consciously translates into his own individual reality what would only lead to ruin if it were lived unconsciously by the group,” according to Jung.
Jung, as well as Herbert, asked us to stay attuned to that still, small, inner voice, which can be hard to hear amidst battle cries and slogan chanting. It cannot be outsourced to a charismatic leader, or displaced onto an abstract ideal. Only when we are in touch with our inner world, our true personality, our deep Self, can we hear it.
After all, dreams are messages from the deep.