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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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A gay pedophile, and feyd-rautha was a heterosexual rapist- heavily implying the baron to be a pedophile and feyd-rautha committing rape would have had the weirdo sexual pervert effect without being politically incorrect.

It's hard to say, given how the boundaries of "politically correct" has changed in recent years. In the recent The Little Mermaid CGI/live action remake by Disney, they edited lines from Ursula's villain song where she was manipulating the heroine Ariel into giving up her voice in exchange for legs by telling her how men like women who stay quiet and meek, since the notion that women ought to be quiet and meek is offensive. So it seems that certain views are so offensive that even villains being presented as being villainous ought not express them. Pedophilia and rape could fall in that camp.

That said, not having seen Part 2, I'd guess that wasn't a meaningful factor, if at all, in the decision. Having listened to the Dune audiobook a couple years ago after having read it a couple decades ago, I recall thinking that the sexual perversion of the Harkonnens didn't add a whole lot to the narrative. In a film with limited time, it seems reasonable to cut it, or perhaps modify it to a less distracting form.

I recall thinking that the sexual perversion of the Harkonnens didn't add a whole lot to the narrative

Yeah, the main contribution to the book of that is emphazing that you should not think that the Harkonnen are moral equivalents to the Atreides. The aesthetic choices in the movie already do that job well enough.

Ursula's not just a villain - she was (allegedly) inspired by a drag queen, she has a special relationship as an unabashedly proud and powerful fat woman, and on and on. You can't just have her say actually bad things, because the people who care way too much about the movie she's in (aka the target audience of the movie) can't and don't see her as evil, and are ideologically committed to reclaiming her.

And the baron specifically wanted to rape 15-year-old Paul, and even had a drugged up slave boy who looked similar to Paul. They definitely toned down how truly terrible the Harkonnens were in the movies (both 80's and new).

Villeneuve's interpretation of Harkonnens as quasi-alien type of evil with Gigeresque aesthetics was one of the best interpretative choices vis-a-vis the other interpretions and even the book that he made.

I've noticed that in almost all modern media. They never let someone be "just a monster" there is always some kind of attempt to humanize them. I think that is why people loved to hate Joffrey so much, and why GOT was so popular, it had true bad people in it. It is rare to see a truly evil person on the screen that isn't some kind of tragic lost cause.

While, as said below, the Harkonnens aren't humanized in any way (if anything their evil becomes of a more inhuman variety), it's always been a funny argument that GoT did not feature "good and evil but just shades of gray". Ramsay Bolton is absolutely evil to the core, Jon Snow a classic good hero character.

I wouldn't say that's true of any of the Harkonnens in the recent Dune movies, even if some of their monstrous qualities have been omitted they're not replaced by anything redeeming.

Haven't seen part 2. Glad to hear it.

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