From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I bought a used copy of Dune as a young teenager around 1994, having noticed several times the series's prominent position on a shelf at the BookWorm. I was quickly drawn into the desert world. I wasn't far from the age of the young Duke, and his particular hero's journey resonated with me. I think I briefly used Muad'Dib as an Internet screen name. Stillsuits seemed a brilliant idea to a kid who'd internalized the mantra of reduce-reuse-recycle. Hooking and riding a giant sandworm as it glides across the desert seemed like the most bad-ass action imaginable. But perhaps most importantly, it was a story about an oppressed people coming together to seek justice and topple an entrenched system that valued profit above humanity. Then I finished the book, and the last chapter or two totally turned me off. The guerrilla hero whose family had been nearly destroyed by the system came back at the head of the army bringing violence and inserted himself into the imperial power structure. This was a major diversion from the arc of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. My feeling of resonance was completely lost, and I never read the rest of the series.

Over the next three decades, the flavor of the book stuck with me. Deserts have remained beautiful and mysterious to me, and National Geographic photos of the Sahara and Arabia were some of my favorite to gaze at in my family's living room. Ten years after reading the book I visited the Black Rock Desert for my first Burning Man and loved the experience of being surrounded by community in one of Earth's harsh environments, forced to focus on present-moment details like having enough water and stable shelter. Viewing technology and culture through the lens of the ecosystem they evolved in has remained an important perspective for me.

A big budget film adaptation of Dune is underway, with part 1 airing two years ago and part 2 landing this weekend. I didn't get a chance to reread the book before part 1, and my only direct exposure to the material in the intervening decades had been the strange and confusing David Lynch film adaptation 15 years ago or so. (Fun fact: I've heard that Lynch passed up Return of the Jedi to direct Dune. Can you imagine David Lynch Ewoks?) The new movie was beautiful, in a reserved way befitting a planet that might kill you if you're stuck outside in the daytime. The overall plot made sense (particularly having read the book long ago), but I recall being a bit confused and unsettled when leaving the theater. It seemed like House Atreides arrived on Arrakis and then about a week later an insider turned off their shields, the Harkonnens and imperial shock troops invaded, and Paul and Jessica fled to the desert to start the part of the story I liked best. But like, why did the shields go down and why did they only have a couple days?

I got motivated to reread the book this month. A lot that I remembered remained, bringing smiles as I read the details of the imagined geology and biology of this planet, the glimpses of religious practice, and technological innovations of a society that has mastered space travel but somehow isn't full of computers. There was also a lot that I could tell I missed as a teenager. The long-running fights between Great Houses and machinations of the imperial order had felt like the generic background story I'd been used to from fantasy novels, but with adult eyes I can see that the politics and intrigue are just as key to the plot as the ecology of Arrakis. As a substance-free kid who hadn't yet dove into the music and art of the '60s and '70s, I hadn't picked up on the spice-as-psychedelic-drug aspect. I was also far more aware now of the structure of the book's story: each chapter starts with a quote from an in-world book written about the events the novel describes; any worry that the protagonist will be killed gets countered by the fact that Muad'Dib's future actions are well documented. The narrative also steps back and forth into the past, slowly building history while the present time unfolds. It also frequently switches perspective, sharing the inner thoughts of protagonists and antagonists alike. This fluid narrative movement through time and into the depths of the mind highlights Paul Muad'Dib's mental development of visions of the future and psychedelic journeys through spacetime. (However, I don't think internal thoughts are shared from the perspective of any Fremen aside from Liet's final scene. This lets the reader join Paul and Jessica in their journey to understand the opaque culture they found themselves in.)

I better understood the book's ending this time. Throughout the book Paul sees visions of a horrible future, where he is the figurehead of a galactic religious war with himself as the figurehead. It's a future he desperately does not want, and his shift from liberation leader to sudden imperial prince is an attempt to walk that narrow path. I didn't get the same strong feeling that he'd suddenly switched personality and lost his desert knowledge. But it did still feel disappointing. Perhaps in the intervening sixty years others have written the Great Space Liberation Novel.

This time through I picked up a lot more of the character development of the characters other than Paul and Jessica. The careful construction of the supporting characters like Duncan Idaho, Gurney Halleck, Doctor Yueh, and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen do a great deal to harmonize the plot: they're playing archetypal roles, but their actions feel natural. And I think that's what was missing from the recent Part 1 movie. Having just reread the book, I picked up on all the characters in the movie and followed the whole plot. But without the character's inner lives, with only a few lines of dialog to establish them on Caladan, what they're doing and why is really hard to see. The movie misses the rising sense of suspicion before treachery and betrayal brings in the enemy forces, and Yueh's redemptive care package for the escaping Paul and Jessica is conveyed so subtly that it would be difficult for someone without book familiarity to pick up on it.

It's interesting to reflect on Dune and where it sat in history. Published in 1965, it was a year or ahead of Star Trek and three before 2001: A Space Odyssey. The main space travel zeitgeist was probably the low-budget sci-fi thriller movies of the 1950s (though Isaac Asimov and others were of course writing thoughtful other-world sci-fi). Lord of the Rings was starting to gain popularity in the U.S., but this sort of deep world-building in a novel wasn't common. Thinking of a whole planet as a system was fairly new, and the environmental movement was fairly nascent, with Silent Spring coming just three years earlier. The book also came at a different cultural contact point between U.S. and desert cultures. Despite the story taking place over a hundred centuries in the future from the Earth-time we know, the people who were pushed from planet to planet until taking up in the sandy desert of a planet are the ones who have vocabulary clearly taken from Arabic. Saharan countries had just gained independence in the 1950s and early '60s. The Islamic revolutions in Libya and Iran were years away; the 1967 Israeli war was two years ahead; the Ba'ath party had only recently gained power in Iraq and Syria and had not yet evolved into Harkonnen-style dictatorships propped up by the West, though Dune's spice can be seen as a clear metaphor for oil. The book's glossary defines terms like "jihad" and "baklawa" which are commonplace in modern American discourse, and the U.S. belligerent elites were focused on hyping the thread of communism, not Islam. In the coming years, young westerners would travel old Silk Road routes along the Hippie Trail. A story today about a messiah figure leading a desert people to overthrow colonialists extracting an international commodity from their homeland would be a lightning rod of controversy.

Over the course of five decades, Dune developed a reputation as very difficult to adapt to the silver screen. I think I now understand why: the strength of the book isn't just in its stellar work of fictional ecology, it's in its deep exploration of the inner world of the human mind, a nexus point on the spacetime continuum where history meets possibility. "Show, don't tell" is crucial for a good movie, but Dune is a work of simultaneous show and tell.

I'm looking forward to Part 2, though. If nothing else, it should have some great desert cinematography.

I watched Kūmāré at IFS tonight. It's a documentary about a raised-Hindu guy from New Jersey who decides to become a "fake" guru. He grew his hair and beard out, learned some yoga moves, started wearing billowy orange robes, and imitated his grandmother's accent. He moved to Phoenix, AZ (so nobody would recognize him) and started attracting followers.

Most of the film is documentary footage of group sessions and individual interactions. Some of them are silly (but not in a trolling Borat fashion). Most of the scenes involve serious personal growth for the people involved. What's fascinating is that being a fake guru is a lot more like being a fake author than a fake doctor&endash;if you talk and people listen, you're a teacher. This believability is compounded by the fact that what Kūmāré teaches&endash;the guru is in you&endash;isn't far from what many "real" eastern mystics teach: god is in everyone, but you need help to realize that. In the end, Kūmāré finds it very challenging to tell his students that he's just a guy named Vikram from Jersey because they've gotten so much actual value from his guru persona.

This film is a good example of what I like to think of as religion as a spiritual placebo. When someone like me or Kūmāré leads a ritual, we realize that the specific words that people say and gestures that they do don't cause a spiritual experience or personal growth. But like a sugar pill can trigger your body's natural healing processes, a good ritual can trigger your mind to go into "whoa mode."

You should definitely watch this film if you've spent time around new age or alt-religious communities. Even if just casually, like living in Boulder. Easily-offended religious people may get upset, but they should watch it too, because being frequently upset is the main pastime of easily-offended religious people. There's a trailer and other info on the Kūmāré movie site.

Movie recommendation: The Interrupters. I just saw it at IFS. It's playing short engagements around the country and in the U.K. The credits include Frontline, so I assume it's either been on PBS or will be soon. It's intense–I was crying a lot more than I was laughing. It's also important–it's a documentary about people taking action and getting results on a major social problem: inner-city violence, especially the cycle of revenge killings.

The Interrupters is a documentary about the organization CeaseFire in Chicago. Their goal is to stop the spread of violence by interrupting situations that could escalate into somebody getting killed. To do this effectively, the interrupters have to be people that the potentially violent folks can relate to–former gangbangers, hustlers, and convicts. Just as only a recovering alcoholic can effectively lead an AA meeting, these are guys (and a couple women) who participated in the cycle of violence, paid the consequences, and realized they need to help their community understand that those consequences aren't worth whatever benefits folks see in the moment.

This movie goes deep with a handful of interrupters, catching amazingly candid discussions. They start by diffusing an immediate situation, from two groups about to clash in the street to folks who call up feeling they've been wronged and want to kill the punks who messed things up. And while the immediate interventions are a great way to reduce murders one at a time, the real strength of the program is how the interrupters stay involved with the people they've intervened with. The documentary follows several of these long-term relationships, where the goal is to defuse not just a situation, but someone's attitude and outlook on life. And it works: 41-73% reductions in killings in neighborhoods where CeaseFire was working with a 16-35% drop directly attributable to CeaseFire. That speaks to what they call "a public health model to stop shootings and killings." They're working to build up herd immunity to violence in the neighborhood, but instead of vaccinations and doctors they use conversations and role models.

Where I'm Coming From

I was interested in this movie in part because it's similar to the work I do as a Black Rock Ranger at Burning Man, though these guys have orders of magnitude more intense situations, more personal connections, and more long-term value on the line. Some similarities:

Mediation, not authority

In both cases, many the folks we're reaching out to don't always have a good relationship with authority figures in general and police in particular. As mediators, we're not telling people what not to do; we're helping them think through why their first instinct may not be a good idea.

Social capital as a tool: community members, not outsiders

People are more likely to listen to folks they can identify with. As ex-gang leaders and hustlers, the people walking the streets for CeaseFire share a common background, skin color, and communication style as the folks they're reaching out to. As Burners who like to spend their vacation helping out, the Rangers share the aesthetics and lingo of the folks we're interacting with. And despite training and experience, both of us would do worse if we switched scenarios. I can create a much better connection with hippies and ravers and drunks and nerds and artists than I can with African Americans from the inner city. And vice versa, I expect.

It's not about you

This is a phrase the Rangers use in training to remind ourselves that the Ranger isn't the important one in an interaction: we leave our ego in camp and focus on the needs of the participants having a challenge. The movie didn't raise this point explicitly, but I noticed that the interrupters they followed were completely focused on the folks they were trying to help. When they talked about themselves, it was to illustrate a point, to let the person know they'd been there and they'd come around. It's not about trying to be a hero, it's about doing what you can to make things better.

Community acknowledgment

Through the social capital they've built through past actions, both groups are recognized as important mediators. While the movie had a scene of a hospital visit to an interrupter who'd been shot, it seemed the communities generally respected them; both sides in a conflict would listen to a guy with a CeaseFire logo. Rangers similarly focus on social capital, and have created a situation where someone in a khaki shirt and a floppy hat will usually be listened to with respect.

Focus on the immediate problem with an eye to education for the long term

One way the Rangers have it a lot easier than CeaseFire is that our solutions only need to work for a week. If two camps are driving each other crazy with their music, we can mediate a solution that will keep everyone from coming to blows until Sunday, when they get to pack up and not be neighbors any more. We try to educate so that participants will be less likely to have the same problem next year, but our main concern is the immediate situation. CeaseFire's first goal is to make sure nobody gets shot right now. They then take it a day and a week at a time, checking in on their new friends and finding ways to show them how to make progress.

I'm not claiming to be in the same league as these guys–my week in the desert contributing to public safety is nothing compared to stepping into potentially lethal situations, year round, day in and day out. But I'm glad to see that we've independently developed a similar approach to community conflict resolution. This style works well in inner city environments with decades of social baggage from unemployment, challenged schools, and cycles of violence. It also works in a radical experimental city with a demographic slanted towards the college-educated, the middle-class, the artistic, and the broadly-traveled. Maybe that's evidence that it can work in communities all over the country and throughout the world.

Tonight I watched the films nominated for Best Animated Short Subject Oscar (plus a couple honorable mentions) at IFS. Here are the ones I'd like to see win:

( Animated GIF Trailer )

"West Bank Story" just won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short. Several years ago, I came up with the idea of a production of "Romeo and Juliet" set in Jerusalem. While a short musical set between two falafel stands isn't what I had in mind, I'm glad someone else is on the same wavelength. Trailer here.