The latest film adaptation of the Sixties novel helps us understand the contemporary Middle East and its ecology.

“Based on Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic, “Dune” is a tale of a rising duke, intergalactic power struggles, a precious spice, and lethal spaceworms. The story, which deals with religion, politics, myth, destiny, heritage, environmental decay and colonialism resonates as much with audiences today as it did when the novel was first published.”

( TRT World ) – The latest Hollywood blockbuster “Dune” is a space opera based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name. While written in the Sixties, its current release is salient as the film reengages audiences with several core themes of the novel.

The novel is replete with Arabic and Islamic references, which raises the question of whether the novel is orientalist, in addition to the film, given the resurgence of cinematic orientalist tropes post-9/11.

Also, while the novel “Dune” won a slew of science fiction (sci-fi) awards, it could also be considered one of the first cli-fi novels, or climate fiction novels. Herbert’s work was prescient given its examination of the ecology of a desert planet that essentially stands in for the Middle East. 

Finally, the novel is relevant due to its trope of resistance and empire. “Dune” is essentially a political thought experiment, examining how charismatic leadership can lead to the defeat of stronger states and empires, salient to US foreign policy, whether it is the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh or the Afghan Taliban.

Techno-Orientalism

In a previous article for this publication, I used Edward Said to examine “Slavery, the “robot,” and Orientalism in science fiction.” I categorise Orientalism as a system of communication that essentialises the East with a series of ‘E’s. The West sees the ‘East’ as Exotic, Erotic, and the Enemy.

For example, in the “Star Wars” franchise, there are Middle East-inspired elements with the Sufi orders reflected in Obi Wan and the Jedi. Orientalist flourishes include the Enemy, the barbaric Sand People and the Erotic, the indolent Jabba the Hut, who smokes a nargile and maintains a harem, which includes princes Leia.

“Dune”, like “Star Wars”, is about a band of rebels who bring down an empire. The protagonists of Lucas’ space opera consist of a rebel alliance brought together from far ranging planets and galactic groups, like Admiral Ackbar, the squid-like commander from the Mon Calamari, to the Ewoks. In Herbert’s work, the rebels are the Fremen, who practice a futuristic form of Islam, seeking to free their desert planet Arrakis and bring down a down an intergalactic empire led by the Padishah Shaddam.

“Dune,” Digital, Dall-E 3, 2024.

The references to the Middle East are not flourishes to exoticise the narrative. The Arrakis depicted in the novel and latest film are not exotic, but enigmatic. There is little that is erotic in “Dune”. The Fremen are not the enemy; you root for them as the protagonists. 

The Fremen are led by a messianic figure, Paul Atreides, who engages in a “jihad” against the empire, but Herbert used this term in the sixties well before the notion become associated with terrorism post-9/11.

It is unusual to have the Muslims as good guys. The only other science fiction franchise that does the same is the “Pitch Black” franchise beginning in the mid-Nineties, also examining a futuristic, intergalactic Islam. The protagonist Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, seeks to save another character, simply referred to as “al-Imam” on his way to complete the hajj in New Mecca on the planet Tangiers-3.

I would argue that the prevalence of a futuristic Islam in both sci-fi stories makes neither orientalist. In both cases Islam is not exotic but banal, interwoven in interplanetary daily life.

Finally, all orientalist films essentialise the Middle East as a desert landscape replete with camels and minarets. The desert in “Dune” does not serve as a mere exotic background but makes an ecological argument. The dunes symbolise the vulnerability and precariousness of human life. The heat and sand, Mother Nature if you will, overwhelms this future civilisation and its technology. The theme of insecurity and the quest for water pervade the narrative. In the face of this powerlessness, the Fremen represent a fight for agency by learning to adapt to the desert, not exploit it. 

Science fiction and empire

The revolt in Arrakis seeks to bring down an intergalactic empire, led by the Padishah Shaddam. While Shaddam does sound like Saddam, the future Iraqi president was relatively obscure when Herbert wrote the novel. However, the title Padishah refers to the highest rank in the Ottoman or Persian empires.

Sci-fi has had a long history of dealing with empire and resistance. One of the first sci-fi pioneers, HG Wells published “War of the Worlds” in 1898 as a commentary on the British extermination of the local population of Tasmania, Australia.

Arrakis could very well be a reference to Iraq. The Spacing Guild in “Dune”, a cartel that controls the production of the Spice that is necessary for space travel is certainly influenced by petroleum and OPEC, which was founded in Baghdad in 1960 (albeit the brainchild of a Venezuelan oil minister). 

In this case “Dune” would fit other sci-fi and cli-fi narratives where Iraq emerges as an imaginative space challenging the 2003 invasion. The film “Avatar” critiqued the rise of mercenary companies, where the planet Pandora stands in for Iraq and Unobtainium, like the Spice, is a reference to oil.  

The 2004 reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” portrayed the villains, the robotic Cylons as Americans, and the humans resisting them as the insurgents, forcing TV audiences, particularly in the US, to see the conflict from an Iraqi perspective.

While sci-fi as a genre is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. It reveals our current technophobias and anxieties over the convergence between scientific advance and what it means to be human. 

Close to 50 years separate the novel “Dune” and the film. The themes of ecological precariousness, rapacious resource extraction, and resistance to occupation are as relevant now as they were when the novel was first published. In this case “Dune”, a work of science fiction, is also a political fact.

December 28 2022 marks 100 years since the birth of the world’s most famous comic book writer: the late Stan Lee.

The 1960s were Stan Lee’s most astonishing decade, during which he came up with ideas and scripts for the first appearances of such heroes as the original X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Black Panther, Daredevil and Doctor Strange.

This extraordinary purple patch elevates Lee as one of the architects of modern pop culture. The Marvel method of writing comics (where artists plot the story of a comic and the layout of the pages based on a collaborative approach between artist and scriptwriter) enabled him to script several hundred comics in the 1960s.

He wrote the dialogue for the first decade of titles featuring Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men and many others.

Stanley Martin Lieber (who later changed his name to Stan Lee) was born to Jewish-Romanian immigrants in Manhattan. His father was a dress cutter and Lee had teenage jobs delivering sandwiches, as a theatre usher and an office boy, before his first writing jobs. These included advance obituaries for a news service and publicity material for the National Tuberculosis Centre.

In 1939, he found work at Timely – later renamed Atlas Comics, and eventually Marvel – as an editorial assistant, with his first writing credit on an early issue of Captain America in 1941. This issue saw the writer adopt his pen name and saw Cap throw his shield as a weapon for the first time – now a signature move for the hero.

Superheroes had been around since the 1930s, with DC Comics finding an early lead publishing Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. But by the early 1960s the genre had stagnated.

At this time, sci-fi and horror anthologies were Marvel’s staples. For the final issue of one floundering Marvel anthology, Amazing (Adult) Fantasy, Lee and artist Steve Ditko invented a new character – Spider-Man. The character was “an instant success”, helping revive the superhero genre.

Superheroes in the 1960s

In 1960, DC hit on the idea of gathering their most popular heroes together to create the Justice League of America, following their earlier Justice Society. At Marvel, Lee had only just co-created such characters as the Hulk, Iron Man and Ant Man but within a year of their first appearances brought them together to form The Avengers.

These initiatives show that Lee was not only good at creating concepts that others could build on. He also had a savvy nose for marvellous ideas, copying what rival companies were doing and looking to new readerships.

He also remembered the company’s back catalogue. First he brought back Namor in 1962, then revived Captain America in 1964. He also reimagined 1930s characters Angel and Human Torch as members of the X-Men and Fantastic Four respectively.

Lee rose quickly from fill-in writer to editor-in-chief at Marvel, partially due to the exodus of Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to DC due to lack of profit sharing and, perhaps, being a cousin of the owner’s wife.

Lee enjoyed being the public face of Marvel, conducting Q&As about comics at colleges in the 1960s. He also added “Stan’s Soapbox” to hundreds of titles, a column which allowed to not only respond to reader letters, but also pursue an anti-racist agenda.

Marvel Hub: “Every Stan Lee Cameo Ever (1989-2019) *Including Avengers Endgame* All Stan Lee Cameos Marvel Movies”

The public associated him with many of the characters he co-created because he also narrated Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk cartoons in the 1980s, as well as the Spider-Man video games in the 2000s.

More recently, cameos in nearly every Marvel adaptation between 2000 and 2018 made Lee the face of the film franchises.

Lee’s faith and multiculturalism

Despite being of Jewish descent, Lee showed little interest in faith but saw “world religion as a way into the storytelling process”.

While the Fantastic Four’s Thing was eventually revealed to be Jewish, it took four decades for this to be worked into storylines.

Lee’s fellow Jewish collaborator Jack Kirby, however, may have included iconography of the Golem (a mythical humanoid made of earth brought to life in Jewish folklore) into the character’s design and gave him a fictional Jewish neighbourhood as a home.

Although Lee didn’t bring his own background to his comics, he and Kirby wished to create the “first black superhero”, leading to the co-creation of Black Panther in 1966.

Interested in minority representation in the genre, Lee was also working on a TV adaptation of an LGBTQ+ superhero novel Hero in the 2000s, before that project was stymied by its gay writer’s passing in 2011.

One comic he co-created – X-Men – has resonated with LGBTQ+ readers. In an article for Syfy, author Sara Century wrote that with its 1980s run X-Men “implied queerness … and an analog to AIDS”.

Pop culture expert Anna Peppard notes Marvel comics in the 1960s and beyond took in themes from “the Civil Rights movement, second-wave feminism … and liberal multiculturalism”.

One of the last characters Lee created for Marvel was She-Hulk, whose 2022 TV series challenged toxic masculinity in superhero fandom. Stan Lee died, aged 96, in 2018.

By accident or design, Lee’s comics and the characters he helped create have not only had a huge influence on pop culture but also reflect an increasingly liberal world.

For these reasons and many more, his impact on the world is well worth celebrating.

Alex Fitch, Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Comics and Architecture, University of Brighton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nichols was cast by Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry as Lt. Nyota Uhura, chief communications officer of the Federation star ship Enterprise and the fourth in the line of command on the vessel. Both for a woman and an African-American, it was an unusual role on network television when the series began airing on CBS in 1966, having been backed by comedian Lucille Ball.

Her character’s name is derived from the Swahili word for “freedom” or “independence,” uhuru, which in turn derives from the Arabic word hurr, free. This term was picked up by 19th century Arab modernists to refer to the new Enlightenment notion of political liberty (hurriyya), but had in medieval times denoted a free person as opposed to an enslaved one. Swahili is spoken in East African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania.

Nichols often told the story of how she met the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. after having played Lt. Uhura for a year, and mentioned that she was leaving the series for Broadway. (She hadn’t been given a lot of dialogue other than “Hailing frequencies open.”) King remonstrated with her, she said, that she must stay, because Star Trek was the only network show that was depicting African-Americans “as they really are.” She decided to stick with the part. She inspired a generation of African-American actors, including Whoopi Goldberg. Later in life, she became a booster of the NASA space program and of African American women in the program. In 1992, Mae C. Jemison became the first African-American woman to go into space, and she paid homage to Nichols by using the phrase “Hailing frequencies open.”

In Season 3, Episode 10 of Star Trek, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” a scene called for a kiss between Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Nichols. When the studio heads saw the dailies, they freaked out that there might be a backlash in the Deep South. Southern TV stations had been known simply not to air network shows they thought provocative, even if they were part of the network, with all the economic downside that implied from lost advertising revenue.

The Supreme Court had struck down laws against interracial marriage, which was characterized by the ugly term “miscegenation,” in 1967, only a year before. Until then, a white man kissing a black woman in public was a scandal in the South, and some teenagers were sent to reform school for this infraction.

So, Nichols said in her memoir, the studio insisted that they shoot a version of the scene in which the two did not kiss. Shatner flubbed all the takes of this non-kissing version by crossing his eyes, and the executives decided they would just risk Southern outrage with the original take.

In the event, there is no record of any public backlash, and Nichols said they got plenty of enthusiastic fan mail over the episode. It wasn’t the first interracial kiss on television, but it was probably the first substantial kiss between white and Black actors that formed a key plot element in a network prime time show. Young people won’t realize that there used to be only three commercial networks with nation-wide coverage, which split 90% of the US viewing audience among themselves. A really popular show could get 80 million viewers. The signal was received over the air with an antenna or rabbit ears from a local broadcasting station. Things weren’t fragmented the way they are now. Star Trek did not have great ratings compared to competing shows like “Bewitched” and “My Three Sons,” but likely a good quarter of US households were tuned to it when it was on. That would be like something getting 82 million viewers today, a rare event indeed, except for the Super Bowl.

But here’s the thing. The 1967 “Loving” decision of the Supreme Court that abolished state laws forbidding interracial marriage was underpinned in part by the Court’s having found an implicit right to privacy in the US Constitution.

Justice Samuel Alito, a strutting martinet, is hell bent on overturning any argument for a right to privacy, and that was the basis for his Dobbs decision annihilating a woman’s right to an abortion.

The ACLU is petrified that the natural outcome of Alito’s reactionary counter-revolution in the jurisprudence of liberty is the undoing of the Loving decision. See also Miles Mogulescu in the American Prospect on this danger.

So, that famous kiss between Uhuru and Kirk? Alito may have started us down the road of making it illegal, 55 years later.

Alito is the Borg of American jurisprudence, bent on assimilating us all not as unique individuals with a right to our personal privacy, but as serfs to invasive religious bigotry.

Director Denis Villeneuve’s most recent sci-fi epic is the latest attempt to tell the story of Frank Herbert’s acclaimed 1965 novel, Dune. The film is set millennia in the future when the galaxy is ruled by a class of family Houses. Each house battles for control over the most valuable resource in the galaxy, “spice” – a powerful hallucinogen that also happens to power interstellar travel.

Spice is mined on only one inhospitable desert planet – Arrakis, also known as Dune. Arrakis is populated by the Fremen, a group of warriors and desert dwellers who have to fight against a series of imperial colonisers, each one using different methods of control to mine and sell spice.

Dune offers a useful allegorical narrative of the “scramble for Africa”, which saw European empires carve up the continent into colonised powers based purely in the pursuit of trade advantages.

Violent extraction of resources

The “scramble” officially began in 1884 with the Berlin Conference. Here major European and other imperial powers – Germany, Britain, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, France, Spain, the US, the Ottoman Empire and others – colluded in violently delineating the continent’s varied tribal geographies into colonial nation states.

The colonial and aristocratic European motifs in Villeneuve’s Dune are not hard to spot: sealing decrees with signet rings on wax, overtly westernised regal dress and military uniforms.

Based on specific trade specialities and existing knowledge of resources, by 1914, Africa was a colonised continent. Like Arrakis, its valuable natural resources (both human and nonhuman) were being mined to service western colonial markets.

In Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium undertook one of the most notorious resource plunders in the Congo, which is known for its abundance of rubber. Leopold was far more brutal in his land grab than other colonisers, committing mass genocide in the process.

Seeing the Congolese people as inferior, Leopold forced them to labour for the valued resources and murdered those who refused. The exact figures are hard to discern, but it is thought that his armies murdered over half of the population.

In the film, audiences are introduced to Vladimir, leader of House Harkonnen, which has enacted a brutal and violent colonisation of Arrakis for years. His corpulence, greed and brutality bear a striking resemblance to the actions of Leopold. There is even a scene where he bathes in molten rubber.

The lasting impact of colonisation

As Villeneuve himself has pointed out, the themes of his version of Dune speak to how fragile a planet’s ecosystem can be. It also highlights how we must change our dependence on extracting resources to start a planetary healing process.

As climate catastrophe continues to unfold around the world, many commentators (myself included) point to the extractive nature of fossil fuel companies, deforestation practices and ocean-polluting industries as the prime culprits. These practices have a legacy in the colonial plunder of Africa, with several chartered companies set up to marshal the global trade of the resources gained from colonial invasions.

For example, Cecil Rhodes, who is known widely for the decolonisation campaign #RhodesMustFall, made his fortune mining diamonds in South Africa. This industry
produces a lot of local pollution and is also highly energy intensive.

Many modern-day mining and oil companies have their roots in the colonial invasion of Africa, with damaging environmental costs both locally in African countries, but also globally as they belch carbon into the air.

Dune shines a harsh light on these processes.

We see how technologically superior invading “houses” are harvesting the raw materials, enslaving the population and using precious resources (such as water) to feed sacred trees rather than quench the thirst of indigenous workers. But these powers are ultimately humbled by Arrakis’ indigenous population who use spice as part of their sustainable relationship with the harsh environment of the planet – not for intergalactic trade or to generate vast profits.

In this, Dune critically explores the geopolitics behind resource extraction. It highlights the limitations of and the inevitable resistance to the powers that attempt to wield natural resources for domination. It also predicted that the colonisation of the past would lead to much of the destruction we are now seeing.

The next decade has to be the one in which we, as a planet, begin to work towards reducing the impact of climate catastrophe. Part of that process will involve understanding the past transgressions of European power on the Global South. Stories that have a message behind them, like Dune, show us how.

Oli Mould, Lecturer in Human Geography, Royal Holloway University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Warner Bros.: “Dune Official Trailer”

Paul Atreides is Golem, not Frodo. He is Herbert’s warning against mass hysteria and great leaders. In our time, Paul Atreides is Donald Trump and the Fremen searching for a mahdi or messiah are the Republican Party.

Herbert’s family had been Eugene Debs socialists, but as Chris Dite writes at Jacobin, he became a libertarian Republican, suspicious of big government and what he saw as its duplicity. He even thought it was a good thing for Dick Nixon to become president because his lies would teach the public how tricky big government can be.

I suspect Herbert’s counterpart in today’s American politics would be someone like Michigan’s former representative Justin Amash. Amash, a Republican Libertarian who was pushed out of the party and is now just a Libertarian, called for the impeachment of populist demagogue Donald Trump

Paul Atreides is very well aware that he is a figure of tragedy, not a triumphant hero. He fights against his future fate, which his psychedelic visions, fueled by the “spice” of the desert-world Arrakis, reveal to him. In the film, at one point he lashes out against his mother, Jessica, who is a member of the Bene Gesserit lay order of women. They are conducting a vast eugenics experiment, attempting to create their own messianic prodigy, They have powers of divination and can access past knowledge along the X chromosome, being women, but are incomplete. They strive ultimately to breed an offspring who has access to both male and female genetic memory, who would then also be able to foresee the future. The experiment was not very far advanced, and Jessica was supposed to produce a daughter to advance the plan another generation. She instead produced a son, Paul, who is therefore the sought-after “Kwisatch Haderach” or ultimate seer, but premature and flawed. Paul intuits this defect in himself and blames his mother and her order for tinkering with him.

For their part, the Bedouin Fremen of Arrakis suspect he is their messiah, or “mahdi” (the Muslim Arabic term for the Rightly Guided one who will arise at the end of time to restore justice to the world).

It is not a fate that Paul Atreides relishes. He is forced into it by a series of acts of treachery by the government. The Padishah Emperor of the House of Corrino is afraid of House Atreides of the planet Caladan. He therefore asks them to take over the dangerous planet Arrakis and be responsible for its melange spice harvest, from the larvae of the planet’s sandworms, called Shai-Hulud (Shaykh Khuluud, Old Man of Eternity in Arabic). He took Arrakis away from the most aggressive of the baronies of his empire, Harkonnen of Giedi Prime.

It was a trick, though, since once Duke Leto Atreides, his family and retainers were on Arrakis, and so isolated and exposed, the emperor encouraged Baron Harkonnen to attack, take back the planet and its spice profits, and wipe out House Atreides.

Of the Atreides party on Arrakis, only Paul and his mother Jessica survive this onslaught. Rather than finding a way to get back to Caladan and attempt to revive his duchy’s ordinary fortunes, however, Paul is gradually pushed by anger at the imperial betrayal, and lust for revenge against both Baron Harkonnen and the emperor into a plan of enlisting the Fremen as his army. He also becomes captive to a budding overweening ambition to become emperor himself.

As an American, Herbert may well have been thinking of Andrew Jackson and his fanatical populists, who after all set the foundation for the Democratic Party. In the 1960s, the Democratic Party was the party of the Vietnam War, which Herbert hated, and on which he ultimately had to report on from the field.

But Herbert had become interested in dunes and deserts as an ecologically-minded Westerner. That led him to an interest in the Greater Middle East and its history. One feature of this region is that it is a vast arid zone in which rainfall agriculture is impossible on a lot of its territory. What is left is savannah and marginal land that can’t be farmed but does produce pasture for livestock.

Pastoralists (“Bedouin” in the Arab world) grew up who specialized in making use of this marginal land to raise sheep, goats, horses and camel, and who wandered with their flocks around to where there was grass to eat. They supplemented their diet by hunting. If you can kill a gazelle with a bow and arrow from horseback, you can kill a man. So pastoralists were a natural cavalry, and often had kinship solidarity as a set of clans. The Romans used the Arabic-speaking tribes as adjunct cavalrymen.

If a canny political leader can unite the feuding clans, however, he can dispense with the old emperor and take over vast territories with Bedouin cavalry, and become emperor himself. The great medieval Muslim founder of sociology, Ibn Khaldun, thought that such leaders could most effectively unite tribes for imperial conquest if they used religion (for Herbert and Ibn Khaldun see Haris Durrani at Tor.com ).

Herbert imbibed these ideas from his reading, and was especially influenced, as Arnold Khan argues, by Leslie Blanch’s Sabre of Paradise, about the mid-19th century Muslim leader in the Caucasus, Shamyl, who tried to fight off a brutal Tsarist Russian colonialism.

Herbert seems to have taken from his socialist relatives a Marxist conviction that religion is the sigh of the oppressed. But he did not think it was the opium of the people. His reading in the history of the Middle East showed him that it could instead become revolutionary.

He feared, however, that revolutionary religion depended too much for its success on fanaticism, unreason, and violence, so that he clearly does not approve of the Fremen uprising led by Paul Atreides, and sees Paul’s decision to go in that direction as a tragic flaw.

If we subtract the Orientalist imagery and unfair use of Islam (which has been an urbane civilization that produced scientists and technology and secular polite culture) to symbolize the Mahdist hordes, Herbert’s main point is to warn against narrow-minded populism and Great Leader syndromes.

Like Justin Amash, Herbert would have found no place for himself in today’s Republican Party, which has gone to the dark side, with Donald Trump as its messiah and evangelicals as its fanatical shock troops. Trumpism doesn’t even have the nobility, though, of a Greek tragedy, because it lacks any core of humanity.

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Warner Bros.: “Dune – Final Trailer”

Here’s a portion of what CNBC printed in what they alleged was the complete transcript of Shatner’s remarks:

“I mean, the little things, the weightlessness, and to see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness. That’s the thing. This covering of blue is this sheet, this blanket, this comforter of blue around that we have around us. We think ‘oh, that’s blue sky’ and suddenly you shoot through it all of a sudden, like you whip a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness – into black ugliness. And you look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there, and there is Mother Earth and comfort and – is there death? Is that the way death is?”

But here’s the crucial takeaway, the last phrase of which is omitted by CNBC:

“What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the jeopardy, the moment you see how vuln– the vulnerability of everything. It so small. This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin. It’s a sliver. It’s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe. It’s negligible, this air. Mars doesn’t have it. It’s so thin. And to dirty it…”

“The jeopardy . . . And to dirty it!” To fill this precious atmosphere, unique in our solar system, with clouds of burned coal dust and with greenhouse gases, Shatner says, is . . . what? Despicable. Unthinkable.

Just when Shatner is getting on to the subject about how what he saw reinforced his horror at the way we are polluting the atmosphere and imperiling the earth with man-made global heating, Bezos interrupts him: “It goes so fast.” Bezos doesn’t want Captain Kirk expounding on the evils of climate change on his promotional clip. He gets him talking about the experience again. Not the conclusion he drew from that experience.

But we know what Shatner thinks. He thinks that the sunny optimism of the original 1960s Star Trek TV series, which reflected the view of the future held by its creator, Gene Rodenberry, was misplaced. Shatner as Capt. Kirk played a role in helping the world imagine a better future.

As Shatner lived through the succeeding decades, however, he discovered the reality of the climate emergency and was filled with alarm.

In a 2016 interview with Brian Fung at the Washington Post, Shatner said:

“The biggest threat to our world today is climate change. The future is exciting because the future is always hope … What seems to be happening is that the future is filled with dread.”

In the same interview, he said of the science fiction writers he worked with in the 1960s, “There was all kinds of interest in flying vehicles and health and the state of the world. That we wouldn’t be melting away, into the sixth extinction. It would be a much more pleasant. Peaceful. Humane world. Than it is.”

Fung asked Shatner if any technologies scared him. The actor replied,

“The technology that worries me is the old technologies. The technology of uses of energy and the spilling of toxins into Mother Earth, and we’re killing our Earth and nobody is irate about it enough. And not enough people are irate about it. People like yourself — young people like yourself should be screaming at the top of your lungs to the people who lead.”

That’s what Shatner wanted to say on his return to earth. He wanted to say that our thin, fragile, vulnerable, unique atmosphere is in danger from petroleum, gas and coal, that this mothering “blue blanket” of the earth is in danger of being enveloped by the grim blackness of galactic emptiness because of the way we are treating it.

That is what for-profit news did not report about Shatner’s profound experience and his articulation of it. He wants you screaming at the top of your lungs that our pale blue dot is in danger of being burned up and engulfed by an unfeeling, black cosmos. And that only we can stop it from getting worse, because we are the ones making it worse.

—–

Bonus Video:

CNN: “‘The most profound experience I can imagine’: Emotional William Shatner recounts space trip”

The dystopia depicted in Alphonso Cuarón’s visionary film, set in 2027, presents a realistic and disturbing portrayal of a white nationalist, apocalyptic future that has now arrived: xenophobic rhetoric and fear-mongering propaganda that denigrates immigrants and fuels hatred of foreigners, a world-wide pandemic, environmental catastrophes, multiple wars, state terror, and ethnic tribalism. In Children of Men, this collapsing world pushes desperate refugees to try entering Great Britain, a racist police state that is the only surviving society. The savage government hunts down these immigrants and cages them like animals in order to deport them back to the hell they came from. Mirroring our present, Children of Men feels torn from today’s headlines. The film was based on P. D. James’ prophetic 1992 novel with the same title.

Dan Dinello is author of
“Children of Men” Constellations: Studies in Science Fiction and Film TV

Anticipating Trump’s ban, Children of Men opens with Britain shutting down its borders. Trump launched his malignant presidency by closing American borders to Muslim immigrants. Initially declared unconstitutional, the third version of the racist Muslim ban was upheld by the Supreme Court, barring entry for almost everybody from several Muslim-majority countries including Yemen, Iran, Libya, Chad, Somalia, and Syria. In January 2020, the administration expanded the ban to target mostly African countries —including Sudan, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Eritrea as well as Myanmar and Kyrgyzstan — all part of Trump’s attacks on people of colorand his ongoing efforts to make America white again.

The caging of immigrants in Children of Men seemed like a fictional exaggeration. But, the U.S. border policy of putting kids in cages is no longer a fictional exaggeration but a disgustingly real and deliberately established plan, engineered by Trump’s vile immigration advisor Stephen Miller. In order to reduce border crossings, Miller pushed the idea of “consequences” — separating children from parents. Exposing the policy as state-sanctioned kidnapping and child abuse, a Homeland Security official said: “Miller made clear to us that, if you start to treat children badly enough, you’ll be able to convince other parents to stop trying to come with theirs.” The policy is so unAmerican and morally egregious that its brutality has even been expressed in a pop song “Babies in Cages” by the Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers.

Scene from Cuaron’s Film “Children of Men”

A kingdom of cruelty, detention centers have been built in 17 states to house detained children and adults. These Trump internment “hotels” force children to endure harassment by guards while living in squalid, over-crowded conditions. A dystopia unfolding in real time, 12,000 children are held in government facilities right now, according to official figures. A human rights disaster, this catalog of abuses belongs in the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

To stress his war on illegal immigration, Trump highlights the construction of a useless border wall for which he’s diverted money — under the pretext of a national emergency — from other congressionally authorized funds. But policy changes, not physical barriers, have helped seal the United States. Using executive powers to rewrite immigration policy with little or no pushback from Congress, the Trump administration has tightened asylum rules as well as cut the number of refugees that could be admitted to the U.S., thus undermining this vital humanitarian program. The right to asylum has been a cornerstone of international immigration law since the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The United States, along with 144 other nations, made a commitment to protect those who arrive at our borders with “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” People who have languished for years in displaced persons camps face a drastically reduced refugee cap of 18,000 this year, down from the 110,000 that President Barack Obama set in 2016.

A June 17, 2018 photo provided by US Customs and Border Protection shows a caged facility in McAllen, Texas.

Beyond this, those fleeing violence or persecution have been forced into ramshackle camps in Mexico whose crowded, chaotic conditions resemble the Bexhill internment camp portrayed in Children of Men. As in Bexhill, the rule of law is displaced by a state of exclusion where people are subject to extra-judicial police violence as well as exploitation by drug cartels and smugglers. The Trump administration executed its “Remain in Mexico” policy early in 2019, forcing asylum-seeking Central Americans to stay in Mexico — for an indefinite amount of time — while their claims are processed, trapping thousands for months or years. These shunned people of no nation must live in vast tent encampments exposed to the elements without adequate food or water.

Since the new restrictions were rolled out, more than 59,000 asylum seekers have been turned back by American authorities. Using Orwellian terminology out of 1984, the government calls the “Remain in Mexico” policy “migrant protection protocols” though the lawyers who challenged it in court argued that it banished vulnerable people to perilous conditions. One week ago Friday, February 28 — over a year since it was implemented, a Federal Court upended the policy. Themigrants face “targeted discrimination, physical violence, sexual assault, overwhelmed and corrupt law enforcement, lack of food and shelter, and practical obstacles in court proceedings,” said Judge William A. Fletcher. “It’s really putting them at great risk.”

Asylum-seeking migrants believed that the wait was over and they could cross into the United States. Some, carrying all their property, moved to the border expecting to be let through. Then late in the same day, the court voted unanimously to suspend its own order. No one was let through. The Justice department claimed that overturning the policy will result in “massive and irreparable harms — to border security, public safety, public health and diplomatic relations.” Backing down, the judges ordered more arguments from both sides. With its insanely confusing and self-contradictory edicts, the government created another chaotic day of emotional turmoil for migrants on the Mexican border. The final decision will be determined by the Trump-tilted Supreme Court.

With the process of sealing the border quickly moving forward, Trump and Miller turned their attention inward, ramping up immigration raids. The forced deportation of immigrants is a central feature of Children of Men: captured foreigners are caged on the streets and then bused to Bexhill detention camp to await deportation. In the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has begun sending armed agents from Border Patrol SWAT teams to New York, Chicago, and other so-called sanctuary cities, where local law enforcement has limited its cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A DHS official was present at a meeting where Miller advocated allowing immigration officers to pull children out of school.

Beyond increased militarization, the government has tweaked the system to create Kafkaesque bureaucratic booby traps: changed government forms intentionally designed to ensnare the unsuspecting. For example, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) now encourages officers to deny outright any visa or green card application that is missing evidence or contains an error — without giving applicants a chance to fix it. A migrant who takes an errant step in filing out forms, in compliance with previous rules, will suddenly find deportation agents knocking at the door.

Using immigration courts to increase deportations, the Trump administration has reopened thousands of deportation cases that were previously closed due to their low priority, thus affecting hundreds of thousands of people with close ties to their communities. To speed up deportations, the Justice Department has established a case quota requirement for immigration judges, eroding the due process rights of immigrants by forcing judges to rush through cases. The administration has also restricted immigration judges’ ability to terminate deportation proceedings against immigrants except in very narrow circumstances. Raising alarms about a creeping surveillance state, the government is now using cell phone data and facial recognition technology to assist in deportations.

Scene from Cuaron’s film “Children of Men.”

The Trump administration is even going after naturalized citizens.A new denaturalization task force has begun working to strip citizenship from naturalized American citizens. While there are few legal grounds for denaturalization, the administration has already referred 100 cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. The creation of the task force is causing tremors of insecurity among naturalized citizens and permanent residents. On the horizon is a termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that protects 330,000 people who would otherwise be subjected to disease, violence and starvation in the aftermath of natural disasters as well as cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), leaving 700,000 young adults vulnerable to deportation.

Immigration arrests of long-term residents are drastically up, mercilessly separating families. Despite Trump’s stupidity and incompetence, xenophobic fanatics like Stephen Miller implement Trump’s steam-of-consciousness incoherence into jack-booted immigration policy. As in Children of Men, this racist policy carves up the world into what social critic Naomi Klein, in her book Shock Doctrine, describes as Green Zones of privilege and Red zones of restriction: “A cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival” and where stark partitions exist “between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.” As part of its anti-immigrant stance, the USCIS removed language celebrating the United States as a “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement. Reinforcing this language change, the president dehumanized and demonized immigrants, likening them to “animals” and “vermin” while deriding people from “shit-hole countries.” If the coronavirus gets much worse in America, Trump is sure to blame the outbreak on immigrants just as he did during the 2014 Ebola epidemic.

Despite the bleakness of its xenophobic portrayal, Children of Men inspires with a story of hope and political resistance. But, in our fraught moment, public outrage has dissipated as immigration news coverage has declined and the federal courts — especially the Supreme Court — are upholding the Administration’s repressive policies. An extreme right-wing immigration policy now rules the land — a policy aimed at rolling back the pluralistic foundation of our nation while creating an atmosphere of nativism and fear that affects everybody. Reflecting the white nationalist agenda depicted in Children of Men and producing a dark stain on American history, Trump’s immigration crackdown reflects the dreadful creation of dystopian fiction. But, the lives he jeopardizes are real. Unimagined in Children of Men is the horror Trump would create in a second term.

The future isn’t what it used to be, at least according to the Canadian science fiction novelist William Gibson. In a interview with the BBC, Gibson said people seemed to be losing interest in the future. “All through the 20th century we constantly saw the 21st century invoked,” he said. “How often do you hear anyone invoke the 22nd century? Even saying it is unfamiliar to us. We’ve come to not have a future”.

Gibson thinks that during his lifetime the future “has been a cult, if not a religion”. His whole generation was seized by “postalgia”. This is a tendency to dwell on romantic, idealised visions of the future. Rather than imagining the past as an ideal time (as nostalgics do), postalgics think the future will be perfect. For example, a study of young consultants found many suffered from postalgia. They imagined their life would be perfect once they were promoted to partner.

“The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone”, Gibson said in 2012. “Ahead of us, there is merely … more stuff … events”. The upshot is a peculiarly postmodern malaise. Gibson calls it “future fatigue”. This is a condition where we have grown weary of an obsession with romantic and dystopian visions of the future. Instead, our focus is on now.

Gibson’s diagnosis is supported by international attitude surveys. One found that most Americans rarely think about the future and only a few think about the distant future. When they are forced to think about it, they don’t like what they see. Another poll by the Pew Research Centre found that 44% of Americans were pessimistic about what lies ahead.

William Gibson’s New Novel, Agency (click).

But pessimism about the future isn’t just limited to the US. One international poll of over 400,000 people from 26 countries found that people in developed countries tended to think that the lives of today’s children will be worse than their own. And a 2015 international survey by YouGov found that people in developed countries were particularly pessimistic. For instance, only 4% of people in Britain thought things were improving. This contrasted with 41% of Chinese people who thought things were getting better.

Rational or irrational pessimism?

So why has the world seemingly given up on the future? One explanation might be that deep pessimism is the only rational response to the catastrophic consequences of global warming, declining life expectancy and an increasing number of poorly understood existential risks.

But other research suggests that this widespread pessimism as irrational. People who support this view, point out that on many measures the world is actually improving. And an Ipsos poll found that people who are more informed tend to be less pessimistic about the future.

Although there may be some objective reasons to be pessimistic, it is likely that other factors may explain future fatigue. Researchers who have studied forecasting say there are good reasons why we might avoid making predictions about the distant future.

Distant forecasts

For one, forecasting is always a highly uncertain activity. The longer the time frame one is making predictions about and the more complicated the prediction, the more room there is for error. This means that while it might be rational to make a projection about something simple in the near future, it is probably pointless to make projections about something complex in the very distant future.

Economists have known for many years that people tend to discount the future. That means we put a greater value on something which we can get immediately than something we have to wait for. More attention is paid to pressing short-term needs while longer-term investments go unheeded.

Psychologists have also found that futures that are close at hand seem concrete and detailed while those that are further away seem abstract and stylised. Near futures were more likely to be based on personal experience, while the distance future was shaped by ideologies and theories.

When a future seems to be closer and more concrete, people tend to think it is more likely to occur. And studies have shown that near and concrete futures are also more likely to spark us into action. So the preference for concrete, close-at-hand futures mean people tend to put off thinking about more abstract and distant possibilities.

The human aversion to thinking about the future is partially hardwired. But there are also particular social conditions that make us more likely to give up on the future. Sociologists have argued that for people living in fairly stable societies, it is possible to generate stories about what the future might be like. But in moments of profound social dislocation and upheaval, these stories stop making sense and we lose a sense of the future and how to prepare for it.

This is what happened in many native American communities during colonialism. This is how Plenty Coups, the leader of the Crow people, described it: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

But instead of being thrown into a sense of despair by the future, Gibson thinks we should be a little more optimistic. “This new found state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing … It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present is someone else’s future”.

Andre Spicer, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Cass Business School, City, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One knows that something is touching a nerve in North American culture when a foreign luxury car company wants a piece of the pie. The movie Black Panther is that type of archetypical popular culture milestone.

The film has generated a widespread sense of optimism. No wonder Lexus invested heavily in Black Panther’s production — in hopes that the movie’s popularity may lift car sales.

The timing of Black Panther couldn’t be better either. It’s Black History Month in Canada and the United States and disappointment over the lack of African-American winners at the 2016 Oscars is still fresh

Lexus aside, what has gathered a lot of media traction about the movie relates to dress. Both the costumes of the Black Panther’s characters and the styles worn by the actors at the film’s premiere have become a popular focus.

There are several other culturally significant aspects about the movie, of course. Chief among them is the fact that Black Panther features the only Black protagonist superhero in the Marvels Comics universe.

But dress style has long been one of few accessible forms of self-expression for North America’s marginalized groups. For the African Diaspora in North America, dress has always had political connotations.

Black style politics

For social groups that can’t access institutionalized forms of creative expression, dress and personal style often become a form of political and cultural broadcasting. The immediacy of clothing and its perceived lack of pretension provides a visible and versatile canvas. For North American Black communities, style can also connect them to a cultural continuum that stretches all the way to Africa.

In understanding how and why Black Panther entered our collective consciousness, it’s important to make a distinction between the film’s two strands of dress. On one hand we have dress as a fictionalized characterization; the movie costumes. On the other hand we have dress as celebrity-enabled commentary; the actor’s outfits during the film’s premiere.

Both wardrobes represent related but distinct aspects of Black style’s linkage to identity, race and culture in North America. Within this context, both the political and social significance of Black style are important. But most important is the long overdue need to honour the many contributions of Black style to North American fashion.

Black Panther’s dress codes

Similar to other Marvel superheroes, Black Panther has a double life and matching outfits for each one of those lives. His supernatural persona is outfitted in a skintight, high-tech suit complete with a feline mask. When not on superhero duty, he wears dapper suits or African warrior regalia. Each of those outfits represents different strands of Black style.

Like Black Panther himself, supporting characters exist in three overlapping spaces; the U.S., the fictional African country of Wakanda and the legendary kingdom of Wakanda.

Costumes worn by characters in each of these spaces capture complementary facets of pan-African dress style across geographical, temporal and cosmological boundaries. We see the expected Westernized dress of Wakanda — a front for the hidden Wakanda Kingdom. But when the action takes place in the kingdom of Wakanda, the overall aesthetic is Afrofuturistic.

However disparate those realms, the overall visual ambience of the movie, including costumes, just flows. How is this even possible? Maybe visual culture from Africa defies stylistic, spatial and temporal demarcation. No wonder modernists used traditional African artifacts as a springboard to reinvigorate European art styles.

Distinctions such as traditional and contemporary don’t apply to African cultural products, including dress. Instead there is a continuous process of concurrent celebration and improvement of ancestral themes and motives. The end result is a sort of permanent impermanence of artifacts and practices.

This sensibility underpins the design of the costumes and the overall art direction of Black Panther. The result is a coherent depiction of several visions of African-ness taking place simultaneously. Slick and fluid as these filmic visions are, there is still a political undertone to it; it challenges our uncomplicated ‘National Geographic’ understandings of Africa.

Take for example the hairstyles featured in the movie. Black characters sport endless variations of natural hair; from bald to intricate braiding to dreadlocks and everything in between. And this is no small thing.

In Black style, especially Black style in North America, hair is a contentious topic. In this context, natural Black hair has connotations that range from racist implications of backwardness to empowerment to militant attitudes.

Black Panther live

Connected to the time-bending quality of the film was the decision by the cast to appear wearing Afrocentric outfits during Black Panther’s world premiere. It was a display of homage to the celebration of African style and beauty manifest in the movie. It also demonstrated the diversity and timeless quality of African style.

For example, there was a nod to ancient Egyptian dress in the pleated and bejeweled outfit worn by Lupita Nyong’o. While Danai Gurira’s ensemble pays tribute to jazz age Black divas, Angela Bassett’s look evokes Afrofuturistic styles. Clearly this was all mindfully orchestrated.

Because of these dress codes, the premiere worked to as a real-life prolongation of the premises of the film. Simultaneously, it visualized how the influence of Black style pervades every corner of North American dress culture. From costumes for show business performers to colourful sportswear and streetwear, Black style is discernible everywhere.

Perhaps Black style is one of the key ingredients of that distinctive flavour of fashion that is North American style. Take for example that uniquely North American export called cool. It originated in predominantly Black urban communities before it became a mainstream staple of style.

Furthermore, the evolution of Black style in North America and its influences to mainstream fashion can be readily traced. It starts with 19th century Black dandies that crystallized into the ‘New Negro’ style of the early 20th century. From there it forks into several streams that includes conformity,rebellion, tradition and innovation.

Black Panther conveys all the complexities of Black style. It is a vehicle for asserting cultural significance and enabling identity in a culturally hostile environment. Symbolically the movie also transmits the struggle inherent to this process.

Black Panther’s popularity then begs the question: Is our society finally ready to fully recognise the contributions of Black style to North American fashion?

Henry Navarro Delgado, Assistant Professor of Fashion, Ryerson University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.