Spice is ostensibly the energy source powering the cosmic world-system of Dune: Part Two. But it’s actually sexually-determined social reproduction, which appears metaphorically as liquids dripping, pouring, and pooling throughout the film’s dramatic convolutions. From amniotic fluid and a lover’s tears to abyssal wells of the dead and “worm piss,” these various waters reflect and express all sorts of libidinal concatenations.

At the beginning of the film, Princess Irulan, the Emperor’s daughter, recapitulates the plot in voiceover. She stresses patrilineal affinities in her imperial diary, noting how the Emperor “loved” hero Paul Atreides’ murdered father Duke Leto “like a son,” even though it’s the “calculus of power” truly guiding this ruler. The inextricability of affection and strength is underscored soon after when Paul’s pregnant mother, Lady Jessica, once again saves him from the villainous Harkonnens, a reminder that he still has some growing up to do.

It’s difficult, however, for Paul to overcome his oedipal situation. Paternal figures either serve him – there’s Stilgar, a Fremen religious follower, and the loyal, knightly Gurney Halleck – or antagonize him – Baron Harkonnen, totalitarian head of a psychopathic brood, and the calmly cruel, despotic Emperor are both so bad they’re outside the Law. With no paterfamilias to confront and defeat, the “Father” exists as a big Other, whose phallus is seized and wielded, more often than not, by the commanding women of Dune: Part Two. Like Lady Jessica, love interest Chani protects, guides, and teaches Paul, giving the romance decidedly maternal undertones. She helps him find his “way” in the desert. Following their first kiss, there’s a tepid embrace as Chani places her arm encouragingly on Paul’s shoulder, without any great passion. The culmination of his assimilation into Fremen culture is a masturbatory ride on a gargantuan sandworm. As a climax, it’s an apposite orgasmic image of polymorphous perversity and illusory masculine autonomy. 

Paul’s sexual innocence really ends when he drinks the “water of life"—extracted by a doula-like woman from a baby sand worm writhing in a kind of birthing pool—at Lady Jessica’s insistence so that his mind will “open.” When his mother earlier ingests the blue potion, the rite’s connotations of defloration are disturbingly violative and associated, too, with impregnation. As the liquid envelops the fetus she’s carrying, a wicked pleasure spreads on the face of the Reverend Mother Ramallo, a stereotypical crone figure, edging close to jouissance. Paul’s only capable of drinking it because of his female-directed Bene Gesserit training. After he’s rendered unconscious and laid out as a sleeping beauty, Paul is revived by Chani’s “desert spring” tears. The droplets, mixed with the “water of life,” are notably on the tip of her finger, which she gently pushes onto his lips.

As in the first Dune film, Chani is characterized as tough, even masculine. Unlike Paul, she always knows who she is and what she wants. He’s not as certain. His principal challenge, it seems, is to be a mightier man than his father. Lady Jessica reminds him that Duke Leto didn’t “believe in revenge,” which is Paul’s guiding instinct, because he tells her, “I do.” But given his visionary prognostications about possible futures, which cause a prevaricating vulnerability that’s coded as feminine, it’s unclear whether he can manifest a manly imago for himself in the existing circumstances. Too much is unknown. “The world has made choices for us,” Chani says to him at one point, adding, “You’ll never lose me, Paul Atreides, not as long as you stay who you are.” But that proves nearly impossible.

As he grapples with his confusions, Paul’s neurotic defense mechanisms reflect an identity crisis. He goes by many names in the film: Lisan al Gaib, Mahdi, Usul, Kwisatz Haderach, and even “young pup,” Halleck’s term of endearment. In his effort to work through competing visions, impulses, and demands, Paul momentarily tries to free himself from the burdensome obligations of House Atreides when he removes his chunky ancestral ring, announcing to his absent father, “I found my way.” But he can’t part from this transitional object, slipping it back on when he claims authority as the Fremen’s messiah, while a proud Halleck looks on approvingly. At this moment of peak decisiveness, however, Paul’s splintered allegiances are revealed—he is both the would-be liberator of Arrakis’ indigenous peoples and the representative of another planet’s royal house. Paul’s negotiation with what Lacan theorizes as the “Name-of-the-Father,” necessary for the constitution of the “symbolic order,” is complicated by the fact he’s part-Harkonnen, although Paul’s in no danger of a slip of the tongue revealing that cursed bloodline when addressing the Fremen because it’s pretty much all he’s thinking about. Earlier, Halleck provides compensatory support to Paul when he discloses the existence of the Atreides’ “family atomics,” only accessible via Paul’s “genetic heritage,” emphatically assuring him “that is power.”

Passed down through the generations, part of Lacan’s “signifying chain,” these weapons of mass destruction epitomize the film’s unceasing eroticization of violence. This aesthetic thematic is conspicuously incarnated in Harkonnen knife fetishist Feyd-Rautha, whose malice, at one point, also spurts out of a flamethrower. Even the Emperor’s floating spaceball descends like a single massive testicle, later extending pyramidally, sublimating sadism in a sturdy geometric form. Just in case Paul didn’t get the message, after everyone’s assembled for the requisite showdown, the Emperor reminds him that his father was “a weak man.” Earlier prostrated before the Emperor, Baron Harkonnen is killed by grandson Paul, who then defeats cousin Feyd-Rautha in a dagger duel that’s staged, shot, and cut like a sex scene, with Chani as a spectator. Right before he expires, Feyd-Rautha compliments his adversary by telling him “you fought well,” an icky echo of Chani’s first line of dialogue when she half-heartedly praises Paul. In this film, aggression recurrently possesses a carnal edge. A begrudging Emperor eventually kisses that Atreides ring, symbolically castrated in a humiliating act.

Paul’s related, coercive demand to marry Princess Irulan is no fairy tale ending. The preceding grotesqueries don’t bode well for their coupling, and, even more importantly, Paul is sacrificing his relationship with Chani—implicitly renouncing the Fremen gender equality she personifies and espouses—to rule as the new Emperor. This rejection has a certain oedipal logic, as she’s both a masculine ego ideal and mother figure; the choice of Irulan makes sense within the most restrictive of hetero-patriarchal orders, for Paul can neither be Chani nor be with Chani.

Yet power isn’t totally held by men. Two forms of women’s sexual agency emerge by the dénouement: one, the happenstance love affair, which is more “meet fierce” than “meet cute” in the case of Paul and Chani; and two, strategic social reproduction, organized and directed by the Bene Gesserit, who don’t “hope” but “plan.” When Paul mentally blasts the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, she mutters “abomination.” This is partly an expression of her anger towards Lady Jessica, an order member, for not adhering to the prescribed breeding program when she became pregnant with Paul, with the intention of producing a male heir for Duke Leto. Her decision parallels the authentic affections between Paul and Chani; Gaius Helen Mohiam can’t control everything, especially true love. She telepathically informs Lady Jessica that “there are no sides,” a cryptic assertion that suggests political, economic, and military power—which the men have been killing one another over—ultimately resides with and within the mothers of Dune: Part Two. In contrast to the Bene Gesserit’s dispassionate sexual labor—illustrated when the dutiful Lady Margo Fenring seduces Feyd-Rautha hypnotically in order to capture his “bloodline"—the film’s final scene is a striking visualization of heartbreak but also independence: Chani attracting a sandworm to ride out into the desert, exiting the whole sordid spectacle solo. She remains the master of her own desire.

Consequently, the film doesn’t provide what Teresa de Lauretis thinks of as cinema’s typical “fulfillment of the narrative promise” through the “image of woman,” for Chani is not a “figure of narrative closure” working to “support the male status of the mythical subject.” Nor is the still-pregnant Lady Jessica, as she will soon give birth to Paul’s formidable sister. His mother’s “care for him,” as Freud puts it, will be “transferred to a new arrival.” Whereas typically that place is reserved for the father, Duke Leto is dead and Alia will be strong. In one sequence, Paul dreams of her as a young woman, in what is arguably a moment of profound wish fulfillment. After warning him that the “truth about our family…will hurt you to the core,” she tells him simply: “I love you.” Behind her, of course, is an ocean. 

References

de Lauretis, Teresa. “Oedipus Interruptus,” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Edited by Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. p 88

Freud, Sigmund. “The Passing of the Oedipal-Complex,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. New York: Collier, 1963. p 176

Lacan, Jacques. Formations of the Unconscious. Translated by Russell Grigg and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. p 165