Dune: Part Two (class film, Elizabeth White)

 I saw Dune: Part Two with my friend as part of our course and I very much enjoyed it. It was a fun experience and I got my family to go see it because I knew they’d like it as well. The most obvious religious aspect of the film was the Fremen fundamentalist religion that Paul ends up the leader of. The Fremen religion was founded to make sense of the chaos of Arrakis. The colonist expeditions to mine spice, the dangerous sandworms, and the hostility of the terrain itself are all an issue for the Fremen. They create rituals to survive on the planet, such as the special method of walking, or the sandworm riding coming of age ritual. Our lecture notes offer a three part definition of religion summed up by the statement, “When our experience of the chaos overwhelms cosmos, religion offers a way to maintain the cosmos, usually through ritual.” Ernesto Grassi defines religion as, “man’s endeavor to construct a ‘holy and intact’ cosmos which he conceives to be reality other than himself. This reality is that to which man turns in order to give himself a place in an absolutely meaningful order” (102).  The Fremen’s religion, although they are unaware of how it has been manipulated by the Bene Gesserit, gives them an intact cosmos to understand their world and survive in the face of chaos. The continual references (“as it was written”) by fundamentalist Fremen, such as Stilgar, to their prophetic texts coming true show the importance of their religion to their hope of survival. The Fremen fundamentalist beliefs line up well with our course’s definitions of religion. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kip Redick Introduction

Welcome to the Religion and Film blog for 2024. Make sure to start the blog with your name and the subject of the entry (Just as I have done with this post). Blog entries will be considered informal writing assignments and as such will be graded more in relation to content than style. Blog entries will contain questions and answers to questions, as well as reflections which relate to daily classroom discussions, completion of exercises, and reading assignments. Any questions the student has when reading or completing assignments should be written in their blog. Reflections may relate to connections the student makes between discussions in this class and those in other classes, between arguments raised in the readings in this class and those raised in other classes or in informal conversations. Students are encouraged to apply the ideas learned in this class to activities that take place outside of the class. These applications make great reflections. The student should bring quest
Read more

Akere Simms - Blog Decalogue

  In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue films, the audience will gain a deeper understanding on the Midrash motive; connecting both films to the 10 commandments, and the laws a Christian must abide by so that they may strive and live more like Christ. In the first decalogue, the audience will gather the setting of a young intelligent boy(Pawel), whose aunt wishes that he enhances his own spiritual connection. When with his father, they both subconsciously find themselves consumed by a man made computer. He asks his father what “death” truly is, seeking for more than just the scientific answer most people would say. “Death is a memory, thoughts and specific characteristics of one person after they have passed on.” When Pawel and his father come to discover that the computer they have has the ability to form a consciousness all while being extremely intelligent; they begin to feel (or at least Pawel) that they can visualize his mom’s dreams all while communicating with her. Krzystof (Pawel
Read more

Decalogue 1&5 Kaylyn Rivera

The film works as a visual medium of Midrash due to its poetic, disruptive, and investigable concepts. Midrash is explained as taking a deeper look into the text at hand and interpreting the meaning of it as we see it. Historian Henry Abramson explains Midrash as similar to the modern-day literary technique of deconstructionism. Midrash is not exactly a criticism, nor interpreted as fact, but as an explanation of what the religious text in mind may mean while observing it through a critical, self-imposed lens. In the films shown, we are given bits and pieces of the character's lives. They are ordinary people; a father, a son, a friend, a sister… No meaning is blatantly given to us, rather and perhaps, hinted at or alluded to. The films are disruptive to our sense of what is right and wrong on a deeper level while considering the implications of the commandments. Should we trust in science as an “icon” or is this blasphemous to a “god”? Should we condone the murder of a murderer?
Read more