#that other post was right! lots of thoughts on count gobbledegook IV today

[fluxofthemouth]

36. — opulent

ohhh this is a good one

Dune has different ways of showing its villains as being on a selfish path, completely disconnected from the story's virtues that the heroes either already have or get to learn (interpersonal loyalty, connection and harmony with the environment, etc. etc.).

The Baron is fat and keeps eating 'on screen' (fatness as a metaphor for greed is problematique, as they say; not the kind of energy I would want to put out, but that's what Frank wrote and, pretty clearly, what he meant by it). The Baron has a lot of rings on his fingers. He's the selfish guy who's selfish and comfortable. No one tells him no.

Piter is thin. He's in the same room as the Baron in all of his scenes in Dune 1, so I can't help but see it as a contrast, as something that can mean the opposite of what it means for the Baron to be fat. He'll try to set the tone of the conversation & put out his own energy into the room, but he'll yield and backtrack quickly wherever the Baron gets upset about it. He's (very interestingly!) described explicitly as masking his emotions, acting cheeky, serious, etc. as a face he's decided to show rather than as a purely natural reaction to his circumstances (and Jessica uses her Bene Gesserit training to observe that underneath the masking he's basically very dangerous and unstable). But his eyes give him away as someone who shows no restraint when it comes to using spice. And Piter is more greedy about spice than the Baron himself, the character who represents greed.

Jessica also notes that he? drinks enough water? compared to the people of Arrakis, and it's written kind of like oh look at the bad guy, so comfortable. but that's true for just about any other character from off-world, so I'm counting that as less of a major sign of opulence than having a spice addict's eyes off Arrakis. Let's all drink enough water, it's,, good for you.

(They really missed an opportunity to properly add Piter's perspective into the movie! The perspective of the evil character who wants spice, not as a way to have large scale power over others, but as a sort of small-minded personal comfort. He doesn't care about where it comes from or who has to get hurt in order to get it, he just wants it because it benefits him, and he cares about that more than he cares about other people.)

So anyways, Piter is from the faction that represents selfishness, and he actually has a lot of indicators for restraint tacked on his character sheet. But there are areas of his life where he doesn't show restraint at all, not even a little bit, and where he can even out-indulge the benchmark character for over-indulgence. So there's a side to it where he's this lowly henchman scurrying around the Baron's table looking for scraps, and there's also a side to it where he's this rich and opulent asshole who has more wealth than whoever the 'common man' is in Dune and all it did was make him want more.

I don't remember the name of the speaker, but I heard a really good lecture on youtube a few years ago about like. Corruption within religions and abuse dynamics or something like that. And she had this really good point about how people who have power can be at their most dangerous when they think of themselves as the lowly victims. Because if you're the victim, you're justified in doing what it takes to protect yourself, and the other people in the equation will hurt you if you let them, and your perspective is the one that matters the most. And if you slide into that mindset with real power to hurt others, you're going to prioritize yourself over the people you should be protecting or at very least curious about.

I see Piter as someone who has seen a lot of shit at one point or another, from his abusive 'education,' from his workplace, and so on. And someone who is so stuck on that (evidence-based!) victim story that he just isn't curious about other people. So when you put him in an environment where, hey, he's actually the chief advisor to one of the richest Great Houses in the Dune universe, hey, he's probably making more money than 90%+ of all of the named characters in the story, he's so deeply identified with the kicked dog image of himself that he doesn't realize how much power he actually has. So instead of feeling like someone who has enough resources to retire three times over or whatever, he's still very deeply operating in scarcity mode, and maybe all of that could go away anyway, and the important thing is to keep getting more because if he doesn't have enough then people will hurt him.