The Judgment of Chani: How Dune Reflects Our Cultural Divide Over Female Moral Authority

By making Chani the moral center of his epic sequel, Denis Villeneuve sparked an unexpected debate that echoes centuries of tension over women's role as civilization's conscience.

This is a guest post by Joseph Holmes.

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The character of Chani in Dennis Villenueve’s Dune: Part Two is a perfect example of the modern archetype of women as men’s conscience. But her story also parallels the likely failure of any culture-wide attempt to tame men through women’s moral influence.

Dune: Part Two was undoubtedly one of the biggest hits of 2024, with a worldwide box office of over $700 million, plus a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 92% and an audience score of 95%. The film is already being called one of the best sequels of all time and this generation’s Empire Strikes Back (by Christopher Nolan no less), as well as compared to The Godfather Part II and The Dark Knight as “one of the greatest sequels ever made”. It even was nominated for Best Picture at the 2025 Oscars. A rarity for sci-fi films.

Easily the biggest change of Dune: Part Two from the books is the character of Chani. Dune is the name of the first book in a series of sci-fi novels by Frank Herbert. It follows Paul Atreides, the son of a Duke and a space witch (the Bene Gesserit) centuries in the future stranded on a desert planet by his enemies. Paul must convince the desert people (the Fremen) to help him overthrow the people who killed his father and fulfill the prophecy of him being their promised messiah.

In the books, Chani was Paul’s love interest. She believed he was their messiah and followed him uncritically. In the movies, Chani is a skeptic. And as Paul rises further and further to power, her disapproval and conflict with him grows, until she leaves him entirely.

Denis Villeneuve made this change to Chani to make Frank Herbert’s intentions with the book more clear. Herbert wanted the book to be a warning against messiah figures, but most people reading the book at the time saw it as an affirmation of those “chosen one” narratives instead. So Villeneuve made Chani the story's moral center to help fans see how Paul is going wrong as he gains power. As Villeneuve told Inverse:

The movie is structured on the love story between Paul and Chani … The idea was to make sure that we will unfold Paul’s story through this relationship, and that the very specific [turning point of] Paul will be seen roughly more from the perspective of Chani. And that is a very important shift. I changed the nature of Chani’s character to create a perspective that I hope Frank Herbert will agree with in order to achieve his goal.

There’s no mistaking that Chani’s gaze is the moral center of Dune: Part Two. This is true visually as well as narratively. One of the most consistent visual motifs is her face casting moral judgement on Paul’s choices. Paul will say something, or take some action, and the camera will cut to her face. Her face sometimes shows skepticism, approval, or moral condemnation. But whatever it is, it usually comes at the end of the interaction. In a meaningful way, her facial judgments are the final word on Paul at any given moment, telling us how we are supposed to feel about him. She also literally gets the final word in the movie. Her face–passing moral judgment on who Paul has become–is the final frame of the film.

And yet, it’s not uncommon online, even for fans of this adaptation of Dune, to see Chani not as the moral center, but the the problem, calling her “annoying”, or “unreasonable” for her rejection of Paul’s ascent to power. Many fans outright knowingly ignored the intentions of the filmmaker, choosing the watch the film with Paul as the hero and Chani as a “secondary antagonist”.

Why did Villenueve’s strategy to make Paul the bad guy fail for many? One clear reason: Chani represents the female moral gaze. A gaze that many men in our society are increasingly rejecting.

It would be fair to say the female lead being the conscience of the male lead is a well-established trope in Hollywood. Whether it’s most of the love interests of Marvel heroes (such as Pepper Potts for Iron Man), Bianca from Creed, Kitty Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer, Rey in Star Wars, Mikaela in Transformers, Mary Lamb in The Holdovers to Lily Houghton in Jungle Cruise.

It’s equally prevalent in faith-based films. Nearly every movie made by the Kingdom Story Company like, like I Can Only Imagine, American Underdog, Jesus Revolution, or Unsung Hero follows a spiritually immature guy who must be challenged and guided by his love interest, whom he must apologize to by the end.

Hollywood movies weren’t always this consistent in assuming female moral authority. In fact, one can argue they used to be the other way around. While the trope shows up in The African Queen and Princess Lea to Han Solo in Star Wars, male characters in old Hollywood just as often morally led ethically mixed-up women. From The Apartment to Woman of the Year, to Westerns like High Noon or films noirs like The Maltese Falcon, and outright rebellions against female authority like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest.

The West’s tradition of women as the moral conscience of men is equally inconsistent. On the one hand–as Dr. Jordan Peterson is fond of saying–men have long used the ideal of feminine perfection to inspire them to virtue and greatness. The imagery of the knight who fought dragons on behalf of the virtuous woman was so ubiquitous that it was parodied by Don Quixote all the way back in 1615. Beauty and the Beast–which became an archetypal representation of how women tame the savageness of men–was written in 1740. In Catholic circles, the image of Mary has long been an object of devotion.

Even so, as Christian Apologist Nancy Pearcey discusses at length in her book The Toxic War on Masculinity, for most of Western history, men were largely assumed to be more virtuous than women. Virtue was seen as rational, and men were perceived as the most rational sex. This changed when two things occurred: the romantics successfully argued that morality was a function of intuition rather than reason–which people thought women had more than men–and when the gender ratio of women to men at church started overwhelmingly tipping towards women. This was exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution, which took men away from the home and started glorifying what we would call “toxic masculinity” traits like hyper-competitiveness and aggression.

Thus, preachers started regularly arguing that women were morally superior to men and that they must tame the vices of their husbands and fathers (e.g., drunkenness, promiscuity, and violence) and bring them back to church. The novels at the time, which were primarily written by women, reflected that. A typical novel portrayed a drunk, abusive husband who spent all the family money on vice until the good Christian wife either succeeded in reforming him, or tragedy struck.

But in the real world this attempt to have women “tame” men failed. Instead, men grew to see traditional codes of civilization, religion, and morality as “feminine” things that must be rebelled against to be real men. Men continued to live and encourage lifestyles of hyper-competitive capitalism and promiscuity. They invented entire literary genres about the moral superiority of the untamed, savage man. The Western glorified the savage “good bad man” and who the woman needed to save her–often despite her protests (such as her passivism in High Noon). The spy genre–exemplified by James Bond–glorified Bond’s womanizing and ability to bend women–good or bad–to his will. Film noir invented the femme fatale, which had women who moral men needed to resist rather than listen to. These genres became even more dominant culturally when they started dominating the Hollywood genre space.

This follows a generally observed pattern of “male flight” in environments or institutions. When an institution–such as a college, workplace, hobby, or industry–becomes over 60% female, men leave. But the opposite isn’t true. Women follow men to the new places they go.

The final failure of the female moral gaze came with feminism. Women who once demanded to bring men back home and stop sleeping around now demanded to be let into the workplace and–aided by birth control and abortion–be allowed to sleep around as well.

I’m not sure when the tipping point was where the “female moral gaze” became so prominent in Hollywood. But I have a good idea about the reason it changed. Just like romantics and preachers glorified women’s moral superiority because women were more romantic and religious, Hollywood glorifies women’s moral superiority now because women are more likely to vote politically left. Starting in the 1980s, and then increasingly ever since, women–particularly single women–have disproportionately voted left. And since Hollywood men vote left they associate women’s moral instincts as generally more reliable.

This also explains why Hollywood and faith-based industry films portray different women as the moral centers of their stories. As I wrote for Fairer Disputations, Hollywood portrays single women as the moral heroes whereas the faith-based industry does so for married moms. This makes sense because it’s single women who vote overwhelmingly left and are secular. But married moms are religious and conservative That’s why in Dune: Part Two, Chani is the hero and Paul’s mom, Jessica, is the villain. Meanwhile, in the faith-based Sound of Hope, the mom is the hero having to coach (among others) a confused and troublesome teenage girl.

In this context, it’s no wonder some men see Chani as a second antagonist. Men are (once again) moving against the assumption of the female moral gaze. Men and women are diverging politically more than before. Men broke strongly for Trump in the 2024 election and were a big factor in his winning. (Fittingly–for symbolic purposes–against a woman). They are coining terms of derision like "The Longhouse" to describe environments where women impose their will through social shaming, and going crazy when Vice President J.D. Vance signals his inability to be shamed by a woman with his "I don't care, Margaret" line.

Boys in this era grew up raised primarily by their mothers and taught by female teachers, yet found themselves often behind their female peers in school, work, and life (and therefore less likely to be chosen by women to marry). In part due to schools being tuned to girls’s learning styles. Listening to women made them feel bad about their masculinity, and didn't make them happier or more successful.

So these men are abandoning the assumption of feminine wisdom for online mentors and heroes who identify more closely with male experiences and wisdom, such as Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. They’re creating anti-woke online critic communities to push back on feminist messaging in shows like The Acolyte and Rings of Power like Critical Drinker and Geeks and Gamers. (In fairness, Critical Drinker didn’t mind Chani’s portrayal in Dune: Part Two at all.) And, according to them, they're happier and their lives have gotten better.

Dune: Part Two is the perfect crystallization of this split between the male/female, conservative/liberal cultural divide. Paul is a male hero fantasy about an underdog hero who overcomes obstacles to slay his enemies and become king. Chani pushes back against this story as imperialistic oppressor propaganda.

Obviously liberal-leaning individuals are concerned about this male conservative drift. And they should be. After all, men moving rightward is a big reason Donald Trump won the presidency. And historically, the last time women tried to “tame” men’s toxic masculinity as a culture it was not men who were drawn into women’s frame but women who fell into men’s.

But conservatives should be concerned as well. After all, that “male frame” that women followed was into secularism, into promiscuity, and away from the home and into the workplace. The male frame they followed was one closer to Andrew Tate than Jesus. The collapse of the family this created was especially devastating to boys who grew up without fathers. Things breaking toward a male frame can just as easily be negative for traditional conservative values. (See Aaron Renn’s article on the post-religious right).

The answer, of course, is found in Christianity. Bible Scholar Dr. Dru Johnson writes in The Biblical World of Gender that the book of Genesis has a running motif of criticizing men for disobeying God because they “listened” to women rather than God. Adam is condemned by God because he “listened” to Eve rather than to Him (Gen 3:17). That same word “listened” is used when Abram “listened” to Sarai to sleep with Hagar And then it is subverted when Joseph–who follows God and doesn’t fall into temptation–does not “listen” to Potiphar’s wife to sleep with her. But in case men were tempted to use that as an excuse to ignore women’s voices, the rest of the Biblical narrative constantly shows women often as wise followers of God, and men are unrighteous because they do not listen to them.

In the Bible, neither men nor women are the seat of moral authority. God is. It is by both men and women submitting to God that they grow in moral wisdom, not each other. When men embrace Christianity, they see themselves as submitting to a higher moral order rather than to the opposite sex.

And it turns out when men buy into obeying God life becomes better for women. Wherever Christianity spread around the world the lives of women got better. Pearcey’s book discusses numerous examples of scholars (such as Marxist feminist anthropologist Elizabeth Brusco, as well as sociologist Bernice Martin, and the book “Half The Sky” by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn) who found that wherever evangelicalism has been exported, men’s bad treatment of them fell and women’s status grew. Sociologist Brad Wilcox found in his own research that in our own country as well, the men most likely to treat their wives and children well were Evangelical men committed to the church.

It’s a good thing then, that trends are in favor of men returning to church. There’s strong evidence American Gen Z men are now more religious than millenial men are, reversing the trends of decline. Gen Z men are also more likely to be religious than Gen Z women–which flips the church gender ratio for the first time in modern American history, reversing the “male flight” contributing to church decline.

The female moral gaze is not powerful enough to reform men’s hearts. But Christ is. Chani could not change Paul; that was never meant to be her job. Men and women both need to submit to a higher Lord. For all our sakes, society must rediscover the gaze of God as the moral frame of our lives.