Princess Irulan Corrino from Dune
The news about Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune is accumulating, with cast announcements, a release date, and a report from the director that it will be divided into two parts. I'm fascinated by Frank Herbert's Dune, mostly because I can never quite figure out whether I like it or not.
The last time it was adapted was as a three-part miniseries on the SyFy Channel in 2000, and though it had its problems, it was largely considered a faithful rendition of the novel's characters, plot and themes. But there was one element that was greatly changed in the transition from page to screen; a character who reminds me a lot of Natalie Dormer's take on Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones in the sense that she's expanded upon greatly outside the source material.
In Herbert's novel, Princess Irulan exists for two reasons: 1) to supplement Paul’s "love versus duty" narrative, and 2) as the Chekhov’s Gunman to a thread of intrigue that wends its way throughout the course of the book.
See, the novel Dune is not divided by chapters, but by quotes and passages from documents that are attributed to Princess Irulan, a character who does not appear in person until the very last chapter. It’s not until then that the reader grasps who she really is: a political pawn that Paul plans to wed in order to consolidate his rule over Arrakis, despite his love for the Fremen Chani.
The book's final passage has Paul’s mother telling Chani: “that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine – never to know a moment’s tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she’ll have little else.”
Thus the meaning behind the quotes strewn throughout the book become clear: they illustrate that Jessica was indeed correct when she predicted Irulan would have nothing to do but write about her husband-in-name-only. We learn absolutely nothing else about the character beyond this.
It’s a clever conceit, but naturally, it does not translate well to a visual medium. And so the 2000 miniseries decide to take the opportunity to flesh out Irulan’s character and expand her role into a significant subplot. Suddenly, Irulan is a character in her own right, a compelling figure whose youth belies her cunning mind and who the denouement depicts as a proud yet pitiable figure whose future is cast in shadow.
Wearing elaborate head-pieces that rival Queen Amidala’s, Julie Cox plays Irulan as lithe and soft-spoken, but also perceptive and cunning. There’s a striking scene in which she, shrouded in white and looking rather like a novice at a convent, enters the chambers of Feyd-Rautha, The Dragon of the story’s Big Bad. She approaches him, slipping effortlessly into seductress mode whilst exchanging glances with the courtesan she’s sent to infiltrate his household, wheedles the information she needs out of him, and smoothly passes him back to her spy once she’s done, reassuming the virginal look once she’s left the room. It’s a great sequence.
So what we get is an interesting subversion of the Standard Hero Reward, firstly in that Irulan herself is a Politically Active Princess who spends most of the miniseries accumulating information through devious means, and secondly that Paul himself is not romantically interested in her despite their early (and largely positive) interaction.
Book purists have argued that the thematic power of Irulan’s deliberate marginalization in the book has been lost, but it's an opinion that ignores the fact that her quotes and passages would have been all but impossible to portray on-screen. And because this version of Irulan is more fleshed out, the audience is able to feel some modicum of sympathy for her as she stands alone in the great hall, Jessica’s voice-over dismissing her as the woman her son will never love.
