In Villeneuve’s words:
“I loved the idea that Harkonnens are a society that doesn’t like hair. […] They remove everything. They want to be as far away from any part of their past as possible, where they are coming from. There’s a will of purity.”
Shaving one’s head has long been a purification ritual in many religions, notably among certain Buddhist monks. The Harkonnens, however, aren’t depicted as being particularly spiritual — indeed, they are hedonistic and cruel — so Villeneuve was likely evoking the panicked, commercially connected hair-removal rituals that began to invade the Western world in the early 20th century. The fashion of shaving one’s armpits didn’t come into vogue until Harper’s Bazaar began hyping it in around 1915. Ever since, both men and women have been encouraged by Madison Avenue to remove more and more of their body hair, in a misguided attempt to look more feminine, “cleaner,” and/or youthful. The complete removal of Harkonnen body hair in “Dune” likely shows that the family has deliberately taken those commercially-driven notions of vanity to their extreme.
In order to make Butler bald, the “Dune” makeup artists outfitted him with a latex bald cap. Butler described the makeup like this:
“There’s two caps on my head. […] One that goes over the hair, and then there’s the sculpted cap that attaches kind of where my eyelids were, right at the crease of my eyelids. That goes all the way back.”
Feyd’s pronounced brow, as seen in the picture above, is artificial. One can only imagine how hot Butler became wearing the latex bald cap while shooting in the desert.
“Dune: Part Two” opens in theaters on March 1, 2024.