Dune’s lip tattoos and Mentat’s secrets, explained

[Ed. note: This piece contains mild spoilers for Dune.]

At the beginning of the runtime of Dune, something funny happens. Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) muses nonchalantly about how much money it must have taken for the Emperor to send an envoy to his home planet of Caladan. In response, his servant Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) rolls his eyes until only the whites are visible, and when he lowers them again, his tattooed lips can spit out the precise monetary cost of the entire production. .

Director Denis Villenueve Dune has so much to explain over the course of its runtime that it never details what the heck just happened, but readers of Dune the book will have a pretty good idea: David Dastmalchian’s Thufir Hawat and Piter De Vries are Mentats, the human computers of the world of Dune.

Why does Dune need human computers? Don’t they have normal computers?

The Dune tradition is long, deep, and strange. That is, tens of thousands of years before the events of Dune, human society was drastically altered by a seismic war against artificial intelligence called the Butlerian Jihad. Subsequently, humanity vowed never to create more machines that could do the work of human minds. It was even encoded in the dominant religion of the galaxy: “You shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

So no, the world of Dune doesn’t have computers, not even pocket calculators. Instead, the complex calculations are done by people called Mentats who are specially trained to be, like, really smart.

Yes, it turns out that the only thing keeping us from being as good at math as computers is proper training.

Why do Mentats have lip tattoos?

Mentat lip tint is one of Dunethe most evocative character images, a visual clue all Mentats share due to: this is Dune, after all, drugs. Mentats routinely drink “Sapho juice,” a kind of hyper-coffee that increases their mental acuity twice or more. Naturally, Sapho is addictive and ultimately has the side effect of turning a wearer’s lips an obvious red.

Donald Mowat, hair and makeup on Dune, told Polygon that the “wine-stained lips” of the movie’s Mentats were among the most difficult elements to design.

“Ridiculous to say,” Mowat said over Zoom. “I spent a week on it. I honestly lost my mind for a minute. ”

On the recommendation of a member of his team, he decided to look to David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation for inspiration. “I tried. I toyed with the idea of ​​blackberry, its color, the wine stains. Aid. ‘

Image: Universal Pictures

Mowat was already working on tattoo design for other character classes in the film, such as the Fremen and Sardaukar warriors.

“That’s what got me thinking ‘Why does this have to be a stain? Why can’t it be a symbol of the color of wine? I kept thinking of blackberries, black currants, dark. And that’s how that little piece came to be. ”