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This article refers to elements from Original Dune Pages for this subject as it appears in other canons: |
For the character in the film series, see Vladimir Harkonnen
- "I make a point. Never obliterate a man unthinkingly, the way an entire fief might do it through some due process of law. Always do it for an overriding purpose - and know your purpose!'"
- ―Vladimir Harkonnen to Glossu Rabban[src]
Siridar-Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (/ˈhɑːrkənən/) (10110 AG - December 10193 AG) was the penultimate ruler of House Harkonnen and chief architect behind the demise of Duke Leto Atreides during the final reigning years of Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. With his nephew and heir, Feyd-Rautha, they conspired for their House to dominate Arrakis and eventually the Golden Lion Throne before their ultimate defeat by House Atreides and their Fremen legions during the Desert War - an event which ousted House Harkonnen, House Corrino and even the Spacing Guild from their positions of power.
Biography[]
Background[]
- "Commonly referred to as Baron Harkonnen, his title is officially Siridar (planetary governor) Baron. Vladimir Harkonnen is the direct-line male descendant of the Bashar Abulurd Harkonnen who was banished for cowardice after the Battle of Corrin. The return of House Harkonnen to power generally is ascribed to adroit manipulation of the whale fur market and later consolidation with melange wealth from Arrakis. The Siridar-Baron died on Arrakis during the Revolt. Title passed briefly to the na-Baron, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen."
- ―Appendix IV: The Almanak en-Ashraf (Selected Excerpts of the Noble Houses)[src]
Leadership[]
Deeming Glossu Rabban too brutish and stupid to be an effective successor, the Baron showered Feyd-Rautha with praise and the promise of eventual leadership, and was also implied to have an incestual lust for his nephew, but his hold over the cunning and impulsive youth remained tenuous, with Feyd even attempting to assassinate him by planting a poison needle in the thigh of a young slave boy, knowing that was the spot his uncle was most likely to touch.
The Baron showed remarkable insight in his recognition of efficiency and talent, as shown in his use of the Twisted Mentat, Piter de Vries, and the way he shaped and positioned his nephews in a grandiose plan to reinstate Harkonnen control over Arrakis. He also had the self-awareness to recognize personal flaws that barred him from pursuing otherwise advantageous strategies such as enlisting the talents of Truthsayers in advisory roles, citing his sexual tastes and extreme distrust of Bene Gesserit witches.
Vladimir's rule of House Harkonnen proved to be notoriously cruel among the other Great Houses. His reputation as a hedonistic pleasure seeker with destructive appetites included a sadistic penchant for young boys, who were sometimes drugged when he wasn't in the mood for "wrestling." Bribes, blackmail, torture, murder and slavery were all considered justified necessities of power, as shown in his treatment of Wellington Yueh and Thufir Hawat, and this systemic cruelty characterized the way his soldiers and administrators handled subordinates and prisoners.
The Baron was known to exploit this ruthless reputation by ordering executions over apparently trivial matters to rid himself of threats. This was particularly evident in how he dealt with Feyd's co-conspirators for their part in the aforementioned thigh-needle, having the slavemaster summarily executed under the pretense of losing a chess game, as well as a couple guards for their clumsy handling of the slave boy's corpse. Such cunning was further emphasized by his coercion of Doctor Yueh's betrayal of House Atreides, wording his promised reward of "freeing Wanna from her agony" in a vague enough fashion that, much to Yueh's lack of surprise, "joining his wife" meant ending their lives. Of course, Vladimir justified this treachery as a practical safeguard, claiming that no traitor could ever be trusted. Just as callous towards his own forces, he did not hesitate to leave his men to die from the poisonous vapor in Duke Leto's boobytrapped tooth before gloating over his own survival.
Despite his sharp and cunning intellect, Baron Vladimir's arrogance and intense hatred for House Atreides proved to be his undoing.
Death on Arrakis[]
Vladimir Harkonnen died at age 83 in the year 10193, during the defeat of House Harkonnen and Sardaukar forces at the hands of Fremen hordes and wormriders on the Plains of Arrakeen. Distracted by the chaos looming around him within the audience chamber of the Emperor's hutment, he was fatally pricked with a Gom Jabbar wielded by a young Alia Atreides as she informed him of her true identity as his granddaughter.
Following his death, the Barony of House Harkonnen briefly passed on to Feyd-Rautha. Held prisoner at the Arrakeen governor's mansion with the Emperor and his daughter Irulan, Feyd challenged Paul Atreides to a duel and met his end on the latter's blade. Passed on to Vladimir's daughter, Lady Jessica declined her father's inheritance, wanting no part in the House that murdered her Duke and drove her family to exile. Paul, now the last living heir, subsumed House Harkonnen into his own - as the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood originally hoped to accomplish with their planned wedding of an Atreides daughter to Feyd-Rautha.
However, death was not the end for Vladimir. After Jessica transmuted the Water of Life to become Reverend Mother of Sietch Tabr, Alia was born with fully awakened ancestral memories, including those of her maternal grandfather. In the early throes of Abomination during her reign as Regent of the Atreides Empire, Alia initially shared control of her body with the Baron's ego-memory in exchange for his protection against other ancestral forces, but his lust for revenge and new life slowly consumed her and supplanted her own mind. In the end, however, this vengeful persona proved fruitless against Alia's supreme willpower in overcoming her possession by suicide.
Description[]
Besides spider-black eyes beneath enfolded eyelids, cheeks like cherubic mounds, bobbing jowls around protruding lips, and large hands that glittered with rings, the Baron's most notable feature was his immensely corpulent frame - implied to be the result of his unchecked gluttony and family genetics, according to his observation on Rabban's growing body fat. Unable or unwilling to walk on his own, all this weight required numerous suspensors harnessed to his flesh, and he could only recline in levitating suspensor thrones.
Being a large man covered in bulbous devices, he always wore dark and loose-fitting robes along with lavish capes for special occasions.
Despite his authoritarian oppression and predatory pleasures, Vladimir Harkonnen seemed to have a rudimentary code of honor. Besides his claim of inflicting pain and fear only when politically necessary, he convinced himself not to keep Paul Atreides as a personal sex slave and even discouraged Piter de Vries from doing the same with Lady Jessica - although this was ultimately a self-serving safeguard against the mother and son's dangerous Bene Gesserit training. He also implored the captive Duke Leto not to make it necessary for Piter to torture information from him, even expressing irritated distaste for the Mentat's boasted methods. However, his concern for the Duke's suffering seemed more out of begrudging respect for his station than the act of harming a fellow human being.
Quotes[]
"A tank-brain. Muscle-minded tank-brain. They will be bloody pulp here when he's through with them. Then, when I send in Feyd-Rautha to take the load off them, they'll cheer their rescuer. Beloved Feyd-Rautha. Benign Feyd-Rautha, the compassionate one who saves them from a beast. Feyd-Rautha, a man to follow and die for. The boy will know by that time how to oppress with impunity. I'm sure he's the one we need. He'll learn. And such a lovely body. Really a lovely boy." - Vladimir's thoughts on his nephews, 1965 novel
"I will have Arrakis back for myself! He who controls the spice controls the universe, and what Piter did not tell you is that we have control of someone who is very close — very close! — to Duke Leto. This person — this traitor — will be worth more to us than ten legions of Sardaukar!" - Vladimir to his nephews, 1984 film
"I won't tell you who the traitor is, or when we'll attack. However, the Duke will die before these eyes and he'll know — he'll know! — that it is I, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who encompasses his doom!" - Vladimir to his nephews, 1984 film
"I want Leto Atreides to appreciate the beauty of what I've done to him. I want him to know that I, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, am the instrument of his family's demise... the extinction of House Atreides and the ascendance of House Harkonnen!" - Vladimir to his henchmen, 2000 miniseries
"I said I would not harm them, and I shall not. But Arrakis is Arrakis, and the desert takes the weak. My desert. My Arrakis. My Dune." - Vladimir to Piter, 2021 film
"Fremen attacks. On your watch! Your orders were to restore spice production, to full capacity! Do you know what it means if you fail? The Emperor will take spice out of our control. Tighten your grip, Rabban. Or feel mine on your neck." - Dune: Part Two
Trivia[]
- Alejandro Jodorowsky wanted famed actor, director and screenwriter Orson Welles to portray Vladimir Harkonnen in his unsuccessful attempt to produce a film adaptation of Dune in the early 1970s. The late Kenneth McMillan was the first to actually portray him on screen, followed by Ian McNeice and Stellan Skarsgård.
- Besides a full head of red hair that influenced most future depictions, David Lynch's 1984 rendition of the Baron was given a more gritty and hideous appearance - drenched in sweat and plagued with diseased pustules that required constant draining - as well as a more unstable personality prone to psychotic ranting and cackling. The pustules bore a strong resemblance to a symptom of AIDS, which was prevalent at the time of the movie's release. Rather than a series of thin straps, his suspensor harness resembles a full-body straightjacket with cables plugged into his bare chest. His demise was also dramatically embellished: instead of merely poisoning him as the climactic battle rages outside the Emperor's encampment, Alia proceeds to tear out his suspensor cables before telekinetically throwing him through a demolished wall and into the open jaws of her brother's sandworm.
- On a similar note, while his pederasty is never directly acknowledged in the 1984 film, it was given an indirect reference in one of the scenes of the movie, which featured Harkonnen torturing one of his servants in a scene interspliced with a romantic embrace between Leto and Jessica Atreides.
- Although the 2000 miniseries still retains his sadistic nature from the book, it's downplayed in favor of his more manipulative scheming, with his pederasty similarly toned down in favor of adult slaves. He is also shown to speak in iambic pentameter on multiple occasions.
- In relation to the focus on his manipulative scheming abilities, the miniseries explicitly states that Baron Harkonnen designed the plan to depose House Altreides in its entirety, while in the novel, it's heavily implied that Piter de Vries was responsible for most if not all of the planning.
- In Denis Villeneuve's 2021 and 2024 films, the Baron - like all members of his Great House - is stark-white and completely hairless from minimal UV exposure and toxic levels of industrial and pharmaceutical chemicals. While very obese, he remains structurally handsome with blue eyes, broad shoulders and muscular limbs powerful enough to lift a grown man with one hand. Unlike the book and previous adaptations, the Baron's suspensors are bolted directly into his spine, which makes an audible popping crunch whenever it's relieved of gravity. Interestingly, his lengthy robes cause him to appear abnormally tall and worm-like while hovering - a possible foreshadowing of his great-grandson. Like his book counterpart, he wears multiple rings including a jointed finger sheath which contains his personal shield generator. Similar to the 1984 version, he also has an embellished death. In this case, however, Emperor Shaddam IV proceeded to personally inflict mortal wounds on the Baron by having the Shardaukar destroy both his life support system as well as his suspensors, with Paul Atreides also proceeding to finish him off instead of Alia (due to the latter still developing in Jessica's womb) as the latter was trying to ascend Leto's throne, also making clear he's his grandson immediately before dealing the final blow similar to Alia, and similar to the 1984 film his corpse was thrown into the desert upon death in an ironic parallel with how he had tried to do the same to Jessica and Paul. The Water of life's flashbacks also seem to imply that Harkonnen was at least aware of Jessica being his daughter and showing a softer side around her as an infant.
- The Baron's homosexuality was given an indirect reference via his binding a stripped and drugged Leto Altreides to the table and making him watch as he pigs out at the dinner table. However, it's also significantly downplayed to the extent that he willingly keeps female concubines in the Villeneuve version (and was also implied to be aware of Jessica being his daughter in the water of life visions), with only subtle hints at his book version's predilections (aside from the scene with Leto, he also briefly kisses Feyd during the latter's coronation, and his bath attendants have see-through clothing).
- While the book's suspensors only lighten his weight enough to walk without strain, all three screen adaptations fully levitate off the ground when he's not resting - an embellishment that apparently originated from Jodorowsky's screenplay and storyboards. Dune: Part Two also features the book's levitating suspensor throne.
- How Vladimir managed to survive Duke Leto's final act varies between sources. In the book, he merely flees through a secret escape hatch upon seeing Piter and his guards succumb to their poisoning. In the 1984 film, Leto's vision is blurred by his drugged state, causing him to only take out Piter with a short-range cloud. In the 2000 miniseries, the Baron barely manages to escape the growing gas cloud by flying across the room in a flailing panic (although the original script plays out more like the book). In the 2021 film, despite taking it right in the face, his personal shield slows the airborne toxin long enough for his suspensors to lift him to the dining hall's ceiling - although he later requires significant rehabilitation to detoxify and repair his ravaged lungs, which become permanently dependent on medical baths and levitating metal ventilators.
Gallery[]
.jpg "220px-Baron Harkonnen-John Schoenherr-Illustrated Dune (1978).jpg (7 KB)")
Appearances[]
Novels[]
- Dune
- Dune Messiah (mentioned only)
- Children of Dune (ego-memory)
- God Emperor of Dune (mentioned only)
- Heretics of Dune (mentioned only)
Adaptations[]
| Preceded by Unknown |
Baron of House Harkonnen ? - 10193 AG |
Succeeded by Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen |
| Preceded by Unknown |
Governor of Arrakis ? - 10191 AG |
Succeeded by Hasimir Fenring |
House Harkonnen
| |
|---|---|
| Barons |
Vladimir Harkonnen • Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen |
| Family | |
| Retainers |
Piter de Vries • Umman Kudu • Iakin Nefud • Thufir Hawat • Czigo • Kinet • Pardee • Guild Bank Agent |