Okay, I’ll be honest: before writing this article I did not know much about Grimes beyond the fact that she was dating Tesla founder Elon Musk (kind of; it looks like they’re broken up now). That alone makes her worth paying attention to, because if, like Musk, you are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, pretty much everyone in your orbit becomes important by proxy.
I have since learned that Grimes is a musician and pop star who’s been working for over a decade. She and Musk have two children together: X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. (They’re a boy and a girl respectively, if the names didn’t make it obvious.) She’s also a big sci-fi fan and even showed up at the most recent Met Gala in a look inspired by the Fremen from Frank Herbert’s Dune:
Apparently Grimes is a big fan of Dune, as she detailed in a new interview with Vanity Fair. She even wanted a crack at directing a movie version of it, one with “the more problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out.” Instead, Denis Villeneuve got to do it, and Grimes was first in line to see the finished product.
“I was just crying my eyes out the whole movie,” Grimes said, saying that she was particularly moved because lead character Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) reminded her of her son X. “I just know X is going to have to go through all this really fucked-up shit that sort of mirrors Paul-type stuff.”
Grimes: “There are things that are deeply not woke in the Dune universe.”
And then, after the movie came out, Grimes partnered with Warner Bros. to promote the film to her large social media following. “I was basically an influencer,” she said. But the studio cut ties with her after she posed while reading a copy of The Communist Manifesto, which apparently was an attempt to troll Musk. (I’m saying “apparently” a lot because I’m just taking it on faith that there’s a logic to these events I can’t quite get my head around.)
Anyway, Grimes says the studio split with her out of an abundance of caution lest people be outraged about some of the more controversial subject matter in Frank Herbert’s book. “There are things that are deeply not woke in the Dune universe.”
I don’t know what we learned from this story, but it certainly was weird. Dune: Part II is scheduled to come out on October 20, 2023.
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h/t IndieWire