As a result of dedicating my life to thinking about Elon Musk as little as possible, I know very little about Grimes. The songwriter and visual artist – who has described her music as “post-internet” and an aspirational combination of Mariah Carey and Aphex Twin – is often lumped together with her billionaire partner, and the two are inexorably linked through both their transhumanism aesthetic and their, ah, social media blunders. So I found the recent Vanity Fair profile of Grimes – whose real name is Claire Boucher – to be a fascinating look at one woman and her relationship to the arts.
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In the wide-ranging interview, Grimes speaks openly about her well-known love of Frank Herbert‘s “Dune” series. As the interviews notes, “Dune” has long been a source of inspiration for the artist. Her first album was titled “Geidi Primes” after the violent homeworld of House Harkonnen (represented by Stellan Skarsgård and Dave Bautista in Denis Villeneuve‘s film). Grimes even claims to have harbored dreams of directing an adaptation of “Dune” with, as the interviewer notes, “the more problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out.”
After seeing Villeneuve’s film, the artist signed on to work with Warner Bros. on the promotion of the film (“I was basically an influencer”), only to have her contract cancelled after she was photographed reading a copy of the “Communist Manifesto.” Grimes describes herself as being upset but understanding at the studio’s decision, noting that “there are things that are deeply not work in the ‘Dune’ universe,” meaning the studio had to be extra-cautious about the type of publicity it sought out.
The annals of science-fiction are littered with esoteric passion projects, so I’m not willing to label a Grimes-directed “Dune” as an unserious concept. Given the headlines the artist often generates, it’s easy to understand how this could be treated as a punchline news story at the end of a long weekend. My only clear takeaway is that I now have one thing in common with Grimes: we both really, really liked “Dune.” That’s something.