Once upon a time, reading a brainy book in public was a badge of honour. Hell, there’s a whole Instagram account devoted to handsome guys reading on public transit. But as it turns out, this literary flex can backfire—just ask the singer Grimes.
Remember last October, when Grimes was photographed reading The Communist Manifesto in downtown Los Angeles, clad in a galactic bodysuit? Social media users interpreted the viral photo opp as a pointed dig at her then-ex, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, but now it’s come to light that the space-age attire was a missed clue. The singer was on assignment from Warner Brothers, which enlisted her to help with the rollout for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. In an interview at Vanity Fair—the same one where she revealed the birth of her and Musk's second child—Grimes reveals that she was hired to promote the film as an influencer, but her choice of reading material got her sacked. She was devastated, but she understood the logic, saying, “There are things that are deeply not woke in the Dune universe.” Publicly-owned property, it would seem, is one of them.
As it turns out, Grimes and Frank Herbert’s masterpiece go way back. She first experienced the book at age four, when her father read it to her. She became so taken with Dune that she named her first album, Geidi Primes, after the militaristic planet ruled by House Harkonnen. At the Met Gala, she once cornered Sting, who starred as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in David Lynch’s ill-fated Dune, and frightened him with her fangirling.
For years, Grimes harboured a dream of directing her own version of Dune, sans some of the problematic colonialist elements, she has now revealed in her Vanity Fair cover story. But even though that dream was deferred, Villeneuve’s version moved her deeply. For the first time ever, in the story she’d long admired, she saw parallels to her own life. She identified with Lady Jessica, the concubine to a powerful ruler, and in Jessica’s son, Paul Atreides, she saw her own son, X Æ A-12 Musk (whom she’s nicknamed X). “When I see X,” she told the magazine, “like, I just know X is going to have to go through all this really fucked-up shit that sort of mirrors Paul-type stuff. I was just crying my eyes out the whole movie.”
What sort of “Paul-type stuff,” exactly, is little X going to go through? Is he the fabled Kwisatz Haderach? Will he lead a jihad in his father’s name? Anyone who’s read Dune: Messiah knows that things won’t end well for Paul—or his subjects. At one point, Paul admits, “I've killed sixty-one billion [people], sterilised ninety planets, completely demoralised five hundred others.”
Grimes, tell us—should we be worried? Maybe Elon Musk’s plans to move to Mars make more sense than we thought.
Adrienne Westenfeld is the Books and Fiction Editor at Esquire, where she oversees books coverage, edits fiction, and curates the Esquire Book Club.
