Fearlessly focused on female desire

The show: I Love Dick, Season 1, Episode 1 The moment: The meeting

Chris (Kathryn Hahn) is a frustrated filmmaker. Her husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), is a writer. He has a fellowship in groovy Marfa, Texas, run by Dick (Kevin Bacon), a revered environmental artist. She wasn’t planning to stay.

But she goes to a party and he’s there. Dick. He approaches her. The background noise drops out. We hear only their conversation — ordinary pleasantries — over a low thrum. The sound of her desire.

Artful close-ups make us feel her chest tighten, her breath grow gaspy. Casually, she says, “I’m here with my husband.”

On the word “husband,” the sound comes back up.

This series, co-created by Jill Soloway, from Chris Kraus’s source book (a feminist classic), is the most exciting thing to come along since Soloway’s last series, Transparent. It takes on the world’s biggest taboo — female desire — from an adamantly female perspective.

The female gaze is the subject in art and entertainment now, and it’s fearlessly the focus here. Chris writes frank, sexual letters to Dick (we hear them in voice-over and phrases appear onscreen in red block letters).

Female desire is scary because it’s perceived to shatter families and threaten society. By season’s end, Chris’s letters have affected every character. Desire, Chris writes, is “claustrophobia inside your skin.” Soloway shows us what that looks like — to her. I Love Dick streams on Amazon Prime Video. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on popculture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.