Female desire in a man’s world
Some TV shows claim to give their viewers a lot to think about, but few ever do it as well as I Love Dick, Sarah Gubbins and Jill Soloway’s perplexing, beautifully told, often enthrallingly provocative exploration of female desire in a man’s world. Its eight fast episodes can press nearly every button you’ve got, constantly asking (at times even demanding), that you reconsider the ways in which a story about a woman gets told.
Adapted from a 1997 memoir/ novel hybrid by Chris Kraus that slowly ascended from obscure publishing sensation to cult classic, I Love Dick is littered with impetuous female and male characters who act on some of their worst sexual and artistic impulses.
Kathryn Hahn stars as Chris, an independent filmmaker delivering her historical theorist husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), to the remote West Texas town of Marfa, a 19th-century railroad stop that became a trendy art mecca in the 1970s. Sylvere has been granted a yearlong fellowship at the Marfa Institute to work on his next book, which he describes as being “about the Holocaust — there’s something new afoot.”
Chris and her husband meet Dick Jarrett (Kevin Bacon), a renowned postmodernist sculptor; women and men seem to vibrate in his presence as he moseys into town on horseback, every weathered crease on his face hinting at another reserve of brilliance. Chris and Sylvere, the typically provincial New Yorkers who’ve left their element and are now caught up in their own pretensions, immediately invite Dick to dinner. Unloading her filmmaking woes, Chris is speechless when Dick tells her that her movie sounds dull.
Livid and lustful, Chris bangs out a draft of a letter to Dick that night on her laptop, in which she imagines the details of a torrid love affair with him.
She reads the letter aloud to Sylvere, which turns him on. Without knowing it, Dick has rekindled the couple’s sex life.
Chris unwisely decides to box up the letters with twine and present them to Dick as a work of art. Hahn gives a bold, convincing performance
of a woman unhinged, while Bacon makes fine use of all that steely-eyed aloofness he’s spent a lifetime perfecting.
Sylvere is apoplectic when he finds out; he and Chris frantically try to retrieve the letters and spare themselves the humiliation. Too late. Not only has Dick read a few of them, they’ve also fallen into the hands of Devon (Roberta Colindrez), a local lesbian with her own artistic ambitions, who now plans to stage a dramatic interpretation of the letters.
In her blind lust and horniness, Chris’s letters become an intriguing body of work, something that begins to envelop Marfa’s inhabitants and the town’s rusted, raunchy esthetic, even as Dick issues a cutting demand for Chris to knock it off: “I don’t find you interesting,” he tells her. “Not now, not ever.”
Chris only escalates her obsession. “I don’t care how you see me,” she tells Dick in another letter.
“I don’t care if you want me — it’s better if you don’t. It’s enough that I want you.”
What’s most striking is how I Love Dick makes use of the postlikability era of storytelling, which calls into question the idea that you have to like a character in order to follow along. You don’t root for anyone’s happiness, perhaps because there’s none to be had. Instead you applaud the emotional breakthroughs, the stirring-up of feelings and flaws that nobody talks about, but everyone knows.