Messy but compelling ‘Dick’ makes for greatness
It is not easy to love “I Love Dick.” In fact, there are moments— a lot of them, really — when Jill Soloway’s new show is exasperating, repugnant, infuriating and magnificently messy. The central characters are not people you would want to spend more than five minutes with in real life, so why am I telling you you should spend eight episodes with them?
Because Soloway is one of the very few TV creators who doesn’t know from not taking huge chances. Putting everything on the line is, not so simply, what she does, and our job, no matter how tough it can be, is to work our asses off to follow along. The work begins when the first season becomes available for streaming on Amazon on Friday, May 12.
“I Love Dick,” co-created with Sarah Gubbins, is based on the book by Chris Kraus and is set in the tumbledown, tumbleweed town of Marfa, Texas. Chris (Kathryn Hahn) is a would-be feminist filmmaker. Her older husband, Sylvère (Griffin Dunne), is a philosopher who has been admitted as a fellow to the Institute at Marfa, founded by smokeless Marlboro Man Dick Jarrett (Kevin Bacon). Chris and Sylvère’s marriage is foundering because their entire relationship was founded on imbalance: As a student, Chris would show up as commanded to Sylvère’s apartment for sex that was not only loveless, but entirely ritualized by Sylvère. She knew he was sleeping with other women,
she tells us in voice-over narration as Chris opens one of his books to find an inscription from the late Fluxus-influenced feminist artist Kathy Acker thanking him for a great f—. But she keeps on coming over and eventually they get married.
They have a tough time fitting in with others once they arrive at the Institute, which only makes sense because when you put a group of neurotically self-involved people together, bonding is not on the agenda. The one thing they all have in common is Dick worship, idolization of the perfectly costumed cowboy-cum-artist-cum-phony who runs the Institute and is the personification of the Freudian slang meaning of his own name.
“I haven’t read a book in years,” Dick crows. “I’m post-idea.”
He lives alone in the far country and makes art. His carved sculptures have only hard edges and straight lines. He believes in the straight line, he says. He watches a snake, brilliantly copper colored, slither on the colorless earth and later replicates it as a series of small stones. Still later, the experience becomes an installation comprising enormous boulders.
Punch line: He hired men with bulldozers to realize his vision. We go from the actual creature, which of course has obvious Freudian meaning, to a somewhat larger replica, to a giant one, created in lifeless stone. Size matters, especially when meant to reflect the phallocentricity of the artist.
Don’t think for a moment this or anything in “I Love Dick” is coincidence. We think nothing, for example, of Sylvère’s academic intent, to take a philosophical look at the Holocaust, until Chris becomes known as “The Holocaust Wife” among the Institute fellows and staff.
For Sylvère and Chris, Jarrett becomes the dick ex machina to rekindle their sex life. Chris writes letters she wants to send Dick, telling him her most intimate thoughts, sharing details of having sex with Sylvère, challenging Dick when he says women are incapable of making great films, venting her fury, really, at the fallacy of patriarchal primacy in art and in life.
Chris is hardly a modern-day Boudica transplanted from a Midtown walk-up to the dusty desert. She’s a mess — neurotic, whiny, filled with self-doubt, tentative and impulsive at the same time. In Hahn’s embodiment, she strides confidently up to others, plants her feet on the ground and then surrenders to paralysis in which you can almost hear her think, “Have I gone too far?” When she thinks she may have indeed done just that, she digs in her boot heels.
Everyone, it seems, loves Dick, and that includes Sylvère. His reawakened sexual interest in his wife owes entirely to her obsession with Dick, so by extension, Sylvère has made Chris a surrogate, because while he concedes there may have been a few penises during experimental moments in his collegiate past, he thinks of himself as resolute in his neurotic heterosexuality. He is a Woody Allen male with a more highly functioning level of self-delusion.
Dunne is always especially effective when he plays a jackass, and Sylvère is a monumental jackass, a snob of the first order, a poseur in life, in work and in bed. Dunne skillfully manipulates us to pity him to such a degree that we can’t help being fascinated by him. Where the rest of the Institute loves Dick, they despise Sylvère, and so do we, even after we realize that the only things that separate Dick Jarrett from Sylvère are cowboy boots and a smaller BMI.
Bacon lives up to his character’s cartoonish persona. He’s Clint Eastwood without the poncho here, and of course, this emblem of swaggering American machismo has to dress like a cowboy. Dick is a sauntering penis.
Hahn’s performance not only anchors the series but pushes it even beyond the multitiered purposes of its thematic construct. She is no one’s idea of a heroine in the battle of the sexes or any other battle, for that matter. It isn’t so much that she makes a fool out of herself for Dick and, by extension, other men, but that she has been told so often that she is a fool, she often acts the part. But beneath it all, she is real. She feels love, desire, pain and a drive to know more about the world that neither her husband or would-be lover would ever understand.
Superb work is also forthcoming from India Menuez as Toby, a young Institute fellow who is a sexual honeybee, moving without commitment from partner to partner; and Roberta Colindrez plays Devon, a lesbian who first encountered Dick when she was a small child and now seeks to emulate him.
Soloway broke ground and defied the odds with the creation of “Transparent,” also for Amazon, but as beautiful and powerful as that series is, it feels almost old-fashioned in comparison to “Dick,” which is only nominally and occasionally linear in structure. Flashbacks? Sure, there are some, but there are entire episodes that simply diverge from “the story,” including one in which the various characters simply talk about who they are, where they came from, and how they got to the present.
Even if viewers make an extra effort, there are going to be aspects of “Dick” that remain beyond reach. Repeated viewings may help get all the details, grace-note references to artists like Kara Walker and various feminist filmmakers, but this is not a series that will ever leave you feeling satisfied. “Dick” will leave you as Jill Soloway intends: restless, provoked, unsettled.
In this case, that translates to television greatness.
For Sylvère and Chris, Jarrett becomes the dick ex machina to rekindle their sex life.