I Love DickAmazon Studios

I confess: when I first heard that / Love Dick was about to be turned into a TV show, I balked. I pffed.

“ Chris Kraus' / Love Dick? That 1997 epistolary masterpiece of female gaze and guile and all round first-person genius?” Yes, the very same. A book that has, rightfully, reached hallowed status among the most articulate of art world women. A book that, along with Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), predicted the early-21st-century obsession with self-obsession, self-analysis, self-Othering. A book that, in its 20th- anniversary year, went mainstream and became avail­able in bookshops at airports and supermarkets.

This fate rarely befalls any title published by Semiotext(e). It is also rare that a book so infused with post-structural, post-neo-feminist theory (I know, slap me!) should ever appear transmogrified into a ... main­stream TV show. On Amazon, no less.

How? Why? Who?Surely it can be no coincidence that the show (or,

more specifically so far, pilot) is sired by Jill Soloway (creator of Amazon’s most successful original product, Transparent), who—gossip alert?— happens to be part­ner to Eileen Myles, who, happens to have written the brilliant introduction to / Love Dick all those years ago. (Myles, a poet and memoirist of desirous breadth and urgency, forged in the Smiths-y of New York’s punk 1970s, and also a Semiotext(e) legend herself, is too

undergoing beatific reappraisal these days.) The pilot’s teleplay is by playwright Sarah Gubbins. All in all, a formidable sorority, innately aligned in the best way.

I Love Dick’s story involves a fantasy love triangle where one of the participants (Dick) isn’t even aware they’re in a vertex of desire. Kathryn Hahn plays Chris Kraus, and Griffin Dunne, her more success­ful husband, the French theorist/Semiotextte) pub­lisher Sylvere Lotringer, who is now (for TV purposes) rendered American. The setting has shifted from Pasadena, CA, to Marfa, TX. And the casting that has caused the most uproar: Kevin Bacon (Footloose, A Few Good Men) plays the titular Dick. He’s rugged, rides a horse around town, thinks women filmmakers aren't very good, forgoes underwear, and gets naked by the end of the episode. Bacon-flavored Dick? I Love Bacon Dick? It's worth it for the puns alone.

I confess: when I finished watching the pilot, I had to admit Jill Soloway and team had pulled it off. Because / Love Dick: the TV pilot is its own thing, and it never really makes you feel the absence of Kraus’ guile and genius. I'm reminded of what Philip K. Dick said after seeing the first rushes of Blade Runner in 1981: the film reinforces the book, and the book rein­forces the film— but, they’re independent. They are their own things.

The pilot conjures what Myles described in her introduction to the book: “ I Love Dick is a remarkable study in female abjection,” she wrote, "and in its fash­ion it reminds me of Carl Dreyer’s exhortation to use ‘artifice to strip artifice of artifice,’ because it turns out

that for Chris, marching boldly into self-abasement and self-advertisement, not being uncannily drawn there, sighing or kicking and screaming, but walking straight in, was exactly the ticket that solidified and dignified the pathos of her life's romantic voyage.”

Although the pilot necessarily has to forgo the stylis­tic shifts of narration that are so beloved by readers of the book for something simpler (and is not TV truly the simplest medium, form-wise?), we’re still in the realm of what Kraus believes is “ the only question ... who gets to speak and why.”

I recently met Sylvere Lotringer at the Belligerent Eyes pop-up school held at Fondazione Prada's Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice, Italy. He spoke eruditely about Artaud, Baudrillard, McLuhan. What preoccu­pied me, though, was how I could see him only as I had read him in I Love Dick. But even this isn’t as simple as perceiving him as a victim or a perpetrator, an alpha academic or a feminist champion. In one of his letters in the book, he writes to Dick, “There’s no way of communicating with you in writing, because texts, as we all know, feed upon themselves, become a game.” Kraus reiterates this idea elsewhere, when she tells Dick, “The game is real, or even better than real­ity, and better than is what it’s all about.”

Maybe this observation is true of the TV show, which I hope Amazon greenlights hereupon. If every letter is a love letter, then surely every adaptation is, to use Kraus' phrase, a “conceptual fuck.”

—Shumon Basar

ABOVE: / Love Dick, 2016, film still [photo: Patrick Wymore; courtesy of Amazon Studios]

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I Love DickAmazon Studios

"It was all very Chris and Dick,” I wrote in an email to my best friend, describing the not-quite-there rela­tionship I had this summer. The reference, as I knew my friend would immediately understand, was to Chris Kraus' / Love Dick (1997), an epistolary novel that describes a love affair between an experimental film­maker in her late 30s and an unwilling participant, Dick, a professor at a California college with a procliv­ity for postmodern theory. The novel charts a seduction through a series of letters addressed to Dick and writ­ten by Chris and her husband Sylvere, reveling all the while in the self-conscious abject position of a woman panting with desire and bound by infatuation.

I read the book several years ago, after another friend had lent it to me (“ You must read this!’’), her friend had lent it to mine, and so on. At the time it was the kind of underground book that all the smart women in their 30s were reading: a tome of femaleness that described both with intelligence and intense wit the dangers of mid-life female debasement and persua­sion. Since that time, the work has been published overseas, and there have been long write-ups in The New York Times and the UK’s Guardian, among other accolades. Kraus, who begins the novel regretting not having “ made it,’’ found success in real life after turn­ing her love for Dick (the story is based on true events) into a work of art, which even seems to have made a little money.

The climax of this achievement, perhaps, arrived last spring when it was announced that uber-hip, femi­nist TV creator Jill Soloway had bought the rights to / Love Dick and would be developing a pilot for Amazon.

Soloway is best known for creating Transparent, a family drama about a father who is transitioning to a woman. The show, while doing real work for the vis­ibility of the transgender community, is not exactly known for its subtlety. As such, I think most of us Kraus fans groaned a little when we read that Soloway would be adapting / Love Dick for the small screen. Not because she’s by any means a bad producer, but because the text, which so closely examines the com­plex internal life of a woman, seemed impossible to translate successfully for an external, visual medium. Who could possibly do it justice (other than filmmaker Chris Kraus herself, perhaps)? Yet Soloway has made the contradictions and complications of what it means to be female central to her best work—and she’s dat­ing poet/lesbian icon Eileen Myles, who in her brilliant introduction to / Love Dick described the novel per­fectly as a “cunty exegesis."

So, did any of this cunty exegesis make its way to the pilot? Not a whole lot by way of direct transcrip­tion, but the result is a testament to Soloway and writ­ing partner Sara Gubbins' sensitive understanding of adaptation. They take the basic premise of the novel and relocate it to the desert art mecca of Marfa, TX— known for its Judd sculptures, and home to any num­ber of foundations hosting residencies for artists and intellectuals. Sylvere, played convincingly by Griffin Dunne, was invited by the eponymous Dick as a fellow to one such “ institute,” and Chris tags along. Soloway finds the right tone immediately, opening the pilot with one of the novel's best lines: “ DEAR DICK," it begins, inscribed in white capital letters on a red back­

ABOVE: / Love Dick, 2016, film still [photo: Patrick Wymore; courtesy of Amazon Studios]

ground to fill the screen. “ EVERY LETTER IS A LOVE LETTER." This visualization of the original text pres­ages the sense of recklessness that imbues / Love Dick, bound up not only with desires unmet, but also with the language that headily attempts to convey them.

The original text punctuates sections of the pilot, signaling that Chris is the one telling this story. The wonderful Kathryn Hahn plays Chris opposite Kevin Bacon’s Dick, who is looking especially sexy in this role. The two first meet at an afternoon party, when Chris eyes Dick from the far side of the gathering. The camera jumps toward Dick for a series of close-ups as he slowly rolls and licks a cigarette. The party music dwindles to a low hollow noise, like the sound of wind in the desert. The camera reverses to again show Chris, simultaneously devastated and turned on. Again, the block letters fill the screen: “ DEAR DICK,” they read. “THIS IS ABOUT OBSESSION.” Chris introduces her­self, and they chat in an awkward flirtation, the hol­low sound continuing. Chris mentions she is Sylvere’s wife, and the mood shifts immediately. Dick's attention fades, and the background party noise returns.

This short scene is a good example of the wizardry in Soloway's ability to create and convey the attrac­tion between Chris and Dick—a feeling we might all hope for, even recognize— and the excitement of meeting a sexy stranger at a pretentious party in the desert. Soloway goes overboard— or perhaps, goes Hollywood— at times, as she relies too heavily on music montages and slow sweeping shots of the Texas land­scape. What might be the crux of Chris’ dilemma, a question of restraint, might also be Soloway’s. Should Soloway indulge, as Kraus does?

Given Amazon’s democratic pilot structure, which invites viewers to vote on which series is to be pro­duced, it remains to be seen whether Soloway will earn a forum at all— let alone whether she will use it to cre­ate caricatures in this grand landscape, or to expand to allow for interpretative space. The challenge to match, and the trick of I Love Dick—the novel— is its ability to portray a woman as debased and empowered at the same time, and to convey those perceived polarities as coexistent in a kind of seduction. Whether Soloway will succeed or fail in conveying such contradictions, in TV terms, doesn’t really matter. Ultimately, it's best to for­get the novel when watching Soloway’s interpretation, and let the show be its own thing. What’s certain is that Amazon has left a lot of us with wanting more. As the question lingers—will they order more episodes of / Love Dick?—we are reminded that there’s nothing sexier than anticipation.

— Katie Geha

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