Chris Kraus had been describing her 1997 novel I Love Dick as funny for years by the time the news broke, in February, that Transparent creator Jill Soloway was adapting it for TV. Many wouldn’t listen. “Almost invariably, reviewers praise the book for its embrace of ‘feminine abjection’, although I see it more as comedy,” she wrote in an essay for the Guardian.
Fair enough: I Love Dick is fun to read. Its minimal plot is propelled by perversity and real-life gossip: a film-maker named Chris Kraus and her husband, an academic who shares a name with Kraus’s then-spouse Sylvère Lotringer, spend an evening with a colleague of Sylvère’s. Chris becomes obsessed with their charismatic acquaintance, identified only as “Dick ______.” (The cultural critic Dick Hebdige, who filled in the blank himself.)
In her promising Amazon pilot, though Soloway heightens the frisson of Chris’ all-consuming crush, she doesn’t come close to capturing the book’s intellectual pleasures. Her adaptation transforms I Love Dick into a simple half-hour comedy, with an expanded cast of characters and proper jokes. Some of them are scathing: at an academic gathering, a man blithely refers to Chris as “the Holocaust wife” – a reference to Sylvère’s research that trivializes her own work and genocide in the same breath. Kathryn Hahn plays Chris as an awkward neurotic, ensuring that the character comes across as humorous and mostly sympathetic rather than fully unhinged.
But I Love Dick, the book, is punctuated by ideas more than events. Halfway through the book, Chris realizes: “Through love I am teaching myself how to think.” By this point, the torrent of erotic energy drummed up by her crush has given way to a series of essays that re-evaluate the underrated work of feminist artists such as Eleanor Antin and Hannah Wilke, and meditate on the story of American activist Jennifer Harbury’s marriage to “disappeared” Guatemalan guerrilla Efraín Bámaca Velásquez. There’s suspense in I Love Dick, but it’s not about whether Chris will finally win Dick’s love or what will become of her marriage. As the letters grow into a writing project, the question that emerges is whether this period of intense living will lead Chris to a new level in her art. The book’s still-growing influence is better proof than its actual resolution that it did.
Feminist criticism has a reputation for being dense and dour, but some of it is electrifying. From Judith Butler’s academic treatises to the essays of Audre Lorde and Ellen Willis, the most resonant feminist essays are driven by the author’s need to think her way to some form of liberation. And as Willis often wrote, liberation doesn’t just mean political equality; it’s also about women’s right to pleasure. “Life without pleasure – without spontaneity and playfulness, sexuality and sensuality, aesthetic experience, surprise, excitement, ecstasy – is a kind of death,” she wrote.
Soloway has called Kraus’s book “the invention of the female gaze”. It’s a puzzling sort of compliment. I Love Dick was published in 1997. If it “invented” the female gaze, what were the Brontës and Virginia Woolf up to? I Love Dick’s real innovation was to make the intellectual thrills of feminist criticism the engine of a novel – and to heighten that novel’s reality through Chris’s pursuit of pleasure. Its hybrid form was unique at the time. But now its influence is everywhere in feminist literature, from Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, a novel that brutally deconstructs a real friendship, to Maggie Nelson’s X-rated, theory-steeped memoir The Argonauts. Even Jenny Offill’s less formally subversive Dept of Speculation, narrated by a woman who sacrifices her writing career for family and then learns her husband’s cheating, owes a debt to Kraus.
TV has, in the past decade or so, become as effective a medium for serialized narratives as literature. But the I Love Dick pilot proves the rule about television: it can’t compete with books when it comes to expressing complex ideas. Jill Soloway is our most intellectual television creator working today. She seems determined to do Kraus’s text justice. Hahn periodically reads the book’s epigrams, like “every letter is a love letter”, as the words flash against a bright red screen. Chris, Sylvère (Griffin Dunne) and Dick (Kevin Bacon) even discuss their professional interests during a tense restaurant scene, though Sylvère and Dick’s jargon-filled conversation is clearly meant to sound like pretentious noise.
In the book, Chris’s encounter with Dick changes her relationship to art overnight; her understanding of Henry James and the Ramones becomes intensely personal. But a TV show can’t capture the thrill of these discoveries because it can’t give viewers more than a few seconds per episode of Chris writing down her epiphanies as Hahn reads them in voiceover. So the pilot translates this initial flood of inspiration into a scene of Chris typing on her computer, lost in a fantasy where they’re back at dinner and Dick follows her into the bathroom.
It’s an intoxicating scene, shot as a series of woozy, warmly lit closeups punctuated by the occasional still. The dream restaurant serves animals still covered in fur, an image both surreal and primal. Dick is dressed inappropriately for a spot with a tasting menu, in a bad boy’s white T-shirt, and sticks a hand down his pants. All of Soloway’s deliriously objectifying shots from earlier in the episode, which show Dick as the cowboy Chris sees when she looks at him, seem lead up to this moment.
This could be the birth of a new aesthetic. Despite feminism’s ascendance on TV, with forces like Shonda Rhimes and Jenji Kohan broadening representations of women while pushing progressive gender politics, creators still don’t enjoy the stylistic freedom independent feminist filmmakers seized decades ago. I applaud Soloway for trying to insert at least one small reference to those forebears: not a spoiler, but the visual poetry of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, the free-associative anarchy of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, and the obsession with subjectivity that fuels Agnès Varda’s entire filmography are all forerunners of the two-minute fantasy sequence at the end of this pilot.
It was a kind of hint that Soloway probably knew she could never replicate the intellectual rigor of her source material for television. Instead of attempting the impossible, she made a very good television show. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the transcendent experience of reading I Love Dick.
• This article was amended on 30 August 2016 to remove an incorrect reference to a cease and desist order.
