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Brian Baker
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The interplay between text and access is unique, and the fantastic adaptability fades into the background as the series becomes more interested in Chris Letters "material and text. Krauss" foreplay in I Love Dick is largely theoretical. The woman tries to capture her complex and expansive feelings, and writing the letters to Dick is both an exercise in letters and in the art form itself. The letters are processed into a memoir by Kraus and are revered in all their splendour during the eight episodes of the first season, read aloud, illustrated on the screen and scattered around the city, but above all, in stimulating, exquisite and experimental form written by Sarah Gubbins and Jill Soloways, of whom wrote the letters herself.
The obscure academic in Krauss's book, whom Chris sees as part of his artistic inferiority, is an artist and Chris finds in him the work of a naive Chris, a lover of a certain kind of bad art : art that offers transparency, hope and the desire to be the person who makes it: Dick is played by Kevin Bacon and the show is played by Kevin Bacon. Since the series is intellectual work, the various characters comment on the objectification process that Chris has in mind ; the letters invent a fantasy of Dick that bears only a small resemblance to Bacon's character.
I love Dick is a novel by Chris Kraus and based on the man Dick, an English cultural critic who teaches how to make poor video art in California. In I Love Dick, Jill Soloway's new Amazon show, Dick is the famous American artist who created a massive phallic sculpture and runs an institute for artists and writers in Marfa, Texas. The woman, Chris, is a forty-something indie filmmaker obsessed with Dick.
As the women tell it, Dick acts as an escape from Chris's Devon role model, Toby's curiosity and Paula's brilliant frustration. I Love Dick is a show about all these things, that is, it's about what the women want and they accept that the title is focused on Dick, but it's also about what Chris wants, and that's what the show is interested in. Because of the men who see I Love Dick's face, they take no responsibility for the end of the first season, when Chris rejects Dick because he's not sitting with the same weight as her.
The camera lingers on Dick's lean body and observes Chris opening his mouth. Chris and Kathryn Hahn, who accompanies her husband on his writing assignment, are undone by Kevin Bacon's presence; in a way they understand how he works to make his taciturn pose feel effortless.
The show's biggest disappointment is that Chris never boils down to anything more. I Love Dick begins as an artistic exercise, but it turns into a frustration of women that boils over into a gnarled and raw libido complex. This one becomes loose and strange, wanders in and out of the reach of Chris Sylvere's suffocating neuroses, and is at its most interesting.
When the floundering filmmaker Chris meets sculptor and cowboy Dick she is inspired by her visceral desire to write him letter after letter describing passionate and angry fantasies. Her controversial and frustrating interactions with the sponsored Dick of the Sylvere Fellowship and the writing of her confessional letters begin to influence her attitude to her marriage, work, and confidence as an artist and person.
I Love Dick, adapted from the cult novel by Chris Kraus by Jill Soloway and playwright Sarah Gubbin and whose first season opened in eight episodes on Amazon Arts & TV on Friday, is a triangle of conceptual performances. A cerebral comedy drama about a woman who discovers herself as an artist through the female gaze, based on Krauss's slow-burn novel. I Love You, the new Amazon series from Jill Soloway's Transparent, is less about the book than the character on which it is based, but its premise is the same.
In the TV adaptation of I Love Dick, Soloway draws on the Krauss novel, which presents Chriss's intelligence as a potential bulwark against devaluation, but also shows that devaluation is structural in nature. For Soloway, the female gaze reveals the overvaluation of tails and phallus as well as the female devaluation. When the book was published in 1997, Chris Kraus was the author of Aliens, Anorexia, Torpor and the Green Tears video, in which a veil separates fiction from reality, privacy from self-expression.
Kevin Bacon, the best title character in I Love Dick, is an artist and cowboy who cultivates an air of mysticism in the art-historical city of Marfa, Texas. The sheepshearing scene refers to one of the show's longest jokes, which revolves around the way the show objectifies the bodies of Bacon's characters.
The Amazon adaptation of Chris Krauss "autobiographical novel, directed by Sarah Gubbins and Transparent creator Jill Soloway, is a smug thought experiment that affects his artistic characters bored with their own brilliance in the sun-burnt desert of Marfa, Texas. Krause's explicit declaration of sexual desire is inexcusable and possessed by a man named Dick whom the author covets, which is uncomfortable, to say the least.