When you set out to watch a show with a name like I Love Dick, Amazon Prime’s newest streaming series which debuted Friday, May 12, you should already be prepared for the shock value that’s inevitable with such a title. But nothing can truly prepare you for the vile filth that this show assaults you with.
For starters, you should know that this is not a family show, obviously. However, nor is it a show for anyone of faith, with morals, a sense of decency, a belief in monogamy, anyone who is against child pornography and exploitation, drug use, sacrilege, crass nudity, or anyone easily bothered by disturbingly weird imagery and words. So, pretty much everyone except liberal, agnostic, extremist feminists.
I Love Dick is based on the eponymous novel by Chris Kraus and is set in small-town Marfa, Texas. Creator and Producer Jill Soloway (Transparent) describes the show as “a feminist matriarchal revolution-inspiring comedy about love and sex.”
“We’re actively disrupting the male gaze,” Soloway said in a behind-the-scenes clip, “actively giving birth to the female gaze but doing so through the transformational power of, like, super soapy delicious storytelling where you just go, ‘I gotta see what happens next.’”
The New York Times raved, “If the first season doesn’t entirely hang together, it’s bracingly risk-taking. At its best, it captures the artistic process in a way that TV rarely does, and it works as a kind of video art itself.”
Who Is Dick?
The plot centers around main character Chris (Kathryn Hahn), a failed filmmaker, and her lackluster marriage to Holocaust scholar Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), who starts a residency under a famed artist by the name of Dick Garrett (Kevin Bacon) in Marfa.
Chris becomes obsessed with Dick and starts writing him letters, which are then discovered by her husband. The letters become both a source of titillation for the couple as well as an “art project” that Chris turns in to Dick to read.
At first, Dick rejects Chris and says he doesn’t find her interesting, even when Sylvere asks him to “fuck my wife” so that Chris will see he’s a real person and will hopefully get over him. But Dick ends up on Chris’s hotel doorstep and begins making advances in order to make Sylvere happy.
Chris rejects Dick when she figures out he only came on to her because Sylvere asked him to, but when the two find themselves alone again later in the series, he starts to feel an attraction towards her and the two start connecting.
Things turn sexual, until Dick reaches his hand down to touch Chris and pulls it back up covered in blood. The season ends with Chris walking away humiliated down a deserted highway with menstrual blood running down her leg.
Bizarre and Disturbing
Throughout the entire season, we are bombarded with the most bizarre and disturbing clips of “feminist art” ever produced. For example, “Mouth to Mouth,” a 1995 independent film by Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart. You’ve been forewarned if you dare to google it.
I Love Dick is also littered with curse words which kind of steals from the writers’ attempts to make the characters sound intelligent with words such as “exegesis” and “subversive."
There is also plenty of religious imagery interspersed throughout the show, but never for good reason or intent. We see Chris flipping through a Bible with disinterest while bored at a hotel, religious statues and crosses in a living room as Dick sleeps with the Catholic housewife who lives there (Devon’s mother), and a fantasy sequence where Dick is walking shirtless down a dirt road towards Chris, holding a lamb over his shoulders in imagery similar to that of Jesus the Good Shepherd.
Upping the shock value, Dick then lays the lamb down before Chris and begins shaving around its penis (lambscaping?) as Chris stares longingly at them, with hints of bestiality and sacrilege all mixed together. A perfect liberal feminist melting pot.
Abortion
Of course, there’s also talk of abortion. What liberal feminist series would be complete without that?
In episode 3, “Scenes From a Marriage,” Chris is speaking to Dick’s assistant Paula (Lily Mojekwu) as Chris tries to recover her letters to Dick before he sees them. “I have two dead kids,” Chris tells her. “I mean, not literally dead. I had one miscarriage and one abortion, but symbolically it feels heavy- you know, dead kids, dead films.”
At the end of episode 7, “The Barter Economy,” Chris appears to be suicidal and walks into a cistern, but episode 8, “Cowboys and Nomads,” opens with her floating to the surface as two men pop up out of the water on either side of her in another fantasy sequence.
“Do I know you?” she asks the men. When one answers that he is her abortion and the other that he is her miscarriage, the only sorrow she shows is over the fact that they are males. “Are you fucking kidding me? I always thought you would be girls,” she laments.
The aborted son isn’t angry, only concerned for her well-being. Because, of course, it’s all about the woman, never the child. He asks her if she got to do everything she wanted, to which she replies, “Um, no. I mean I’m not dead yet, right? So there’s - I guess there is a chance.” She also says she recognizes her husband in the miscarried son because of his “privileged hair.”
Riffing on Monogamy and Sexuality
Monogamy and the Christian view of the afterlife are treated with disdain by the show’s writers, as Chris asks Sylvere why they’ve been monogamous “all these years…when we don’t even believe in it?” Amazon’s X-Ray feature reveals that the scene was originally 13 minutes of the characters “riffing on monogamy.”
“…in like a hundred years, it’s like none of this will even matter anyway,” Chris tells Sylvere as they share a joint, “Because we’re just going to be like, formless, genderless, balls of just pure light, just floating around constantly just fucking each other.”
“Sounds amazing,” Sylvere replies in his drugged-up haze.
This scene is soon followed by one between androgynous character Devon (Roberta Colindrez) and her love interest Toby (India Menuez), both artists as well. Toby enters Devon’s trailer and begins hitting on her. At this point, we aren’t quite sure if Devon is male or female. Because, of course, the writers needed to throw in some “gender fluidity” as well. (We learn later on that Devon’s real name was “Delores,” and we see her topless with breasts and full-grown underarm hair, but we are spared from seeing anything below her waist, fortunately.)
Having an androgynous character fall in love with a woman wasn’t enough, however. The writers went a step further and had Toby say that she wanted to “suck (Devon’s) cock,” and as Toby proceeds to kneel down and perform oral sex on Devon, Devon repeatedly tells her to “suck my cock."
Sexualization of Children
The most offensive scenes occur in episode 5, “A Short History of Weird Girls,” which was described by the New York Times as “the best episode… a transfixingly visualized 20-minute collection of monologues by women in the Marfa community about art and their sexual awakenings.”
When you consider that these “sexual awakenings” occurred as young as six-years-old, and another when a child is raped by her father, it makes you wonder why anyone at the Times would be “transfixed” or choose this as the “best episode.” I would like to think that anyone not blinded by the rampant sexualization inherent with liberal feminism would find the episode nauseating and chilling.
The monologues are based on letters that various females in Marfa write to Dick, describing their adolescence in the most profane ways possible, while child actresses play out the roles of their younger selves.
The first monologue is from Chris who talks about humping a stuffed animal in front of her female babysitter and her attraction to Jesus.
“Dear Dick: I’ve been horny since I was six. I used to press my crotch into the belly of my stuffed rhino in the family room of our Duplex in Cleveland, Ohio. I loved to hump him in front of our sitter Karen Harris. I used to say that Rhino was hungry and that I needed to feed him. Then Karen went away to college and I didn’t feel like doing it anymore. Then I found Jesus. I was the only Jew at St. Cletus Elementary School. I fell in love with Jesus because He looked like a hot 1970’s yogi with his man bun, his loincloth. I used to picture Him climbing off of His crucifix, walking into my room to say ‘hi’ with His tears of blood.”
Interestingly, the closed captioning recognizes the sacredness of the Lord even as the show trashes Him, capitalizing the pronouns “He" and “Him” whenever they referred to Jesus.
At the end of her monologue, Chris says that she doesn’t care if Dick is interested in her, likes her or wants her. In fact, she says, “It’s better that you don’t. It’s enough that I want you.” Then she asks, “Dear Dick: What if we all started writing you letters?” Thus begins the series of monologues from the other female characters.
Can you imagine if this was a man speaking about a woman? A woman who said “no” repeatedly, yet the man kept obsessing over her, fantasizing about her, stalking her, then invites other men to write to her as well? A man who says it’s okay if she isn’t interested because “it’s enough that I want you.”
Somehow, I doubt the New York Times would be raving about that.
Perhaps the most disturbing of all the monologues comes from Paula, who, after innocently talking about her crush on Family Ties’ Alex P. Keaton and her mother’s work on Geraldine Ferraro’s vice-presidential campaign, describes how she made a reading closet for herself as a child.
We see a child actor (who I refuse to name even though the show had no problem exploiting her) playing the role of her younger self, as older Paula says she would allow her hand to “go wherever it wanted” while she read.
[Clip includes graphic textbook drawing of female genitalia.]
That is a child! I don’t care if they don’t show her in “the act.” The insinuation is enough, and it’s just short of full-on child pornography and exploitation.
Graphic Pornography
Next is Toby, though I cannot show you this clip as it is filled with outright nudity and pornography, including a scene of Toby as a child being shown internet porn for the first time by her older cousin. I hope the porn was edited onto the computer screen after the scene was filmed and not in front of the young child playing younger Toby, though I wouldn’t put that past the creators of this show.
Toby was sexually abused by her father which might explain her obsession with pornography in her college years. She attended Columbia University at age 16 and was an art history major. She goes on to graphically describe the hardcore porn she studied:
Toby: In my Early Modernism class, we studied 19th century diagrams of the ideal breast shape. And the thought of that porn still stuck in my head inspired my research presentation at the end of the semester, ‘The Morphology of the Breast in Online Pornography.’
Then I turned my attention to hardcore porn. I refused to discuss its politics. I studied its shapes, the colors, the forms, composition. For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote about what happens to a woman’s face when she sucks two cocks at the same time.
For my Ph.D., I wrote about gaping. Gaping, in case you don’t know, is when a group of men fuck a woman in the asshole and then tape it open to see how wide it’s gotten from all the fucking. Sometimes they measure it. I studied all the different iterations of this gaping hole. My professors had some questions.
Professor: Have you thought about switching to gender studies?
Toby: I’m an art historian. I have no interest in gender studies. Why would you ask me that?
Toby laments in her letter to Dick that “we (women) should be able to study beauty, too. We shouldn’t have to be gender studies majors.”
Beauty?! There is nothing "beautiful" about a woman allowing several men to have anal intercourse with her and then measuring it for the sake of…art? Pornography has destroyed a proper view of women for many of the men who watch it, has objectified women, and sadly has lead to sex addiction and destruction of marriages. But I Love Dick celebrates it as feminist and beautiful?!
Subversive for the Sake of Being Subversive
Finally, what show about feminist extremism would be complete without its own extremist feminist art statement thrown in for good measure? In episode 6, “This is Not a Love Letter,” Toby strips completely naked and live-streams her body as an art project for all the world to see in the middle of “man camp,” the living quarters for the local, male oil workers. Toby is protesting their “rape” of the land.
“This beautiful landscape pillaged by phalluses pumping oil,” she says. “Oil that spills into the soil, ruining the crop. Ruining water…I offer my body, my visibility, my privilege. I invite an open dialogue. Don’t look away.”
In an ironic twist, Devon confronts Toby and takes her to task for her stunt.
Devon: Seems to me like you’re just real busy inflicting all your privilege on all these big, working class, mostly brown dudes just so that somebody out there, or you, can see what might happen.
Toby: It’s an exercise in the mutual debasement of foreign bodies invading foreign lands.
Devon: Foreign. Toby, please, you’re just…you’re using these guys without their consent. You do realize this is like their livelihood? You know. They’re human beings, they’re not just your fucking lab rats. It’s fucking unethical. Okay? And irresponsible, and honestly, fucking pedestrian, Toby, and you know it. And you don’t care because every white feminist out there is gonna come and congratulate you with a big pat on the back for being so brave, and making art that’s subversive for what, the sake of being subversive? That’s so fucking played out. It’s bullshit, Toby.
Exactly how I would summarize this entire show. Subversive for the sake of being subversive. Pedestrian. Unethical. Irresponsible. But they don’t care because every white feminist is going to come and congratulate them with a big pat on the back.
That’s so played out. It’s bull, I Love Dick. And you know it.
