Soloway documents a collective of people of marginalized gender and sexual identities as they attempt to carve space for their art amidst the stifling presence of Dick.
Earlier this year, Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024) mounted an attack against autofiction. Autofiction, for Kornbluh, is a “naked rejection of fictionality,” an “overarching mutation, a gutting of literary objectivity [and an] event of epic proportions for which serious explanation is due.” I agree that autofiction’s seeming saturation within the contemporary literary market feels like a recent, epic event that is exaggerated, as Kornbluh argues, by late capitalism’s evisceration of “speculative objectivity.” Yet autofiction is not new, and increasingly, the claim that autofiction is nothing new… is nothing new. From early, scandalously referential works such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to the much more recent French tradition of Hervé Guibert in the 1980s and Annie Erneaux’s “slim autobiographical fiction” in the 90s, “autofiction” as a term first emerged from Serge Doubrovsky’s Fils (1977) and has, as Kornbluh notes, continued to expand in seemingly epic proportions. But in the contemporary American tradition, autofiction’s early roots were in New York City’s experimental, feminist enclave of the 1980s and 1990s with the work of Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, and Chris Kraus—whose novel I Love Dick (1997) would exceed her niche art community and become a blip in mainstream news.
Kraus’s novel, a brilliant mash-up of epistolary, diaristic, and prosaic life-writing, uses the guise of reality to critique patriarchal hegemony within artistic production and the exclusion of women’s perspectives from male-dominated cultural and academic discourse. At the time of its initial publication, I Love Dick eschewed any certain generic categorization. Memoir? Autobiography? Love Letter? Well, no, not quite. The novel follows the characters Chris Kraus, “a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker,” her husband Sylvère Lotringer, “a 56-year-old college professor from New York” and “Dick______, a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère’s [and] an English cultural critic.” The three figures become entangled in a frantic and lopsided love triangle, the novel’s pages awash with Chris’s desperate desire for intellectual stimulation and romance with Dick. Published to minor critical acclaim, the media coverage of I Love Dick often swayed towards tabloid-like coverage of the reactions of the eponymous Dick Hebdige, a cultural studies professor at the University of California and a colleague of Kraus’s longtime partner, Sylvère Lotringer. Hebdige’s outrage and subsequent lawsuit against Kraus for his “nonconsensual” stardom in the novel persisted, despite Kraus having changed all biographical detail in the novel—including titles of Hebdige’s actual publications and scholarship—except for that one key factor, his Dick.
While the scandal surrounding Kraus’s use of fact and fiction dominated the novel’s initial reception, recent years have seen the emergence of a new Cult of Kraus. But what sparked this new readership, obsessed with Kraus’s unique “autofictional” play that impossibly spins women’s desire, desperation, and the damnation of the male gaze? Rather than simply the results of an algorithmic suggestion for readers of Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Jenny Offill, and Deborah Levy, I think Kraus’s resurgence comes from both director Joey Soloway’s 2016 adaptation of I Love Dick for Amazon Prime Studios and the series’ coincidence with the rise of the #MeToo movement, amplifying the more radical feminist underpinnings of Kraus’s original work. In reviving Kraus’s confessional mode as a feminist artistic intervention, Soloway’s I Love Dick takes inspiration from Kraus to disrupt male-dominated artistic production and discourse. Through the adaptation’s addition of the “Dick Jarrett Institute,” which expands Kraus’s solitary novel to an expanded cast of women and non-binary artists, Soloway documents a collective of people of marginalized gender and sexual identities as they attempt to carve space for their art amidst the stifling presence of Dick.
Speaking candidly, Soloway admitted to their ignorance of I Love Dick’s existence as a novel, as though they “must have been in the wrong place to know about the book. I almost felt like [Kraus] was kept from us—like there was a conspiracy keeping me from knowing about her.” In another interview discussing the launch of the pilot, Soloway described the feeling of wanting “to rescue [Kraus] and share her with the world, and introduce her to a new generation of women.” Soloway’s tri-part framing of their ignorance as first, being in the “wrong place” to discover Kraus’s work, second, a “conspiracy” to gatekeep Kraus from the public, and third, a need and desire to “rescue” Kraus, register Kraus’s condemnation to a middle space of culture—neither critically interesting to her then-academic peers in the 90s nor popular to a general reading public.
Kraus’s I Love Dick dissents by enmeshing autobiographical fact with exaggerated, overextending fictitiousness, laying claim to a narrative in which Kraus is entirely in control. Though the eponymous Dick once suggested that Kraus’s novel was “read only because it [exploited] a recognizable figure,” Hebdige’s aggrandizing of his own relevance and popularity betrays an anxiety towards the novel’s content: Dick as an unwilling creative collaborator, a dismissive intellectual, and a cruel and evasive lover. Hedbidge’s dismissal of I Love Dick is only one example of a patriarchal imperative that discredits and obscures messy, blubbering, feminized confessional modes of literature and art. Hebdige’s public complaint betrays his attempt to regain control of the “narrative”—which is Kraus’s fiction, her art form.
Prior to adapting I Love Dick, Soloway, who identifies as queer and nonbinary, consecrated their cultural fame through the award-winning series Transparent (2013), lauded for its centering and showcasing of queer and trans identity. The series starred Maura (Jeffrey Tambor), a transwoman navigating family, life, and identity, which was inspired by Soloway’s own experience of having a transgender parent. Although Transparent justly received criticism for casting a cis-male actor in the lead role, the series’ intermingling of queerness, sexual desire, humor, and trauma earned the show immense popularity. While researching a lesbian character for Transparent, Soloway met Eileen Myles, Kraus’s longtime friend and collaborator. A romance sparked between them, and Myles gave Soloway a copy of I Love Dick. So taken with the novel’s wilding genre-bending, Soloway decided an adaptation had to be on the horizon. In a characteristically grandiose lesbian gesture, Soloway shifted the adaptation’s entire production from California and New York to Marfa, Texas, just to “visit” Myles, who was living there at the time. Soloway’s experience in Marfa, as a “place where masculinity had been running rampant,” nurtured an even greater desire to disrupt the town with an eruption of queerness. Fans of Kevin Bacon’s onscreen cowboy persona as the titular Dick in Soloway’s adaptation can extend their gratitude towards Myles, too.
While I Love Dick’s original triangle exists solely between Chris, Sylvère, and Dick through a composite of hasty love letters, diary entries, and faxes—yes, hi, hello 90s—Soloway’s adaptation doesn’t attempt to replicate the novel’s experimental form and characteristic interiority. Rather, Soloway’s I Love Dick contends with how the series will be disseminated through the Prime Video platform and its over 200 million subscribers globally. While much of the novel’s tension and propulsion depends on letters that—importantly—are never actually sent, received, or unanswered by Dick, Soloway’s adaptation depends on the introduction of new characters that interact within, around, and against the Dick Jarett Institute in Marfa.
The series begins after a fellowship at the Institute is offered to Sylvère (Griffin Dunne), and Chris (Kathryn Hahn) accompanies him as “the wife”; Sylvère is the only older white man to whom an invitation is extended. As Chris tries to carve a space for herself within the Institute, Dick (Kevin Bacon) evades her attempts to enter his artist seminar with the other fellows, such as the Guggenheim-winning-hardcore-porn-art-historian protégé Toby (Bobbi Salvör Menuez), and the Institute’s Black artistic director Paula (Lily Mojekwu). Characters outside of the invited fellows, such as genderqueer playwright Devon (Roberta Colindrez) and Chris herself, operate in the peripheries of the Institute, overflowing into Marfa’s public space.
Soloway’s expanded cast of characters and their performance art, plays, and curatorial decisions are interspersed with archival footage from iconic and revolutionary feminist and queer artists: when Chris is rejected from Dick’s private seminar, a black and white montage from Chantal Akerman’s Je, tu, il, elle (1974) closes the scene. Toby’s euphoric dance sequence in episode three ends with her accidentally shattering one of Dick’s sculptures, cutting sharply to Carolee Schneemann’s erotic Fuses, 1964-67. A clip from Naomi Uman’s REMOVED (1999) opens episode five, “A Short History of Weird Girls,” in which Chris, Devon, Paula, and Toby perform individual vignettes reading their own “Dear Dick” letter, recounting each of their sexual-consciousness-raising. Toby’s main performance piece, an online stream of her naked body lying in the middle of an oil camp, surrounded by confused, rugged male employees, is interspersed with footage from Marina Abramović’s Freeing the Body, 1975, Annie Sprinkle’s Post-Porn Modernist (1989), and Schneemann’s Up to And Including Her Limits (1973–76). The montage flashes across the screen in quick succession as Toby slowly recites a mantra: “this beautiful landscape, pillaged by phalluses pumping oil.”
The flitting of radical, liminal, and obscure feminist footage might arguably be impossible to identify without a liberal arts degree (the show’s consultant Logan Kibens holds one from CalArts), or without referencing the “trivia” feature on the Prime Video platform that offers its viewers some titles of the artworks featured alongside other “fun facts.” But the series nonetheless opens the possibility of nourishing the kind of “creative awakening” Soloway had when first reading Kraus. In each episode and with each performance, Soloway’s characters become fictionalized appendages to a real, historical feminist legacy. In Kraus’s I Love Dick, Kraus constructs a literary network—through letters, faxes, and diary entries—that evokes James, Proust, and Flaubert, a network that functions as both a demonstration of Kraus’s intellectual prowess and as an act of self-consecration within the canon. Replicating the form of the gesture while altering its content, Soloway takes up Kraus’s formal innovation yet disavows any male canonical lineage on screen. Soloway lovingly nestles Kraus not just alongside but within a radical hagiography of the likes of Akerman, Schneeman, Uman, Abramovic, and others.
Soloway’s I Love Dick will forever remain a one-season blip on Prime Video. At Amazon Studios, the then-head of Comedy and Drama, Joe Lewis, believed in Soloway’s adaptation “immensely,” describing it as a “perfect nexus of storytelling and art” that “truly challenges the medium of television.” But despite the show’s rapturous reviews, I Love Dick would never see a second season, nor would Soloway’s other streaming sensation, Transparent, see a completed fifth season, as both were eroded by the sexual misconduct of the men involved in their productions. Ironically, as Soloway cites the “perfect timing” for “a cultural moment about the trans movement” at play in Transparent’s creation and success, reverberations from the #MeToo movement became the impetus for both productions to see their end.
The #MeToo movement strived to disclose and expose the drastically different workplace conditions for women and gender-nonconforming people in the entertainment industry—of which Soloway’s Transparent was no exception. While Transparent’s star Tambor described working on set as being “the safest, most playful set [he’s] ever experienced,” several colleagues would later surface that spoke to the contrary, citing Tambor’s aggressive, violent, and lewd behavior on set. In response to Tambor’s behavior, Soloway killed off his character and ended the series abruptly with a train wreck musical finale, ending the series on what many consider a devastating low note.
And then, as if Kraus’s legacy could not be spared yet another Dick that would undermine her flourishing, that same year, Amazon Studios Executive Roy Price resigned after sexual harassment allegations by Amazon producer Isa Dick Hackett (the daughter of Philip K. Dick). Hackett accused Price of incessant advancements towards her at an afterparty for Amazon’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the Castle. Hackett accused Price of repeatedly telling her “You will love my dick.”
In the upheaval following Price’s resignation, Joe Lewis (Soloway’s primary production support) left Amazon, effectively axing any further support for them at Amazon Studios. Soon after, Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Studio’s “shaking [off] its niche content” in favor of supporting productions like Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power more fully. Soloway’s Kraus-inspired adaptation was shafted aside to make space for shows with “more expansive appeal.”
In their recent memoir, She Wants It (2019), Soloway discusses why they produced Transparent with Amazon in the first place—a decision made only because “nobody else would take it.” And while Transparent’s success then created the opportunity to produce I Love Dick, it could be said that the price for signing a deal with the devil (Amazon Studios) to fund a less “appealing” production like I Love Dick is the (overwhelming) possibility of the show’s cancellation at the snap of an assault or misconduct allegation.
Though both series will be entombed in their Prime Video sarcophagi to be streamed anytime (although perhaps not forever, as streaming platforms increasingly purge their own content), the fate of Transparent and I Love Dick re-confirms hard truths about gendered power in the creative industry. Despite the gains of the #MeToo movement, when it comes to patriarchal power, even when individual men themselves are gone—Dick Hebdige, Roy Price, Jeffrey Tambor—their absence seems to stifle feminist and queer creators just as much as their presence.
In 1997, I Love Dick, despite being published by Kraus’s own imprint, was still ostracized from serious aesthetic consideration by the boy’s club that dominated the cultural scene. Nearly two decades later, Soloway’s adaptation of the novel would be axed by Amazon Studios for being too “niche.” Yet no matter who I Love Dick has been discarded by—culturally by Hebdige, financially by Amazon—the legacy of Kraus and the messiness of the confessional mode persists as worthy of creation and recreation. It is as Kraus’s Chris has always lamented: “if you’re an artist, you can’t rely on other people to do the work for you.”
Andy Perluzzo is a PhD student at Carleton University researching the relationship between creative writing programs, millennials, and the publishing industry. While their only social media is Goodreads, they somehow manage to maintain a healthy phone addiction.