I Kind of Love I LOVE DICK--Jill Soloway (2016)

In Chris's fantasy, Dick (Kevin Bacon) snuggles a lamb in I Love Dick (Jill Soloway, 2016)

I'm not much of a binge-watcher, even though I know it's all the rage these days.  Yet, I found myself whipping through the entire 8 episode season of I Love Dick (Jill Soloway, 2016) in the last couple days.  Granted, the entire series clocks in at less than 3 1/2 hours, so it's not that much of a time suck.  Yet, I did not want this show to end!  Let me regale you with its pleasures, of which there are so, so many.

So Many Women!--Jill Soloway, Chris Kraus, Andrea Arnold, and all the women-directed clips.  Wow!!

First off, this show is created, written, and frequently directed by WOMEN.  I'm sure you have heard of Jill Soloway from her hit Amazon show Transparent.  While that show carries her trademark thoughtfulness and wit, this new show is a different fish.  The show does similarly highlight nuanced and sophisticated representations of women, but it focuses very specifically on women's interiority and desire.  If a show deliberately tried to embody a "female gaze" in its characters, then this show IS IT!

The show follows Independent filmmaker Chris Kraus (the author of the feminist novel I Love Dick on which the show is based, and one of the series' producers) as she moves to Marfa, Texas to be with her husband, Sylvere, an academic doing work on the Holocaust at a residency at the Marfa Institute.  She does not originally plan to stay in Marfa, until she has her first, rather fateful encounter with Dick Jarrett, a famous minimalist artist who runs the institute and basically draws acolytes to his desert artist's retreat.  (While Kraus was writing about media theorist Dick Hebdige, the show seems to be having fun with someone more along the lines of Donald Judd, who did have a foundation in Marfa, although he was NOT the charismatic cowboy played so winningly by Bacon on the show).

Dick (Kevin Bacon) busily mansplaining at dinner

During dinner, Dick tells Chris that women cannot be filmmakers because they are just not passionate enough and that their oppression gets in the way.  Chris points out "Jane Campion, Sally Potter, Chantal Ackerman," but Dick is a first-class Dick of the highest order.  Instead of dismissing this guy as a sexist a-hole, though, Chris gets highly stimulated by this battle, and it's "GAME ON."  He becomes her muse, and drives her creative writing of a group of "Dear Dick" letters that shake the town, and everyone's lives, including Dick's.  And she will not be muzzled!

Kathryn Hahn as the sexy, beautifully-flawed, and creatively inspiring Chris Kraus

Hahn's Chris is a bit of a hot mess, but wildly funny, and as the show goes on, deeply admirable and somewhat inspiring to those around her.  She has an incredibly rich fantasy life and it fuels the creativity of others, including Dick himself, who when she meets him hasn't created a new piece in over a decade.  The wry digs at the precious academic and art world community in Marfa are actually very gently cutting, making fun of the artist and academic residency racket in a rather kind, but genuinely funny way.

Chris's desiring letters fuel a creative upswing among the Marfa community

Chris is not the only female artist/academic on which the series focuses, as her letters stimulate everyone in the town, especially Toby (India Menuez) who writes on the formal aspects on hard core porn, and is inspired to create her own performance piece (one that is called out for its own entitled privileges).  Paula (Lily Mojekwu) is the curator of the Marfa Institute, but her hands are tied by Dick's stranglehold over the exhibitions.  She wants to curate feminist work by women!  By far though, the show is often stolen by Roberta Colindrez's Devon, a queer Latinx who is inspired by Chris and Sylvere's drama next door to write a play and construct a performance that lifts the men of the town up high.  She is sexy, charismatic, and the heart of the show in many ways.

Sylvere (Griffin Dunne) and Chris's (Kathryn Hahn) marriage transforms over time

The show really never wavers from Chris's desires.  They drive the series.  Nevertheless, I Love Dick is also a careful examination of a contemporary marriage and people who truly love each other exploring who they are and what they need.  While Sylvere can be a bit of a "dick" many times, his love for Chris is pretty unshakeable, and he wants her happiness above all.  His encounters with Dick change him in important ways.

I Love Dick highlights women filmmakers in extraordinary ways--here Carolee Schneeman's Fuses (1967)

The show is also an educational journey into some of the best female experimental filmmakers' work, including pieces by Schneeman, Chantal Ackerman, Marina Abromavic, and the beloved Maya Deren, among many others.  Not only does the show formally and stylistically manipulate the politics of representation, but it also deliberately inserts feminist work to remind people that women are creative forces with which to be reckoned.  This show inspired me to think about using more experimental work in my Women Directors class, or, quite simply, requiring students to blog about this show.

While there are many deliciously sexy people on the show, and the whole atmosphere is riddled with desire, I have to give kudos to Kevin Bacon's handling of Dick.  He serves as the object of desire, and muse, for so many creative and talented women, and he handles that mantle quite well, admitting to feeling flattered and humiliated in equal measure.  Dude.  Welcome to our world.  See this show.  For a very brief time commitment, it's really, REALLY great.

Fantasia 2016--The Love Witch--Anna Biller (2016)

Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is addicted to love in Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016)

It's certainly a testament to Anna Biller's incredible talent in constructing The Love Witch's rich set design and wonky period detail that until Trish (Laura Waddell) whips out a cell phone toward the end of the film, I had no real clue as to what time period in which the film is set. The opening reveals the lovely Elaine (Samantha Robinson) driving in a shiny red vintage car (with matching dress and luggage), and her voiceover only tells of her zeal to start a new life after a tale of heartbreak and emotional breakdown.  Flashes from the past show that Elaine's participation in a coven ritual has empowered her to start afresh, on a quest to experience love at its fullest.  The Love Witch is the story of that journey, and in a more significant way, the consequences that women must suffer in succumbing to the fairy tale myths about gender roles and love that are fed to them by society.

Elaine dines at the Victorian tea room with style

Period anachronisms are what give The Love Witch so much of its charm, as the film pays homage to great 70s occult films such as Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (1971), Baba Yaga (1973), Hammer films such as Countess Dracula (1971) or even some Jess Franco oddity starring Soledad Miranda--although I think The Love Witch does not tap into its queer potential.  Biller's film is rather exclusively focused on hetero fantasies and nightmares (I couldn't help wishing that Trish and Elaine would end up together).  Trish takes Elaine to an incredible Victorian tea room bathed in peaches and pinks, with a golden-tressed lass strumming a harp. A seedy burlesque club hints at Blacula by way of Blue Velvet.

Elaine and Trish hang out at Elaine's witch pad

Elaine making some witch items for a local new age shop

Elaine's apartment, borrowed from her fellow witch Barbara, is filled with kitschy tarot card paintings, a cauldron, and what looks like a well-equipped laboratory spewing smoke in day-glo colors.  Here Elaine makes her love potions that she tries out on several unsuspecting men--to ill effect.  In fact, a moviegoer sitting behind me kept saying every time a man interacted with Elaine--"Uh-oh, he's dead.  He's so dead."  Poor Elaine, she isn't trying to kill anyone.  She just wants LOVE!  Another nice thing about this film--no women were physically harmed in this flick.  A rare thing, even for a horror comedy.

Elaine's bewitching gaze

Much of The Love Witch is so delightfully hyperbolic, that laughter frequently echoed through the theater.  Elaine's sensual stare, enhanced by her witch powers, is so provocative, that it stops men dead in their tracks, zapping them like deer in headlights.  There's something pleasantly off-kilter about a film emphasizing the power of a female gaze.  While the film highlights Elaine's laser interest in being the object of a presumably male gaze, she tends to frequently be oblivious to her effect on others, which speaks to some confusions that the film employs.  Is the film playing to a "male gaze" or critiquing it?

Still, many scenes just add to the overall zany tone.  One of the true standout scenes is a horseback riding date that Elaine has with Sergeant Griff Meadows, a chiseled Bruce Campbell type (without the great chin).  As they are riding through a wooded area, they hear music, and literally stumble upon a performance and feast put on by the Renaissance and Medieval Players.  They sing "Love is a Magical Thing" and it's all rainbows and unicorns (literally).  The costumes, accompanied by the music, are just too, too good!

Griff (Gian Keys) gazes into Elaine's mesmerizing eyes at their faux handfasting feast

The couple are game for a quick costume change and then a handfasting, which Elaine revels in while Griff seems to amusingly tolerate.  Biller is making fun of every fairytale cliche she can find, while also jabbing playfully at the faux witchiness of Renaissance and Medieval fairs.  The soundtrack of this film is truly, truly inspired, and Biller has her hand in every great detail.  When the harpist sings "So tra-la-la and so La-de-da" with such heartfelt sincerity, I was hard pressed not to sing along.

Elaine is every (straight) man's fantasy, but is clueless about her own desires

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, all this lightness is tempered by a rather dark heart.  At the film's beginning, Trish rightly calls out Elaine for some of her truly backwards beliefs, exclaiming "It's like you've been brainwashed by the patriarchy!" Both Elaine and her coven friends espouse the idea that women gain their power through their sexual wiles, but this power is limited only to a certain kind of glamorous, and largely unfulfilling seduction.  Elaine's head is so filled with notions of fairy-tale romance and an obsessive, overpowering love, that she gains little satisfaction from the elaborate steps she takes to secure the desires of the men around her.  In fact, she is so "brainwashed" that an entire scene shows her getting off to a chorus of emotional and verbal abuse spewing from the mouths of countless men, her father seemingly included.

Star (Elle Evans) and Moon (Fair Micaela Griffin) dancing very poorly at the burlesque club

The Love Witch had a few confusing missteps that muddy its message a bit.  The film does no favors for witches, suggesting (albeit hyperbolically) that these goddess worshipers are just perpetuating a rigid gender binary, and that they are only interested in fulfilling narrow narcissistic desires in a quest to bend the world to their will.  Instead of empowering the impressionable Elaine, her coven pals only seem to lead her toward her inevitable doom.  While the film seems to criticize the limited range of power that a woman's (hetero) sexuality elicits, scenes highlighting Elaine's wide variety of scrumptious lingerie are notable and numerous.  Further, the film is almost entirely narrated through Elaine's voiceover (yes, she's pretty unreliable as narrators go), but toward the end of the film, the narration suddenly switches to Griff.  Griff's thoughts emphasize that he's a complete cad, but I felt that this shift in narrative authority dis-empowers Elaine in some unfortunate ways.

Elaine rides off into the sunset with her fake prince and fake unicorn

When Elaine realizes that Griff is not her fated true love, she shatters, forever slipping into the fairytale world where she ultimately gets her prince (and her unicorn).  Alas, that world is both unreasonable and impossible for women fueled by such ridiculous fantasies, and the only recourse for Elaine is madness.  Anna Biller's The Love Witch is funny and entertaining, but ultimately supplies a sobering message to hopeless hetero romantics bent on getting their man.