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Back in January, we sat down with Jill Soloway, the Emmy-winning creator of Transparent, in Park City, where she was set to premiere her new Amazon series I Love Dick at the Sundance Film Festival. Snow was falling outside the window, the energy was high, and people’s voices were incredibly hoarse.
“It almost seems like the perfect time to be launching this show, because the show is all about feminist anger,” she says, eyes still wide with electric excitement.
Soloway had flown directly from Washington, D.C., where the previous day she took part in the Women’s March, for the impeccably timed premiere of her new show. “I don’t have to, like, turn off my revolutionary brain and turn on my TV brain,” she says. “This is wild.”
By title alone, I Love Dick carries a certain political, even baiting, charge. The half-hour comedy series, which launches on Amazon Friday, is a heady, raucous one, based on what had been considered a deeply unadaptable book by experimental filmmaker and writer Chris Kraus.
Kraus’ I Love Dick has been described as “sprawling, cerebral, and uncomfortably intimate” and is a lightning rod in the academic gender studies space.
The book chronicles Kraus’ move with her husband to Marfa, Texas, and an intense infatuation they both develop with a culture critic named Dick. As they collude to seduce him, Kraus, despite Dick’s attempts to stifle her, discovers her artistic voice.
“For me, I’m always on the lookout for the mechanics of a good story,” says Soloway, reacting to what had been branded the insurmountable feat of adapting Kraus’ complicated work. A love triangle in which a heterosexual couple falls in love with a man? “That to me is a juicy story.”
But Soloway, who created Transparent based on her own experience as the child of a transgender woman, saw a personal entry point into I Love Dick as well. For a hook, there’s the love triangle. But the story is also about a woman finding her voice in an environment of men who won’t validate it.