Amazon's 'I Love Dick' makes a muse out of Kevin Bacon

What's the harm in a muse?

Women's curves have inspired artists for centuries, but in the new Amazon series I Love Dick (eight episodes streaming Friday), the female gaze flips the narrative.

From co-creator Jill Soloway  (Emmy-winning Transparent), Dick follows Holocaust scholar Sylvere (Griffin Dunne) and his filmmaker wife, Chris (Kathryn Hahn), who trade their New York digs when Sylvere gets a fellowship in Marfa, Texas, a close-knit community revolving around a renowned artist named Dick (Kevin Bacon).

Marfa is “a small pond, but (Dick) is a gigantic fish," says Bacon. "And everybody hangs on his every move and his every word."

Clad in a 10-gallon hat and cowboy boots, Dick reawakens desire in Chris and Sylvere, and their growing obsession sparks a new kink in the marriage, as Chris begins writing abstract letters to their sexual muse.

“I was especially excited about the dynamics, the story of this couple who sort of fell in love with a person together, which is something I've never seen before,” says Soloway, who shot most of the series during the presidential campaign election months last year. 

But like Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, Trump's win skewed the landscape I Love Dick arrives in. "I assumed Hillary was going to win and this show was going to be a little bit about the past, or the moment before things really got good for women," she adds. "That was the one bright side of the (election result), where I was like, 'Women are going to need this show more than ever.'" 

But the couple's private fetish goes public when Chris, rejected by Dick, plasters her letters across Marfa's dusty streets.

To some, Chris’ sexualization of Dick may seem fanatical. But her actions are “only fair,” reasons a drunken Sylvere. “Men have been doing that with women for centuries: using them as a source of their creativity. What’s the matter,” he says to Dick. “You don’t like being a muse?”

Soloway, adapting the 1997 novel by Chris Kraus, assembled an all-female writers’ room to take on the patriarchy.

"A lot of straight, cis men will say something totally heteronormative without even thinking about it: ‘I don’t like her anymore because she did this.’ Or, ‘What woman would do this?’" says Soloway. "People don’t realize that when they’re talking about what’s appropriate for a woman, they’re talking about likability. For women those things can be really disempowering.”

Bacon says  having all women writers made him nervous: “Like, 'Whoa, hey, how are you going to write for me?' And the truth is that men have been doing that for years. I honestly believe at the end of show, that’s a room of women that wrote way more complex and interesting male characters than I’ve seen written by men,” he says.

The actor, who last starred in Fox's The Following, knows that Dick's focus on the female gaze  might take some viewers outside their comfort zone. (Hang in there: It's during episode five when the series begins to cast its lens into the backstories of the women in Marfa, cementing its powerful thesis.)

“My hope is that they ride it out through that uncomfortable feeling and make it to the end" of the series, says Bacon. "Because ultimately, it’s very satisfying.”