Original subtitles

Jerome: His hands are wandering over her body.

Female voice: Oh, yes.

She's enjoying it.

Oh, yes. Go on, tell me...

everything. I want to know everything.

My God, she's got a fantastic ass.

What, nicer than that lovely redhead's?

Now he's pushing her down on the bed.

- Ah, yes. - He's kissing her breasts.

Ah, all gone.

[gasping]

What's the matter? Why aren't--

Dear Dick...

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 1970s 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.

In high school I wanted to fuck anybody,

male or female.

Nobody took me up on it.

I had severe cystic acne,

and I wore an enormous,

vintage, smelly motorcycle jacket.

And I chain-smoked.

[boy, girl grunting]

In college I found a taker:

Noah Nussbaum.

Finally, someone I desired

desiring me back

was within the realm of possibility.

After we were done,

I wanted to know all the parts of me

that he found beautiful.

He said, "Your lips, your eyes, your hair."

As he listed off these parts of me,

my mind began to wander

to those parts that remained unmentioned:

my nose, my bush, my tits.

After college, my best friend Liza and I

wanted to fuck a rock star.

We finally caught one.

He took us back to his room at the Chelsea Hotel.

We told him we wanted to fuck him as if we were one person:

her body, my mind,

a living representation

of the Louise Bourgeois sculpture The Couple.

This is Louise Bourgeois.

We wanted to act out the Cyborgian split

projected onto every woman in this culture.

You're weird.

Weird girls.

Ten years later, I met Sylvere.

He was the first man I was with

who didn't resent me for being smart.

Hey, I'm here.

Sylvere: Hey, Chris.

I'm in the bedroom. Give me a sec.

Maybe it was because he had just published a book

and everybody thought he was going to be famous,

or maybe because he was so much older than me.

We would meet up once a week to have sex.

I knew he was fucking other people,

but I was too obsessed with him to care.

- All right, come on in. - Coming.

Take off your clothes and touch yourself.

No.

Boots on.

He said what got him off most was watching me get off.

Nothing freaked him out.

Smile at me.

Now don't smile.

After he watched me get off,

we would eat clam soup and talk about philosophy.

He was one of the smartest people I'd ever met.

I mean, if you were ambidextrous--

And I loved seeing myself through his eyes.

A year after we met,

I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease,

and I figured that that was the end of us.

Have some of this.

But instead, he said that we should get married

so I could be on his insurance plan.

A year after that, we stopped having kinky sex.

And five years after that,

we stopped having sex at all.

Forgot what lust felt like...

until I met you.

I don't care how you see me.

I don't care if you want me.

It's better that you don't.

It's enough that I want you.

Sometimes, when I walk down the street,

I look into the faces of every woman I pass,

and I wonder what she sees.

I wonder about the history of her desires.

Dear Dick...

♪♪ [Woman singing in Spanish]

Devon: Dear Dick...

The way you moved...

captivated me.

You swaggered.

You took your time like you knew

the whole world would wait for you.

Hey. Nice to see you.

I asked my parents

for a pair of boots just like yours,

and they got them for me.

We all pretended we were friends,

even though my grandparents had all worked on your land,

just like their parents had.

♪♪[continues]

I loved watching you play cowboy

with all your women.

Watching you, I knew

I wanted to grow up to be like you.

The hand, not the waist.

When my girl cousins told me to act like a boy

so that they could practice kissing,

I pretended I was you.

I had girlfriends from an early age.

I was good at romantic gestures.

I wrote poems that made girls cry.

Why are you doing this to me?

Shh.

Hey, Mom, I'm home.

Hey, there, cariño.

Mom, what's Dick doing here?

I was just talking to him about the ranch, Dolores.

Shut the hell up. My name's Devon.

We don't talk like that in this house.

It's not ladylike.

I'm not a lady!

I was the first member of the Buendia family

to go to college.

I was going to study playwriting,

but then I met Shirin.

I was in love

for the first time in my life.

I couldn't even go to class.

Shirin would practice the cello every day

for hours.

♪♪

[exhale]

[no audible dialogue]

I called my abuela

to tell her that I'd met someone new.

By this point, everybody in my family knew what that meant.

She told me,"Mija,

"it's better if that person loves you

just a little bit more than you love them."

Hmm.

Shirin never told her family

about anything at all.

Then one day I bumped into her

at a restaurant having lunch with a boy.

♪ Just pretend I'm on a journey ♪

♪ Well, I got no time to tarry here ♪

I need to talk to you.

I'll talk to you later.

Hey, dude. I'm Gabe.

♪ And I ain't got time

♪ To linger longer

- Fucking weird. - What is so weird?

I'm not being crazy. I--

We fought for days and days.

you coming up to me in the middle of--

Then one morning she left me,

and she told people we'd never been together at all.

I flunked out of school.

I came back to Texas...

to figure out who the hell I should become.

I wrote this edition with a new one:

Books and Pictures.

This was to vent and focus my anger,

but I was saved. I know now

that the only way I'm going to get on TV

is to make my own goddamn tapes

and play them for myself,

my sisters, my brothers.

We will be seen, and we will be heard.

Dear Dick...

I learned everything I could about him.

He was born on June 9, 1961, in Alberta.

He was a child actor in Canada before he came to the States.

He married his "Family Ties" costar Tracy Pollan

on July 16, 1988.

His middle initial was actually A,

but he didn't like the sound of "Michael A. Fox."

Why did I love him so much?

Partly, I think, I was in love

with his alter ego Alex P. Keaton.

It's kind of messed up,

but something about the idea

of a political conservative...

I found that really, really sexy.

Maybe because my other great love

was my mother.

She was a feminist.

She and her friends wanted to change the world.

They were trying to get Geraldine Ferraro elected

as the first woman vice-president.

♪ There's a river somewhere

♪ Flowing through the lives

♪ Of everyone

♪ And it flows through the valleys ♪

♪ And the mountains...

My dad died when I was 4,

and it was just the two of us.

♪ There's a star in the sky

I loved every part of her:

her ears,

her neck,

and most of all her hands.

They were so soft and warm and smooshy.

I used to beg her

to chop off one of her hands and give it to me

so I could have it all for myself.

I followed her everywhere.

I liked to watch her do her nighttime things--

put on lotion, floss--

while she told me about her day.

Then one night, I noticed something:

her tampon string.

♪ There's a voice from the past ♪

Something in me turned against her.

I stopped following her around.

I started hiding.

Hey. Where's my good night kiss?

Good night.

I turned a closet into my reading nook.

I would get under this soft blanket

my grandmother had knitted for me

and read my Edward Eagar books

and just kind of let my hand go wherever it wanted.

Reading meant touching myself,

and touching myself was something I did

when I was reading.

I didn't have a word for it.

I didn't know it was this thing

or something that you weren't supposed to talk about.

All I knew was it felt good.

The day I first learned

what masturbation actually was,

I didn't want to do it anymore.

Naming it was literally

the least sexy thing I could imagine.

That's why I love your work so much, Dick.

You refuse to give anything a name.

So you call it Untitled.

No, I don't call it anything.

When I first saw your work, Dick,

the word "art" seemed so inadequate.

This was something much more ancient

and unnamable.

Beauty is one thing.

Your work was sublime.

It evoked in me a feeling of boundlessness.

it was fucking terrifying.

When you invited me to come curate with you...

I was ready to dive into that feeling.

I would love to open the new space

with a Mickaline Thomas show.

I only like her early stuff.

How about a Doris Salcedo retrospective?

Young Jean Lee's untitled feminist show.

I'm still here,

searching for something you'll say yes to.

Dear Dick...

or should I say...

Shall we go over your many awards and accomplishments?

You've made a career moving boulders,

cutting trenches in the desert,

making art that reminds us

of how precious Mother Earth and her sacred resources are,

while also reminding us

of the size of your massive steel-and-concrete cock.

Your pieces cost millions of dollars to make.

You employ hundreds of men per project.

You embody everything anyone has ever wanted

from a late 20th century alpha male artist and scholar.

You are a remote, mysterious, unknowable cowboy.

Art historians worship you.

I know all this because we had one of your books

when I was a kid.

This was our living room.

These were our coffee table books.

My favorite was the one about you.

This was the house I grew up in in Santa Fe.

This was my favorite doll.

Her name was Stupid.

Doesn't she look stupid?

This is me and my dad.

He was an expert on children,

so he thought he was allowed to touch me.

This is my mom.

And this is the woman he left my mom for.

This is the first time I watched pornography.

Check this out.

My cousin Tara was visiting.

Ohh! Ohh!

I couldn't get it out of my head.

Oh, yeah. Ohh.

[laughing]

Fuck. Ohh!

Ohh.

[laughing continues]

Dear Dick, I know you went to Columbia at 15

and I went to Columbia at 16,

but it's a lot less common

for people to do that these days.

I was an art history major,

and I saw a lot of naked women

in my survey classes.

There are 500 times as many female nudes

in art history textbooks, Dick,

as there are female artists.

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.

Have you thought about switching to gender studies?

I'm an art historian.

I have no interest in gender studies.

Why would you ask me that?

In the past three years,

I've gotten two postgraduate fellowships,

an Outstanding Dissertation Award,

and a Guggenheim.

I may be nowhere near you,

but I am definitely heading closer.

Dear Dick,

when I first read about you,

I was confused.

Who was this rich, famous person

who got to make whatever he wanted

in the desert?

Did he not know how much I had suffered?

What I mean to say is

we should be able to study beauty, too.

We shouldn't have to be gender studies majors.

You've got 30 years on me, Dick,

but you haven't made a piece in nearly a decade.

Your time is running out.

Dear Dick...

♪♪[guitar]

[laughter]