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Honestly, I probably would have liked that show.
What a sharp, delicious hit it turns out to be.
She doesnt tiptoe up the stairs when guests ring the bell at the Homestead.
Shes an opium-dosing, cross-dressing, open-mouthed kisser.
Let us count the ways in which weve been force-fed dour, vitamin-deficient biopics of our favorite authors.
Its fine, I guess, but wheres the convulsing orgasmic joy and pain?
But more often it fades into the period wallpaper.
Sometimes, of course, experiments go awry (see:Midnight in Parisin totality).
In all these cases, your mileage may vary.
(Personally, I can handle dreamy Romeo Leo, and thats about it.)
But messing with actual, once-living literary idols has for some reason bent toward humorlessness and rigidity.
Dickinsonoffers a master class in fucking with your literary idols.
The peripheral characters all have the names of people who really lived in Amherst when Dickinson was alive.
All that precision builds a stable platform for the funky, wild abandon that Smith stages on top.
That bread turns orgasmic when it rises and rises in a roaring oven while a female character comes.
Writers, theyre just like us!
This isnt a parody of Dickinson and her life.
The joke is instead on contemporary readers who have twisted her up like a soft-serve ice-cream cone.
Give me more of this.
More, more, more.
An animated Philip Larkin show helmed by a bird and drawn by the Instagram artist@falseknees.
I do understand the visceral discomfort of being thus fucked with.
But why not live a little?
In a show about a poet a hundred years ahead of her peers, does time even matter?
Dickinsonis irreverent as hell, but irreverence alone cant do all the heavy lifting for this or future biopics.
This Emily stays home because work calls to her, because she craves immortality.
There is no self-imposed punishment or romantic exile.
Is that the truth?
And it opens Dickinson up to us, rather than encasing her in scholarly carbonite.
Damn, I like this Emily better than the one I thought I knew.
