pisswater-deadgirl

[pisswater-deadgirl]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

[pisswater-deadgirl]

[pisswater-deadgirl]

Cornell Capa, Rural Highway, USA, 1959 

[pisswater-deadgirl]

playstation advertisements in the 2000s

[pisswater-deadgirl]

No way home, Erin Morris

[pisswater-deadgirl]

heartbreak

[pisswater-deadgirl]

Only at the H.R. Giger Bar.

[pisswater-deadgirl]

It’s scary when you realize just how many men RELISH in fantasies where they get to kill people for so called justified reasons… men who stockpile guns in the hopes that their elaborate home intrusion fantasy will come true and they’ll get to shoot the intruder epic video game style. Men who stockpile a militia’s worth of guns in their basement because they drip precum thinking about the day when they will have to fight the evil government outside their door and they get to water the tree of liberty. So many boring ass dudes secretly want to live out the plot of John wick and kill hordes of people in the name of self defense/defending their family and their honor… not actually to protect anyone but just because killing seems awesome and guns give them a boner

[pisswater-deadgirl]

Robert Crumb Valentine Cards Topps (1965)

[pisswater-deadgirl]

Youzo Kurihama. Fishermen, Japan

[pisswater-deadgirl]

Lucy Liu, 1990’s

[pisswater-deadgirl]

(Not Only) Blue (1998)

[pisswater-deadgirl]

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung

[pisswater-deadgirl]

Fergie is like the blueprint of who I wanted to be as a child. and gwen stefani too a bit, and lara croft

[pisswater-deadgirl]

everyone is too distracted to even talk, god I hate it here.

[pisswater-deadgirl]

Golden Gate Park, Speedway Meadow - October 1970 Photos by Ted Benhari (for the Underground Press Syndicate)

[pisswater-deadgirl]

allistic people laugh when I’m being serious and are silent when I’m being funny.. be normal