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just deleted my fitnesspal!!

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SPOILERS FOR I SAW THE TV GLOW!!!!

this is the best trans allegory i've seen in film. the horror of knowing yourself and not doing anything to change, and passively watching your life slip away as time ticks by...owen has known and denied the truth for the whole movie, until decades later, he's with the horror that he is going to die without escaping the prison of his unsatisfying life. that's one of my biggest fears especially as a trans person. like what if i don't transition, what if i just live my life for other people, and i just stay trapped? the juxtaposition throughout this movie is heartbreaking, switching between owen's bleak reality to the "tv show" reality that is owen's true life, true identity, and true potential. this is the first time i've seen repression portrayed as true horror, but it resonates so deeply. denial is arguably compared to plato's allegory of the cave- maddy/tara accepts the truth and escapes by leaving their stifling hometown and embracing her queer identity, owen/isabel runs from her identity and ultimately ends up trapped in the closet, constantly apologizing for his existence and experiences. i'm going to be thinking about this moving for a very long time, and I will be telling my therapist about it.

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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.

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But I know that's not true. That's just fantasy. Kid's stuff.

I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024) dir. Jane Schoenbrun

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I saw tv glow is like YES the realization you are trans might implode your life and make the world you live in uninhabitable but that will happen anyway if you don’t do anything about it. if you retreat from your own needs and refuse to let yourself resurrect you’re still gonna run out of air and even the tv show that kept you alive at one point won’t be able to bring you back

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I Saw the TV Glow (2024) dir. Jane Schoenbrun

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can't stop thinking about this movie tbh..

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there is still time. there is still time. until your bones are in the fucking ground there is still time.

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I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.

And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.

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Ok also I think the reason I Saw The TV Glow is so powerful (and everyone is making jokes like it got them to start hrt) even beyond its fundamental message of hope and There Is Still Time etc is because as a trans person there are so many people and medias that will ask you the question What If You're Faking It. What If It's Not Real. And ISTVG is the first media I've seen that asks What If You're Not? What if you're not and you keep going on like this?

And it gives that question a name and a physical presence and a weight and an aesthetic and a horror. It's like TV static. It's like falling asleep on the car ride home. It's like living with a light inside you crawling to get out. It's like suffocating to death. It follows that thought to its logical conclusion and, in a frankly extremely painful and hard-to-watch but deeply needed way, excruciatingly draws out what that looks like. Suspended animation. Stasis. A life that is not your life.

It says that choosing not to transition is still a choice.

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I'm very attached to the idea of percy being like, Part Of The Sea as well as a demigod. like yes it's a godly domain that he has powers from but the sea as like, it's own separate primordial Thing that he's also connected to. his powers are so different from other demigod powers, even the other big 3 kids- like, hazel doesn't heal faster if she shovels dirt on an open wound. lightning and shadows can actively kill jason and nico if they aren't careful. none of the other kids can both telepathically AND verbally speak to animals (frank can't speak to animals even when he Is an animal, but he still gets the under water telepathy!). all the sea nymphs he comes across act like he's their baby just as much as he is poseidon's. he gets sick and irritable if he's too far away from the water for too long, and even when he's inland if poseidon is in a mood and causing storms because of it, percy's mood is also affected? whenever he's in the water, it seems like everyone in the ecosystem immediately knows it. sea creatures literally cry out to him for help and he'll sneak out in the middle of the night to go free them 🥺 like sorry I will never get over that it's so sweet 😭. I'm too tired to really articulate this right but I just love the idea that he's not so much tied to the water as he is part of it, like there's just this sort of otherness to the ocean and it's various deities and creatures that is different than all the other demigods and their parent's domains. he IS a demigod but he's also literally a sea creature in his own right and there's a whole community to it. like there's different life forms in the ocean but at the same time everything in it is One in a way. the way he's instantly soothed and calmed by the water, the way the sea always greets him with love, like whenever he's not in the water everyone feels the hole where he should be. like it's more than just being the sea god's kid- he's part of the ocean and an extension of the ocean and Is the ocean all at once. there's like a spiritual hivemind going on there. he feels who goes in and out and they weep whenever he goes out. what belongs to the sea will always return to the sea. am I making any sense here.

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xoxo.

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i want a shirt that says:

“i went to prison and all i got was the transgender illegal alien sex surgery”

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the absolute worst thing is that, objectively, if he was not real, trump would be funny as fuck. as a skit character? like literally fucking hilarious. but no, he’s not a dramatized, satirical parody that exaggerates a stereotype. no. this man is REAL. and that is. fucking terrifying

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*snort*