#isttvg rewatch

[uwuipunchedurmom]

something i’ve not seen anyone notice about isttvg is that in the scene where owen/isabel is walking down the hallway, as the tape notes show up, the messages of being courageous and brave are constantly shown, contrasted with the staying true theme also on the walls. she stayed true. semper fidelis. never taking the chance.

[thesunoficaruss]

I saw the TV glow is so horrific to me because I fear that's my future. you find out who you really are. not who you're told you are, who you really are meant to be. you have someone who accepts you for who you are. maybe even multiple people. and yet, you bury it deep in your chest out of fear. lock it up and throw away the key. but eventually, you are crushed under the weight of what could've been. you're drowning. you were born to be someone else. you ARE someone else. you yell I'm dying! can't you see! but other people were born who they were always supposed to be. you're weren't. it's killing you. nobody can see you. there's still time. until there isn't.

[timelyenigma]

theres still time

'i saw the tv glow' is one of those "well what do i do with myself for the rest of the night?" kind of movies. and also i need to watch it several more times

also you should probably watch it with a friend you trust

[devilish-parrot]

so i just watched i saw the tv glow. lads im sitting here, sweating, heart pounding, verge of tears, goosebumps, shaking, very confused, unable to speak. 10/10 experience i recomemd.

[kqtebishop]

peak viewing experience

[chai-en-kaadhale]

utena and i saw the tv glow utena and i saw the tv glow utena and i saw the tv glow "escape with me and stop repressing yourself" and anthy and isabel being entirely self aware of their predicaments and not moving from their positions but rather being complacent, worn out by their surroundings and the fake realities twisting around everyone's truth and identities and the memories that were lost from other timelines/realities and the fact that theyre kids and the "end of the world" being the guy who wants to keep everyone trapped in ohtori just like mr. melancholy and desperately, desperately needing escape andand andnd andndgbgngnnd

you know what if utenanthy could escape then isabel WILL bury herself one day trust (delusion)

[bookwyrminspiration]

I SAW THE TV GLOW!!!! thoughts?? 👀

i think that was the most transgender movie I have ever watched and I didn't even consciously realize it until afterwards

I had absolutely zero idea of the story going into it, I just knew people who liked and rec'd it to me and I'm curious. so it took me a minute to understand what was happening--and also just because. you know. the movie itself fucks around with reality

got pretty caught up in debating what was real, so I'd like to watch it again to focus on the allegorical, emotional aspects. there's so many layers to it all I just know I missed so much.

but after it finished my dad and I both kinda just sat there like. what tf just happened. and it turns out we both interpreted the end scene differently. I thought Owen's hurrying meant they'd held onto their realization and were on their way to do something about it, so I was really caught off guard by the sudden cut. my dad focused instead on the apologizing as evidence they'd regressed and repressed everything again, the cut off meaning Isabel never escapes and they're now dead.

very mind fucky, will be thinking about this for a while. i've already proposed it to my mom so I can rewatch it

[strange-calathea]

Thinking about the scene where Owen's dad pulls them out of the tv screen....

[milfygerard]

hey you casanova

hey you supernova

☆~Come Home~☆

[asclexe]

Do you want to rewatch I Saw The TV Glow with me..?

yes but i am doctor who maxxing as well. the doctor is fallunfg. falls. they made them all trans women.

[rivetgoth]

The fact that I’ve seen a few people try to analyze I Saw the TV Glow through a lens of it being about like, fandom and obsession with media and nostalgia being bad ?? is genuinely blowing my mind. Obviously there’s the fact that this movie is as unambiguously about being trans as it can possibly be without just saying outright “this is a movie about being trans” but I also think this is crazy because I would say it actually has one of the most unambiguously positive relationships with concepts like “media consumption” and “nostalgia” that I’ve seen in a movie.

Like, to say it’s a shallow interpretation of the film to call it “about media/fandom” (and especially a negative depiction of such things!) is putting it quite kindly because I kind of feel that anyone who utters such sentiments didn’t actually understand the core element of the entire movie: “The Pink Opaque” is not a show. Commentary the film makes about watching “The Pink Opaque” cannot translate to commentary on watching shows broadly because the movie spends half its runtime making it explicitly clear that “The Pink Opaque” may be a show that exists in a literal sense but is not one in a figurative sense. “The Pink Opaque” represents the possibilities of childhood and innocence. Innocence that still is not free from judgment—Owen gets told the show is for girls, Maddy’s friend accuses her of sexual harassment on account of her sexuality while they were watching it together—but it’s the moment in your youth (or any time! it doesn’t have to go away!) when the possibility of queerness and more explicitly queer utopia feels real to you. The external pressures to conform are still there but you can tune them out if just for a moment to envision a future and a life for yourself free of it and living authentically. I think this is an experience all LGBT people can relate to, but in the case of ISTTVG it’s very explicitly primarily focusing on queer femininity, predominantly transfemininity, but in Maddy’s case as well she is a queer woman (I’ve seen some interpretations of her as transmasculine but I disagree personally). Hence the on-the-nose nature of it being PINK.

What feels very genius about Schoenbrun making it about a show though is that it’s so generational, right? For all of us LGBT people who grew up in the age of screens that WAS where a lot of that early imagination going wild resided. The first time you explore a new name is on anonymous forums. The first time you explore your masculinity or femininity is with which character you relate to in a show, or which gender you select in Pokémon. Movies and shows with “queer subtext” or even without give young LGBT people the chance to envision relationships and futures for themselves, what many grow up and call “shipping.” You have your first gay crush while watching your favorite movies. You envy those of your true gender while watching your favorite movies. Amongst many other things when Maddy watches “The Pink Opaque” she’s given access to a world where two women share this intimate connection and overcome obstacles together. When Owen watches “The Pink Opaque” they’re given access to a world where femininity is a real option for their future.

The relationship these characters have to “The Pink Opaque” is a net positive and the movie makes that so incredibly obvious when Owen goes back to rewatch it later and finds that it’s nothing like how they remembered, it feels childish and immature and dumb. That is a bad thing. This is a bad thing. The movie wants you to see this as a bad thing. This is the result of repression, of conversion therapy, of violent coercion into normative lifestyle—That sense of limitless possibility is destroyed and the idea of accessing one’s transness, of imagining this utopia where you CAN be yourself and live as a woman, strong and beautiful on the other side of the screen as said in the film, is lost. Now you tell yourself it feels silly, it feels childish to imagine such things, it’s not nearly as deep and meaningful as you believed it was when you were younger and less inhibited, or it’s at the very least easier to tell yourself that. Owen’s feeling embarrassed is of note here. If it weren’t for these external pressures that have been internalized they very well may have been able to still enjoy the show, even as they’ve aged and grown and matured, even if their perspective has changed a little. But they can’t. Not yet, at least.

I feel kind of out of my mind seeing people try to approach it through a lens of commentating on media consumption because it’s so deeply missing the layers of what’s actually being said… and not even in a wildly obfuscated way. The movie is ABOUT the relationship these characters have to “The Pink Opaque” and how the loss of that is a bad thing. How you can possibly watch it and see it being about some kind of growth from obsessive media consumption is mind boggling to me. Seeing multiple reviews and posts in tags about it is crazy. One thing I really like about this movie is that it so confidently argues for a more positive interpretation of being obsessed with “fantasy” and the childlike wonder of the limitless possibilities of fiction. I think that’s a very very trans narrative, as I mentioned it feels tied deeply into Queer Utopia, and I find it much more bold of a stance to take. In a world where people tell trans individuals (and especially trans women) that their identities are works of fiction or products of the imagination or even caused by excessive media consumption, to embrace these things and turn them over and use them as a symbol of the whimsy and innocence and excitement that first ignites that spark as a positive, thrilling, beautiful thing is very cool.

[sockhatingsapphic]

propaganda poster i made for isttvg! planning to have some friends over to rewatch soon :)

[lilydvoratrelundar]

tagged by @lesbosexual to do my top 9 films i first watched in 2024!

these are in the order i watched them - Laura in March, Dunc Part Tunc in April, The Exorcist and Collateral in June, Harakiri in July, Eyes of Laura Mars in August, I Saw The TV Glow in September, Heathers in October, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish a couple of weeks ago

ISTTVG is the most a film has impacted me, possibly ever. It hurt. It still hurts, I feel like it's a film I need to revisit and rewatch at some point, but even three months on I'm not sure I'm quite ready yet.

Harakiri, Laura, The Exorcist, and Puss in Boots were all films that I knew I'd love, or that I'd just heard so much about in terms of them being near-perfect films that it was not surprising at all that they're favourites of mine now too. Likewise Dunc, though that had only been out for a few months when I saw it at the student cinema.

Laura was picked on a whim by my mother and honestly it's done me a disservice for every other Noir I watch, because it's such a perfectly constructed film that everything else I've seen in the genre doesn't seem anywhere near as good.

Collateral was one Charlie had mentioned, and she was absolutely right that it's exactly my thing and a fucking fantastic film. Similar in some ways to Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai in what I have started referring to as "philosophical crime dramas," giving just as much time to their protagonist's understanding of the universe and their place in it as they give to tense action or chase sequences.

Eyes of Laura Mars was a strange one, because about halfway through I found myself tiring of it a little, and said that one choice it made was the most boring way the story could have gone, unless something very specific happened at the end. And then at the very end, that thing did happen, and my perspective on the entire film flipped and it's solidly one of my favourite films of all time, which I didn't expect when I picked it out semi-randomly due to a vaguely interesting premise and it being in a collection on Criterion.

I shall tag: @grimdarknokia @regicidal-defenestration @lycheo @ylfas-bottleneck @innocet @zagreus-eats-your-bread and anyone else who would like to do this!

[lifeintheworldtocome]

rewatching isttvg with friends. migjt cry super hard

[stargazinglesbian]

rewatching isttvg and then i'm gonna go on a massive fucking paper girls fic binge because i miss kajemac and my girls tiff and erin sooo much. crazy plans for the night 💪

[sainthelgas]

Follow up post to the last one. I wanted to contain all my comparisons between isttvg and worlds fair in one post.

The big thing that really stood out to me on rewatch is near the end. When LBJ is quoting cassie talking about the night they talked. About going to the world's fair, she also says "I made it there, to the planetarium". It reminded me a lot of the planetarium in isttvg. That made me start to think how many similarities there were between the worlds fair and the pink opaque. They're not the same but they are very similar imo. More like two sides of the same coin. The pink opaque is definitely more of a positive force in the characters lives then the world's fair. It almost feels like a middle point between worlds fair and something yet to be released. I know Jane Shoenbrun said it was like a thematic trilogy but I'm getting what they mean a lot more now.

Also I love how both movies deal with the themes of identity. Isttvg's more obvious with this theme but it's here too with Cassie describe herself becoming someone else.