#moment in I Saw The TV Glow

[sweetberry-roebuck]

Hey y'know when the current moment is transcendently beautiful and meaningful and true, but you know that it is temporary and you can't help but feel existentially haunted by that fact. You know when you are experiencing beautiful heartrending art and you feel lost in the moment and then its over. You know how you'll experience art or human connection or a walk on a nice day and you know the sunlight on your skin will fade and you'll forget how it felt to be this warm.

You know in video games when there is one experience-definingly gleeful or touching or viscerally emotional moment that soon ends and leaves you with something more complicated, more doomed, more cyclical? You know? You know how it feels to dig your claws and teeth into a moment and try as hard as you can to feel it and to remember it and to make it part of yourself? Do you know??

[startheskelaton]

Putting this here to see who actually reads my posts

Next art is gonna show that Nightflyer has always been communicating with the ghost of Predaking whoever kinda like the ancient ancestor of flying transformers (because wings, fuck you. I��m sorry that was rude). He was always ment to be a predicon but yet he emerged much too late to be one. Even though everyone around him praises him for how perfect and gorgeous his body is, he doesn’t see himself in the mirror. Just because you are beautiful by society’s standards, doesn’t mean you’re beautiful to yourself… true beauty is in being able to find comfort in your own body.

But yeah that’s that

[sleep-sounds-nice-rn]

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.

[sashathegirliepop]

I Saw the TV Glow is not a masterpiece. I'm sorry, it's a nice movie but I feel like the pacing is genuinely holding it back to me. it feels like a compilation of cutscenes instead of a full movie. The pacing is sloppy and makes the movie feel inconsistent to watch. It wants to be a horror but the open ending removes that horror to me because the main character's personality isn't shown to us enough for me to actually connect with them. It feels like a movie that's supposed to look nice on a Wikipedia page or a summary, but watching the movie just left me dissatisfied. I Saw the TV Glow was advertised to me as a horror movie with a transfeminine lead and an ominous tone. The movie is ominous, but it rarely dives into more, the movie stays constantly unsettling, but it's consistently just riding a line between unsettling and genuinely horrifying. For the entirety of the runtime, I waited to be scared in any way. A lot queer people praise the film for its trans "representation", and while I do love the metaphor for transition, I wish that our main character was at least slightly more fleshed out. Owen feels like a tool for the story to progress and I genuinely couldn't name a single character trait he holds other than monotone, depressed, and egg. The main highlight of the movie to me is The Pink Opaque itself. The in universe show genuinely captures the essence of shows like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Buffy the Vampire Slayer perfectly and watching scenes involving The Pink Opaque makes me feel exactly how I felt watching these shows in my living room during 2020. I genuinely think the movie would have worked better as horror if it doubled as a comedy, the inherent silliness of these shows contrasted with the real terror of Owen's situation would really help the movie shine. Without depth in Owen's character, the movie feels like a first draft, especially when the only draw to me feels like nostalgia bait. I love the concepts presented in I Saw the TV Glow but with a few more drafts, I think it could have really raised the bar for queer horror.

[zaddyazula]

i saw the tv glow gave me so much hope for my future but also so much fear. what if i don’t ever get to transition? what if i end up trapped as someone i don’t want to be for the rest of my life? what if i do transition and deal with cutting a lot of my close family off? what if i actually am someone else? what if i could actually be me? what about if i transition after i already have a career? how difficult would that make life? i don’t want to end up caged as someone i’m not but i don’t want to lose who i am.

[lizzybeanbutt]

holy shit

[gayiconwaluigi]

Twin Peaks and I Saw The TV Glow are really companion texts. Laura Palmer dies, and with that death, the normal facade of the town is peeled away, while when Maddy disappears, there is no fuss and no grand change. Maddy dies to find her actual world being run by nefarious supernatural beings. Her actual life isn’t banal suburbia. It’s evil. It’s life and death. She tries to peel back the reality of the Midnight Realm for Owen just as Agent Dale Cooper peels back the mysteries and horrors of Twin Peaks, while Owen pleads with her to go to the cops, to engage in the rules of the fake world they live in. Except in Twin Peaks, Coop is a visitor who leaves messages to Diane on his tape recorder, an outsider willing to believe in the supernatural, while Owen is a prisoner who speaks directly to the audience and cannot believe what Maddy has told him. While the whole world of Twin Peaks cracks and falls apart from Laura’s death and Coop’s investigation, revealing the town’s underbelly, Maddy’s death does not free Owen. Instead, the horrors simmer for decades, the facade of normalcy plodding on until the suffocating shell of existence breaks under exhaustion. You are trapped but in what way. And who is there to free you.

[sewerratzz]

pretty little things

the song is (You) On My Arm by Leith Ross !!

[kalirya]

The little exchange where Owen is like "Because they're part of the Pink Opaque" and Maddy going "no, because they *are* the Pink Opaque" and Owen just like exasperatedly rubs his eyes is so real lmfao

[nailyourcoffins]

Since i've seen some fanarts and fics about kaiser as a trans man, may i present a new idea specially for the gender site?

🏳️‍⚧️Transfem Kaiser🏳️‍⚧️

No but seriously, apart from the whole programmer tgirl thing, she really gives the egg vibes iykyk... and the lack of fashion sense some early trans women have (and i say it as affectionate as i can)

I specifically headcanon her to discover herself later in life, maybe living at the same house as Ivete who's also trans and thinking to herself "wait, you can do this??? Not be miserable 24/7?!"

Maybe estrogen could have saved her

[damnbluewires]

even if we forget for a second the trans allegory (which i learned some people somehow dont see??), i saw the tv glow is about the meaningfullness of media.

a fully isolated kid sees another fully isolated kid and they bond over the show they both like. it really doesnt matter how good the show is or what its about, they found a connection with eachother over it. and it helps them to escape the abusive and disfunctional and suffocating reality of their actual lives. they find themselves in the characters, they can imagine themselves being said characters, and to see those characters overcome challenges like monsters or whatnot - it empowers them, helps them see that they too could be strong and powerful and beautiful. even when the whole world is against them.

its the only thing in their life that makes sense. that has a premise, a conflict, and a resolution. yes it also helps when the resolution ends in tragedy, sometimes even more so.

and while one kid stays behind, deeming the show childish and unrealistic, and why do they even resonate with it so much, its silly, its just a tv show - the other escapes. they take that empowerment that a silly tv show no one even knows about gave them and they run with it. and they find a better place in life. they fought the monster like the characters did, and they won!

and if even a single person sees that, a media piece about the meaningfullness of a media piece, and decides 'you know what? this makes me want to fight my monster too! maybe i can also find a better place in life', its fucking everything for me.

[shouldering-worlds]

raise your hand if you remembered to show your straight siblings I Saw The TV Glow this thanksgiving 🙋‍♀️

[0m3g45n1p3r4lph4]

Y'all motherfuckers were NOT joking

That TV can glow

[tattle-tayler]

I just watched I Saw the TV Glow with my dad. He wasn't interested in paying attention, while I was just in a speechless state throughout the entire movie. Holy shit. It's so personal

[allcirclesvanish]

i felt so close to isabel in that bathroom. such bitter, visceral hope when she cut into herself to see something bright and real. i wanted for her to run out of that horrible place and reclaim her heart right then, but i guess things don't always work out so cleanly... maybe fiction is realer than reality in this way. i think the film was really able to capture something so delicate and personal. how many people just like isabel languish underground, apologizing for their own existence...?

[ratatatlas]

My feelings on I Saw The TV Glow, which may include spoilers to some degree, mostly just based on general plot and nothing specific. I highly recommend going into this movie blind.

I Saw The TV Glow was such a deeply unnerving commentary on the feeling of knowing what you could be, but ultimately hiding in the familiar, current self. Fearing that big of a change and never truly getting to experience how wonderful the possibilities actually could be.

I think what resonated so deeply with me wasn't even the allegory of being transgender (though this is part of a bigger whole), but rather the experience of feeling... Incomplete. Of being an "other." The experience of being a kid who feels different, who knows it, but can't figure out why.

Then, instead, you escape into fiction.

Imagine yourself as a TV character, as a narrator in a story, as something bigger or better than yourself. Having psychic powers or being an alien or anything unrealistic would make it so much easier to explain the painful feeling of not seeming quite right. But it isn't true, and so you never face either possibility; the possibility of being something fictional, and the possibility of being your true self.

This movie left me feeling half-dissociated. I felt like I had just been transported back to age ten, before I knew I was queer, before I knew I was trans. A time where I would will myself to believe that I had powers, or I wasn't human, or there was some truly special thing about me, just like my favorite fictional characters. I still feel this way sometimes. And I wonder what I'm shoving down inside myself in favor of these imaginary thoughts. I know, deep down, how I am different. And, like Owen, hide in fiction and in myself.