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pros: it would most likely vastly improve my life in a multitude of ways

cons: might get scared

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🫂🤍 I LOVE MY COMPUTER! 🤍🫂

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This too shall pass but like holy fuck

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Hi 👋🌸,

I hope you're doing well. I need you to Support our new campaign . We’ve lost our home and jobs due to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in Gaza . We’ve started a GoFundMe campaign to escape the horrors of war and rebuild our lives.

We are vetted by association. Please check our story and support us through this link:

https://gofund.me/89758aef

A 5€ will be sufficient and supportive to our goal.

If you can't donate, at least please share the link

Thank you for your kindness 🌹

donated, hope things get better for you and your family

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THERE IS STILL TIME giovanni's room, brokeback mountain, i saw the tv glow

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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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can't stop thinking about this movie tbh..

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i know most ppl haven’t seen it yet but wanted to write something abt how annoyed some of the critical discourse abt I Saw the TV Glow is making me. MAJOR SPOILERS below the break, be warned!!

so idk i’ve seen so many reviews of the film positing that it’s about the dangers of obsessive fandom and overidentification with fictional characters, esp vis a vis real life self-actualization/coming out. (like, essentially every review has some of this in it, from what i’ve seen.) and, like: i don’t think that’s wrong, but i also think it’s massively underselling what schoenbrun is doing here. the metaphor of the show’s bleed-over is so smart because works in both directions at once.

like, in one direction: when maddy asks owen to come into the show by burying himself alive, you can read it as her asking him to abandon his real-life responsibilities, and the material facts of his real life body, in favor of a fantasy life where everything is already fixed. she’s inviting him to skip over the hard, messy work of transitioning and to sink even deeper into the analgesic obsessions he uses to numb his dysphoria. in this interpretation, it’s, like, the equivalent of overprioritizing “transition goals” instead of actually medically/legally/socially transitioning if that’s what you want, living forever in the ideal instead of taking difficult steps to change the material. (also, uh, if you don’t think she’s literally correct about the nature of reality, she is in fact asking him to kill himself. there’s that.)

BUT! it also works the other way. when maddy tells owen that the show is real, that their lives are just the buried dreams of dying girls in another life, she terrifies him by confronting him with something he’s always known about himself: he was supposed to be a girl. what she proposes is radical, dangerous, seemingly unhinged, and based on a childish fixation: all the things scared closeted trans people worry transition is, basically. on a more figurative level, too, the feeling she’s telling owen is real – that his real life is just a dream within a dream, that his home is not his home, that he belongs somewhere else, that he is supposed to be SOMEONE else – is something so, so, so many closeted trans people have felt before, myself so much included. when he sobs in the shower, yelling “this isn’t my home!” at his dad, i felt a sense of identification stronger than i’ve almost ever gotten from art before. when maddy finally calls him isabel, it’s the gentlest thing i can imagine.

in this read – which i do love, while thinking the other one is simultaneously true – it’s less “come sink deeper into delusion with me instead of dealing with your own life” and more “it’s going to be terrifying, but that childish dream of being a girl you once held wasn’t childish, and it can be real if you’re courageous enough.” he says he runs away from the football field because he thinks maddy’s not mentally well; it takes very little analysis of subtext to figure out he’s running away because he’s afraid of how much he wants what she’s offering. and, of course, the idea of the visible world being an illusion laid atop the world in which one is one’s truest self is a classic trope of trans cinema going all the way back to the matrix. (also: while i’m pretty death-of-the-author-pilled in most media analysis, it kinda seems like schoenbrun themself has interpreted the film in this way, as they’ve spoken at length in interviews about how, to them, transition felt like asking to be buried alive.)

all of which is to say: i think the film IS commenting on fandom, obsession, overidentification, and the ease with which queer people can sink into art as a way to dissociate from real life. but i think it makes the film so much more cynical and so much less tender to treat it as the ONLY read of the film’s relationship with the pink opaque. art, especially the sort of slow, metaphor-laden art schoenbrun makes, is best when it is complex and productively contradictory. the pink opaque is a problem, and an escape, and a fantasy, and it’s real, and one day isabel is going to wake up.

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I finally got around to watching “I Saw the Tv Glow”… I will never be the same

(Lyrics from “Claw Machine” by Sloppy Jane)

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no bc it's not too late. i found your heart, it's still beating. there's still time. come with me. life doesn't have to feel this way. it's not supposed to feel this way. the person you want to be, the person you're capable of becoming has been inside you this whole time. look inside, open up; you're not hollow or empty you are full of life and love and color and everything you thought you could be and so much more. and it's not too late. you can still find yourself. there's still time. you're not gone. your heart is still beating. but you're dying. you're dying slowly, and quickly. and time isn't right. and you're so much more than this. you were so much more than this. you ARE so much more than this. you can escape. we can escape. you don't have to be alone, none of us do. we can be free and ourselves, away from the shackles of where we once held ourselves, of where other people kept us. there's still time. but time is moving fast. and time is moving slow. time is moving constantly. everything is shifting, moving. nothing is stagnant. except for you. but you don't have to be. you are everything. you are nothing if you don't try to be. you are whole. and you are wonderful. and you could be everything you could've ever dreamt of. and there is still time