In 2018 I watched through a curated filler-free selection of Sailor Moon, and I wrote about it on this very blog 6 years ago. I told the tale of how I discovered the show in 2003, sick on the couch one morning while home from school and channel surfing, and then vibing with it for some reason and continuing to watch it in secret. What I didn't tell you all back then was the day that secret was uncovered. The day when I was in the basement viewing it when someone came downstairs to get something. A vain attempt to change the channel to hide my deeds was attempted, but it failed. A 17 year-old boy was caught watching Sailor Moon, and chastised for it because that's a show for little girls. It was the memory of this event, reader, which lit the spark of rebellion in me in January of 2018. That was what brought me back to Sailor Moon, and to everything that has come since in the intervening years. Why do I tell you this story? Because a similar thing happens in the film. At the 40 minute mark, the protagonist played by Justice Smith asks if they can stay up late to view a show of some fascination in the film, called The Pink Opaque. The father (played by Fred Durst for some reason) barely turns his head while driving and offers a cutting rebuke to this request. "Isn't that a show for girls?". Reader, that line threw me right back in time to that basement in 2003 like I was a food critic who just took a bite of ratatouille. Me and this motion picture, we had an understanding from that point forward.
Jane Schoenbrun (who we last discussed with We're All Going To The World's Fair)'s I Saw The TV Glow has lots of things going on under the hood. Before we go talk about the obvious one, let's play in the space of this television show wistfulness we seem to find ourselves in. Much of the first half is dedicated to our two protagonists bonding over a show called The Pink Opaque, and immediately you can see things start to stir here. The Pink Opaque can stand in for a lot of things, but with its youthful teen focus and its monster of the week approach it most resembles Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Except it also owes a clear debt in parts to something like The Adventures Of Pete And Pete (and the titular Petes show up for five seconds in the film to affirm this influence upon the narrative). This is what drew me to the film initially. It's about two nerds bonding over an old TV show, memories of flickering static and the fuzz of a CRT. I do that kind of shit here all the time. The TV glow, a warm fuzzy thing which washes over you, a beautiful pink-purple which our protagonists bathe in. It's scary but compelling, terrifying yet resonant, and beautiful and sad and one day it ends and all that's left is the memory of it. There's a lovely movie there about our shared nostalgia for a thing, and the way media can help us bond together.
Except that's not all this movie is doing. I didn't know where it was going on first watch. On rewatching it for this thing? I feel like a blind idiot. Within the first two minutes we have Justice Smith's younger self under a big billowing tarp of pink and purple and blue stripes. Later we are fade cutting between them and Isabel, one of the protagonists of The Pink Opaque and their favored of the two. Justice Smith does not like girls or boys, but just old TV shows. Halfway into the film, in a scene with live music at a bar (that feels so Twin Peaks it hurts), the truth is revealed. Brigette Lundy-Paine and Justice Smith are the characters from The Pink Opaque, Isabel and Tara. We get to see the horrific final episode cliffhanger where the villains cut out their hearts to keep them on ice, feed them poisonous psychedelic moon juice, and bury them alive. (Somehow, The Pink Opaque ends with both fridging and buried gays.) Isabel and Tara, true selves trapped within frames that aren't really theirs, unable to live their lives and speak their truths. The only way out is to bury yourself alive, to kill that part of yourself. It is the most terrifying thing you can do, but when the nightmare is over you can live as the true you hidden within. To reject it and live in the delusion will slowly kill you, day by day, until your true self dies in a nightmare realm, coughing up neon poison.
I Saw The TV Glow is trans as fuck. That tent, the cross-cutting, those remarks... and hell, the basic premise of having to accept that there's this other you within yourself, a true you begging for release? A release which, if given, would destroy the life you lived up to that point? A release which terrifies, which leaves you cowering behind your bars, preferring the safety of captivity to the fear of the unknown, even as your time ticks away? Your chance to live your true self dwindling less and less? This is a trans experience. It is not the universal trans experience, but it is one. This is the true horror at the heart of I Saw The TV Glow. Not a masked fucking killer. The existential agony of not being able to live as the true you, the Isabel locked inside. The slow insidious anxiety of time running out for you to do so as years pass by in the blink of an eye, until you're middle-aged and still unable to live as Isabel. I don't fully know it. I only know part of it, and it's enough to bring heartbreak and pain to me as I watch Justice Smith act out going through it. It's enough to make me baffled at how so many people can watch the movie and not get that it's about this. It would not be true to say that the Venn diagram between cis people and people who did not get I Saw The TV Glow would be a circle, but God damn it sometimes it feels really close. To put the shoe on the other foot, it's also not true that every trans person gives this 5 stars while sobbing. Some don't vibe with it based on their experience, and that's fine!
What we have here is a movie which wears its heart on its sleeve, drenching everything in the aesthetic of fuzzy TV memories and nostalgia. It's a beautiful and sad piece of art which expresses a different sort of horror: the horror of not being able to live as your true self. In its ending, with Justice Smith and a bit of what should be body horror, I this time saw gender euphoria. I want to close with perhaps the most heartbreaking shot of the movie, a message that should and can resonate with many gender non-conforming people, or just people who want to live as their true selves. Four simple words, expressed on screen for all to see. Four words which made at least one trans media critic on Youtube break into tears while reviewing the picture. Four words I'll end on to show that there is optimism in the movie's end, as well as for this post.
Go with those words, and welcome to October, all. We will get to more traditional spooky scary media soon, I reckon... but keep those words with you, and live your best. I know I will be. I get to express my true self through these words, on Twitch, and elsewhere. I'm content with where I am and who I get to be, and how you get to perceive me. I hope you all are too. Now then, I think I should sit down with an episode of Sailor Moon, grab a nice drink, and watch an anime for little girls. Because I get to choose that without being chastised now.
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