Seeing Myself in the TV Glow

This essay discusses self harm and suicide. It also spoils just like, every single part of I Saw The TV Glow. Go see it before you read this.

I am six years old and I am fighting with my teacher. She has asked me to circle my gender on my introduction paper and I have, in her mind, selected wrong. She is trying to gently correct me, but this is, in my mind, wrong. Deceitful. She is lying to me. And I don’t understand why she’s lying to me. So I have pushed back. And she’s pushed back. And we’ve pushed. And pushed. And pushed. Until she’s half pulled me out into the hallway, my mother already called, while I scream three words over and over and over.

“I’m a girl! I’m a girl! I’m a girl! I’m a girl!”

That was not, I understand, a normal introduction to a review of a movie. But this is not going to be a normal review of a movie. And honestly, I don’t think I want it to be.

I Saw The TV Glow is a new horror movie by Jane Schoenbrun, director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which some of you might recognize as the movie I have been utterly insufferable about for about 2 years now. And since this is not a normal review, I’ll just get my opinion out of the way right up front: I love it. I love it so fucking much. It’s the best movie of the year, the best movie of the 2020s, maybe in my top 10 of all time. But the reasons why are complicated and I wanna talk about them. And I wanna talk about myself.

The plot is pretty simple to relate, at least the setup. A lonely, isolated teenager named Owen (Justice Smith) begins to build an intense, but emotionally fraught, friendship with a slightly older girl named Maddie (Brigitte Lundy-Paine), bonding over a teen aimed TV show called The Pink Opaque (think Buffy by way of Eerie, Indiana and you’re about 90% of the way there). But after the show is canceled and Maddie disappears, reality begins to warp suggesting that there may be more to the show than there seems.

Okay but…what is the movie about? And there’s lots of metaphors you can draw out of it. It’s about nostalgia, and the benefits of connecting to people through media. It’s about how those relationships turn sour, how seeing yourself reflected metaphorically isn’t enough, about how nostalgia lies to you. But it’s most importantly, to me, about being trans. It’s about being trans in ways that I don’t think a cis person could write, because they are pointed enough to leave me bleeding after every viewing.

I’m 16 years old, and I’ve just, faux-casually, told my therapist that my self esteem problems, my painful reluctance to look at myself in the mirror, is because I wish a girl was looking back. He ignored it, shrugged it off with a comment about how most guys wish they were different. I’m in the car with my mom and she comments, equally faux-casually, that I seem upset, more than usual after my therapist.

There’s a moment, a painful unending moment, where my heart feels like it’s going to burst. I can hear the sentence I want to say to her in my head. “Mom,” my brain screams at me to say, “is it usual for guys to want to be a girl?” And then, to add a firmer underline, to make it unambiguous; “All the time? All day? Every day?” The moment stretches and stretches and stretches as I will myself to say it.

Then I shrug and look out the window. I actually say something trite and meaningless, “Just a lot to think about,” or something equally useless. And tell myself the same thing I’ll tell myself every day for the next 14 years; If I don’t think about it, it’s not real.

There’s a lot of superficial things you can point to with the trans allegory of I Saw The TV Glow; The show is aimed at girls, something Owen’s father (played with real menace by Fred Durst) gruffly points out. When Maddie returns to try and pull Owen out of the world and into the fiction of The Pink Opaque, (or perhaps the real world, the film refuses to give you an easy answer) she explicitly wants him to become one of the two female leads, wants him to be Isabel. When he pushes back and calls her Maddie, she calmly informs him “That’s not my name.” But there’s something deeper, something more painful. Something that makes it pointed enough to dig into my heart.

When Maddie, or perhaps Tara, confronts Owen in the high school, explains where she’s been, she never says the word trans. She never says dysphoria. But the words she uses, the way she describes time moving too quickly, feeling wrong, feeling like everything is off and if you could just run away, just change names, just change who you are, it would all be okay, that sounds like dysphoria, it sounds like the clawing, angry feeling I lived with for most of my life.

There’s another part of her speech that feels painfully accurate to my, and tragically to too many of my trans siblings’ experiences with dysphoria. The part of her monologue where she talks about being buried alive and coming out the other side with a knowledge of herself as Tara, sounds a little like a usual plot element, sounds like digging deep into your soul and emerging with knowledge gleaned from pain. But it also sounds like a suicide attempt.

I’m 19 and crying in my therapists’ office. A different therapist, I’d stopped seeing the first one soon after he dismissed that concern. I hadn’t repeated what I’d said to him, until now. But this time, this time it came after she did some digging. Some pushing on my self esteem issues, refusing to let me deflect. And my statement was clearer, at least I think; “I want to be a girl, I want to be a girl because being a boy makes me want to claw my skin off.”

She responded with a simple, authoritative sounding comment; As a man, I hate women and since I also hate myself, I must think I deserve to be something I hate.

I find that story funny now, not least because I’ve never told it to another mental health professional without them responding in abject horror. I want her to be a monster in that story, to be grinning evilly as she says this awful cruel thing to a vulnerable teenager. But she can’t even give me that, can’t even be the uncomplicated villain in my story, because she doesn’t say it with a cruel grin, she says it gently, her face concerned. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. That doesn’t matter though, because she did, she said something awful and damaging to a barely stable 19 year old. Still, she didn’t see it that way. 10 minutes later, when we wrapped up the session (I spent the rest of it wordlessly crying) she smiled and said that she thinks we made some real progress, that we have turned a corner.

6 days later I would attempt suicide.

There’s a cliche in trans narratives written by cis people (because aren’t they all) which I call the Dress Revelation. The moment where the protagonist tries on a dress and suddenly it all lines up and they’re Themselves Now. I hate that moment in trans narratives, at least when written by cis people, because it always rings false. It never feels like a real moment, and I think that I Saw The TV Glow knows it too.

When Maddie returns to bring Owen back out into The Pink Opaque, to rescue Isabel from the waking nightmare, there are flashes to scenes from the show, scenes we’ve already seen on the TV, but different. Because in them it’s Owen in the place of Isabel. And in them Owen does what Isabel did, wearing what Isabel wore. Owen crosses a football field wearing a dress.

Later, when Maddie is trying to bring Owen down to bury him, to bring Isabel out of the dream, they cross the football field, together. They stand on the threshold, in the place we saw Owen wearing the dress, wanting to be who he wants to be.

And Owen tells himself “If I don’t think about it, it’s not real.” And then Owen runs.

I’m 22, and I’m wearing a dress for the first time. And I’m having a panic attack. My girlfriend of the time and I were lounging around her house, making fun of her best friend and her girlfriend for being overly cutesy, and my girlfriend casually said to me “I’m like 90 percent lesbian, you’re basically my only exception.” And I toss back, before I can stop myself, “Well, you know, I like you in like, a lesbian kind of way.”

Despite the alcohol in both our systems she sits straight up and says “Oh my god, you would be so cute in a dress,” and bolts off to her bedroom, snapping at me to follow. A few minutes later I’m one of her sister’s dresses, and she’s cooing over me, telling me I should shave my legs and try it out more often, while I clutch the fabric to my skin, so happy to be wearing it, it feels like my skin is on fire. I’m so used to ignoring this part of myself, to repressing it, that having it here, having it on me, feels overwhelming.

I spend most of the evening having a panic attack, holding off the symptoms so no one sees them. A few days later, I log onto my tumblr account where I roleplay an Asari character (I’ve always been Very Cool), a Mass Effect OC who is entirely unpopular, but who I enjoy writing and has allowed me to form some friendships. I’m using a feminine variant of my deadname in them and letting them assume I’m a woman. And I tell these friends, tell them I’m a guy but I’ve been presenting as a woman because I think I am one.

For reasons I still don’t understand, they take this as an admission I’ve been lying to them, infiltrating their space, and callout posts are written about me within a few hours. The next day the account, which is unconnected to my personal tumblr, is nuked. I try again, try to feel out what my roommate thinks about trans people. He responds with a reference to the South Park episode Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vangina and I drop the subject.

I’m stopped from another suicide attempt 2 weeks later when he decides, on his way to his car, that he doesn’t want to go a party. The bath was drawn, the note was written, the razor blades were out on the bathroom counter. A few minutes later and I’d be gone. I never tell him what his return stopped and I resolve to never tell anyone I want to be a girl again. If I don’t think about it, it’s not real.

Owen’s story doesn’t get better from there. Despite hoping that Maddie will come back, and force him into the hole, force him to confront himself, she never does. Owen is unable to make himself walk across that football field again, to make the choice that he needs to make, and Maddie won’t come back and force him. Even if he wants her to.

The final few scenes are Owen, years later, old and barely functional. He seems to have aged 50 years in 20 and Justice Smith’s acting makes him seem more like a walking corpse. In one of the film’s final scenes, in the middle of work, he stops what he’s doing and begins howling in pain and fear, begging everyone around to help him. And no one even acknowledges it. Everyone just puts their heads down and acts like he’s not dying on his feet, right in front of them.

When I say that I Saw The TV Glow understands dysphoria, this is what I mean. Because I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a painfully accurate depiction of what dysphoria feels like then a man screaming in agony while everyone ignores it.

I’m 30 and covid is getting to me. The isolation, the change in my schedule, the fear and uncertainty are wearing me down. Weeks of cajoling from my partner have gotten me to finally see a therapist again, but prior to covid, I’d been holding back. But the stress has worn down my walls, dulled me to the point where, when she asks what I’m afraid of looking at in the mirror, I sigh out, “I dunno, I guess I just wish I saw a girl.” She looks at me oddly but the session is nearly over. But a week later she comes back with some questions. Some odd questions about myself. And I answer them, surprisingly honestly. And she says something to me.

She tells me that those questions were about gender dysphoria. She says that I have a lot of the symptoms, basically all of them, and that maybe we should talk about that. And we do. We talk and we talk and we talk. A few weeks later, I message a friend of mine, a trans friend of mine, with a simple sentence.

“I want to be a girl so bad it hurts.”

I’m 14 years old and am being told by my grandfather that my living there is contingent on me cutting my hair and going by a more masculine version of my name. I’m 9 and wondering why I have to get shorts and a t-shirt to visit Florida, instead of the sun dress I wanted. I’m 17 and wondering why a lesbian friend of mine took me to a lesbian book store in Bridgeport for what she is describing as a date. I’m 25 and admitting to a friend that I never watched Dragonball Z as a kid but I really liked Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena. I’m 6 and screaming at my teacher over and over; I’m a girl, I’m a girl, I’m a girl.

But I’m also 33 and in a lesbian bar in a city I’ve traveled to for a night, on my way somewhere else. And when a girl approaches my table, I’m ready for it to go wrong, ready to hear some of the bullshit I hear online from transphobes online about how lesbians don’t like trans women. But she asks if she can buy me a drink, invites me to sit with her and her friends. And I join them and we chat and I drink more that night than in the rest of the year combined, talking about life in the New York area and getting groans of jealousy when I describe a Tegan and Sara concert I attended. And at the end of the night, when I’m heading back to my hotel, she kisses me. And when I get back to my hotel, I don’t shirk from the mirror, don’t enter the bathroom sideways to keep from seeing my reflection like I did in high school. Because it’s finally not a stranger staring back at me.

It’s easy to read I Saw The TV Glow as something dark, a terrifying tale about the long term damage repressing yourself can do. And yeah, that’s in there, just like the musings on the nature of nostalgia and how it distorts memory or in the way it depicts how people can connect in the glow of a tv. I know, on some level, that my approach to this piece has not done the film justice, has not talked about the film’s incredible cinematography, or the way it plays with color and shadow, or Lundy-Paine and Smith’s amazing performances, or the soundtrack I can’t stop listening to.

I don’t know Jane Schoenbrun, I’m not privy to their writing process. But if I had to suggest the message we’re supposed to take from the film, it’s not the view of Owen, carving open his chest to find the TV show he connected with inside. No, it’s the final message from Maddie, someone who made it through, who is beautiful and powerful somewhere on the other side of a TV screen. It’s not a line of dialogue, but a visual message, one she leaves in chalk on the street, so that the camera can linger on it, to give us a moment to absorb it:

There is still time.