Keep Circulating the Tapes: Thoughts on I SAW THE TV GLOW
“Let it fall from your grasp, half asleep, foraging / Silver screens for a dream that we aimlessly re-enact / Only now, every town is the same town / Every doomsday cult screaming how we’ve gone off track by circling a cul-de-sac.” - glass beach, “cul-de-sac”
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KEEP CIRCULATING THE TAPES
When I was a child, my imagination had crossed its circuitry. Having at best, one consistent friend to spend my time with, I found myself retreating into constructed worlds to make my free time into something worthwhile, a thing that came out in the wash as one of two patterns of behavior: The first, a maximally unhealthy amount of time spent on video games, reading, and childrens’ television shows, subsuming my Self into the screen until the programming block reached a point I found too unbearably dull to continue on my marathons. The second, building out imagined places. I had a single plastic tub of unassigned Legos, with which I’d spend hours just creating dumb scenarios I’d plotted out in my head, little stories with mismatched characters and ideas, sometimes emulations of the things I’d seen on my TV screen or the novels for slightly higher age groups of children I’d hoped might give me some insight on how to socialize and make friends. At times, I tried to use that imagination to project into my own life, to put together a hypothetical future that I could see myself in, and it was there I discovered my fundamental glitch. Every scenario found itself boiling down to the same thing. Despite all the multifarious lives I tried to give some idealized future me, I was never there.
In my place, there was a human void. I attempted, repeatedly, to project something, and in my place, some facsimile generic adult man would appear there. I’d try and latch onto this creature, but deep in my skull, I sensed the danger: That wasn’t me. This demon became a recurring feature of my most frequent daymare, a doom spiral not dissimilar to a circa-2002 Spongebob cutaway gag. Every time I reached some new milestone of my aging, this “future” version of myself would end up haunting me again. The first time I got into a car to practice driving, I was suddenly bawling at the prospect of ending up in the same driver’s seat as that thing. In recollection, as a 25-year old adult woman whose existence was gracious enough to allow her at the age of 20, I understand it now as a manifestation of my then latent dysphoria. In that moment, the thing felt like an inevitability, a final take upon my inevitable, sad, lonesome death, the husk I would come to occupy as my human form. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is perhaps the closest thing to a filmic translation of these sorts of nightmares I’ve seen.
Schoenbrun’s last picture, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, operated around a kindred zone of suburban negative spaces, a film about losing yourself into an obsession with subculture as a means of crafting a new identity around it, an experience, which, as with TV, I had more than enough anecdotal experience to relate to. It was, and remains, a work rife with the understanding of finding a worthwhile fragment of being inside dark places, a true internet-age film. TV Glow, the followup, mines parallel thematic ground in its story of Owen and Maddy, two teenagers whose early fandom for a 90s young adult TV program, The Pink Opaque eventually leads the pair careening down two separate, horrific paths of life. At the outset, the two find each other in a social blank space, both demure loners who encounter one another by chance, with their only commonality being a budding interest in Pink Opaque, a sort of riff on “monster of the week” programs of the era a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer or X-Files about a pair of teenage girls, Tara and Isabel, psychically linked to one another. Owen (as played by Justice Smith) is an archetypal lost child, deferential to a point of fault, overly apologetic, a vessel in search of personhood. In meeting, Maddy (Brigitte Lundy-Paine) becomes an object of fascination to him by virtue of their shared absence of definition.
Owen’s chasm of personality is constantly prodded at by every figure around him. His mother is gently authoritative, a clear “not mad at you, just disappointed” type who desperately wants to see her child form into something, his father a looming presence and silent judge waiting to be dialed over into a fear activator (who better to perform such a role than a true icon of destructive masculinity like Fred Durst?). At all turns Owen’s choices are prodded with the exact sort of questions and responses that trans people both closeted and out have been bombarded with throughout our lives: His father’s first response to Owen’s interest in Pink Opaque being “isn’t that a show for girls?”, his coworkers1 outright asking him what his deal is and taunting his seeming disinterest in typical masculine boasting, re: sexuality. He is, in all, a void. He endures on in the solace of his loosest of companionships with Maddy, their shared interest in Pink Opaque and its intricately knotted piles of lore and storytelling. They remain content in this quasi-social bond to one another, passing along tapes of the latest episodes until the evening Owen comes to visit Maddy again. Owen continues on watching as usual, by Maddy is entranced by something further, drawn into the show beyond enjoyment into horrified displacement. That night, they announce their intention to run away the next day from their abusive home, bringing Owen along with them. Out of fear, Owen backs out of it, and never sees them again outside of a delivery of one more tape, the show’s final episode. Ten years pass.
In this time, Owen’s life begins to further sink into the impressions of his and Maddy’s absence, trapped in the cyclical rut of suburban life, working a wage job that never seems to improve, retreating even further into his shell, until the day Maddy suddenly reappears, bringing with them a trickle of surreality, bits of the show melting into the “real” world. They ask Owen for time to present an explanation, a plan to move forward.
[1: One of them being Conner O’Malley bringing his usual schtick, here recontextualized by its placement in the film to have an almost malevolent aura around his every appearance.]
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[major spoilers hereon]
As I got older, my time only sank further into media escapism. I hid under the sheets in my room every night watching the entirety of the first ten seasons of The Simpsons on my phone till I passed out, pestered the few rudimentary examples of friends I had about whatever old television show I’d most recently fixated on, keeping a pair of earbuds jammed in at any available moment to blast the same five 70s dad-rock records on repeat. I’d drawn myself deep into a well I found no compulsion to exit out of.
When Maddy finally presents their new escape plan to Owen, reality unspools itself. In a shellshocking monologue, Maddy begins to run down the history of their last ten years of life. A new career in a new town, a new name, seemingly a new life, all the ingredients for some teenaged idea of what true freedom could be outside of the cycle of abuse. Yet still, they felt dissatisfied. And the cycle repeats. And repeats. Again, circling this reality, Maddy finds themselves trapped in existence as “a brief hallucination” (a phrasing coincidentally similar to the title of Schoenbrun’s one major pre-transition work), trying to find some answer to what may finally define their personhood, their eventual conclusion lying in the only consistency left: The Pink Opaque. Maddy explains that at a point, they realized that reality was simply wrong, the show being a peek into the fabric of their true identities, Maddy as Tara and Owen as Isabel. The time is dialed back to the last night the two spent together, and there, the veil starts to lift. The lines blur, they are the characters, the characters are them, they just have to come out of this trance they were put in a decade ago.
The show’s fifth season finale before cancellation veers into its truest expression of horror, the kind of nightmare scenario episode that would circle around the internet years after its existence in the form of “TOP TEN MOST FUCKED UP CHILDREN’S SHOW EPISODES” compilations on YouTube or mythologized as Dead Bart-esque creepypasta. The protagonists end up at the conclusion of the series buried alive, fed inhuman sludge, with their hearts ripped out in front of them2. And it just ends there. This anti-resolution becomes the impetus for Maddy’s final choice: Buying a cheap coffin for themselves, hiring out a wage job coworker to bury it, and letting things take their natural course. For a while, I felt held at a distance in trying to understand this choice of storytelling, as well as Owen’s eventual act of Cronenberg-ian ritual body defacement at the film’s closure, but after more consideration, the simplest answer is probably the right one. Transition is in itself a form of wanton self-destruction, to scatter the pieces of your old identity to the wind in what for most becomes an almost socially violent act. To commit to this is to let your guts spill out in front of you, to embrace the fact that you will be an embarrassing, half-finished mess in front of the people you care about to some degree or another for however long it takes to feel settled in that space. (If Maddy is any indication, you will have at least one shitty looking haircut in the process too.) To do so in this moment in history can seem almost like an act of grandiose social suicide or self-harm. As Maddy tries to show Owen, you find something else in the closure of it.
[2: This grotesque act of disfigurement is a ripe metaphor for a forcible detransition, literally tearing the heart out of a person!]
By contrast, Owen’s reaction to this is where the film’s showcase of Schoenbrun’s horror chops dials up to a degree that left me upset enough to still be sobbing well after the credits began their roll. For a moment, you’re left to imagine the good outcome of this scenario, as Owen begins to commit, but then…he doesn’t. As with every choice in his life up to that point, Owen commits to noncommitment, a decision that presents him with his final death loop, a path marked by a single, gutting intertitle: TWENTY YEARS LATER. The film’s motif of the transformational nature of recontextualization in a physical space is turned into a true knife twist, with Owen forced into the purgatory of working around a children’s arcade, constantly seeing the open opportunity of youth pass around him as his own body warps and ages into unrecognizable form. All around him, the signals begin to speak more clearly than ever: YOU ARE DYING. The horror of the film here reflects a concept of longtime discussion within trans communities: For us, time moves differently. Before you’re out, the movement of things feels wrong, a distortion between days that can’t be distinguished from one another, in many cases (including my own) leading to massive gaps in memory during the time of one’s closeted years. Many of us in the times after our reclamation feel compelled to mourn this lost time for the simple fact that it could have all been different, a worthwhile thing with just one change. To grow up is to see the body change with yourself, but to be trapped in the stasis of self-denial is to be stuck with this change as an inevitable fear rather than a comfort of progression through one’s life, in that way making the plain process of human aging an outlet for meaningful body horror.3 Owen/Isabel is trapped in their husk of a life, the milestones happening at a rapid clip, barely being acknowledge. They have a family, you will never see them. They take the same place as their father on the couch at home, subsumed to the current of static consumption. They try and revisit the show, but suddenly, the magic is gone, the latent queerness and allure of the thing has been replaced with a pastiche of hokey childish nature, the vivid analogue color and life given way to the flatness of online streaming television. The danger and the magic of all of it, gone in an instant. You are wrong, you are distorted, you are dying. And just as on TV, Owen/Isabel is left with non-resolution. A missing heart, a missing person. A void. The only hope is in the belief that one day, in the dwindling moments, they might claim what’s left of themselves. We just won’t see it ourselves.
[3: see also: Shyamalan’s Old]
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I admit I got lucky. One of the few people I hung around in high school saw my budding interest in music and gave me a gentle push towards contemporary work I’d like more. With that, I gradually tiptoed off into the ether of online spaces to talk about the stuff, meeting dozens of likeminded folks who reminded me that there were people in this world who might see me as worthwhile, understanding the potential person inside the shell. Among them, I encountered trans women for the first time, and the spark of hidden identity that had always been there was set alight into a quiet burn of confusion, tumbling onward into my own eventual coming out. If it weren’t for the gentle nudge of that art I might have never found what I needed to build myself, a tip in the right direction to ensure I made something of it. But I found it all the same. I still allow myself an active imagination these days, to drift off into the other worlds of my choosing as I need them. The difference between those dreams of the past and now is a simple one: In all of them, there’s no one taking my place. I’m there, just as I’m here now. I hope I always will be. I hope you are too.