thread of jane schoenbrun (“we’re all going to the world’s fair” “I saw the TV glow”

kind of surprised there’s not more discussion of this director here! I just saw I SAW THE TV GLOW this afternoon. I think I wanted to like it a little more than I did, but it’s clearly the work of a serious artist exploring identity, body dysmorphia, and alienation that I’m going to be thinking about for a while. now I want to see her first feature

i have been meaning to start a thread for i saw the tv glow, a movie that made me feel very very very bad (compliment)

the most emotionally true depiction of what life was like for me before i transitioned and what it would've continued to be like had i never come out. devastating to see a trans person express this in images

idk even beyond the trans of it all it was just a very powerful movie about getting spellbound by popular art that seems to tell you something about yourself that the rest of the world is actively trying to suppress, story of my freaking life!!!!!

❤️

really my only complaint is I found owen to be guileless and devoid of vice

next Friday! can't wait. loved World's Fair, video for Lucy Dacus' "Night Shift" also very good.

I watched World's Fair the other night and, while it didn't entirely work for me, I was impressed by Schoenbrun's style. Def looking forward to TV Glow.

i watched world's fair a few nights before (which prepared me for how i saw the tv glow was going to strand me in the worst feeling possible before ending). i didn't know what to make of it at first either but my brain is still ulcerating around it, like... what happens when the most desperate and unfocused loneliness in the world finds an outlet to perform??? really bone-chilling for a movie that mostly unreels in youtube monologue

In January 2023, The Film Stage announced that Schoenbrun was set to direct an adaptation of Imogen Binnie's 2013 novel Nevada, widely considered a classic of transgender literature.[17] However, Schoenbrun confirmed in a May 2024 interview with The Cut that they had exited the project due to "creative differences with cis people".[4]

oh my god i understand _exactly what they mean_

quote comes from here:

I always joke and say that I would love to adapt Infinite Jest because it would be the best troll. I actually quite like Infinite Jest. Its cultural position right now is

“warning sign on men’s bookshelf energy,” and it would be fun and edgelord-y to figure out my lens into adapting that.

this but unironically. like yeah, _summer fun_ portrays its cultural position pretty well, but shit. i spent a year in my early 20s reading and completely falling in love with that book, thinking it was like The Best Thing Ever. i think i finally consigned it to the Closet of Shame in the last move, along with Gareth Roberts' _The Highest Science_. it's cringe as hell... it just so happens that this week i'm in my Cringe Era. i'm trying very very hard to get over my "sad t-slur" era. out with books by the Topside diaspora! In with... shit, what's the most cringe thing I can think of. OTOKONOKO MANGA! that's right, this week i'm stanning otokonoko. even if my fingers refuse to type that word. it's like a finger twister. or something.

anyway make a film of _infinite jest_ but it's entirely from the perspective of the tennis player the author makes transphobic jokes about. that's my elevator pitch.

also just make up everything else from memory because jesus christ my closet's more of a mess than fibber mcgee and molly's.

anyway i'm going to see if there are any local... there's this 24 year old lady who calls herself a "transgeener". i guess that's how the kids talk. is that something i'm allowed to say? is "transgeener" a slur?

also, like. i did not know that... like i did not know "hipinion" was a message board. something something balkanization of the internet.

met up with a lady from a local discord. i'm glad it wasn't just me there. neither of us had anything to say, really. after it. usually when i see a movie i like to talk about it afterwards, but this.... i don't try to make noise at movies. but sometimes. sharp intakes of breath. saying "fuck" under my breath. and after the film i turned to annaliese and said "43 years. 43 years of my fucking life."

it isn't. i gotta say that for myself... because one thing the movie mentions is how easy it is to get a story confused with one's own life. and people use that, like, weaponize it against us, which is bullshit. it's something... i didn't have a _life_, i didn't have a _story_. the man i was supposed to be was _nothing_.

particularly more than five years in, now that i'm pretty committed to this life, i do look around and ask myself why i did all this, why i went through all this. i need to... i need to be reminded sometimes. what it was like. it doesn't seem any more _real_ than _i saw the tv glow_. it seems like a nightmare. a horror movie. the monologue at the end of "miss fortune".

I lift my skirt when Voltaire turns
As he speaks, his mouth full of garlic
White, yes, white

i don't know. that always made _sense_ to me somehow. with "the murder mystery" it's two voices running in parallel, but "miss fortune" - alternating, word by word, two voices, two minds, united only in one sentiment:

"nobody knows if it really happened"

for a long time, i felt like those six words could well be my epitaph

but it did. it did really happen. i don't know what a cis person would see. what i see is a trans person speaking to another trans person. this was real. is real, for the viewer, maybe. the words on the driveway in chalk... i can't remember what they said. "it's not too late"? it's not. for me the movie isn't what life _could_ have been if i _hadn't_. 43 years. the thing buried inside of me screaming "YOU ARE DYING" while everybody else acted like everything was fine. that voice asking me if there was something else. the things i didn't see, didn't happen, things i couldn't even dare to _think_. i'm pretty sure that's not just a trans thing. a lot of people, i feel like, a lot of people experience it

the horror for me is that THERE WAS NEVER ANYTHING WRONG WITH ANY OF THOSE THINGS. there are other things in my life that... i've had those kinds of experiences with, truly awful things. _wearing a fucking dress_ isn't even on the same _exponential_ scale as those things. jesus god. all that pain, all that suffering, for _nothing_, for fucking _nothing_. no reason for anybody to feel the dread, shame, terror, that i felt. not about _that_.

i don't think that... i don't think that's something the movie is setting _out_ to talk about. it's just saying what the horror _is_. what it takes away from us, how empty it leaves us in its absence. since i've lived a version of that horror, i... don't know how it would feel to people who haven't.

I wake up and of course I'm still thinking about the film. The thing about it is that the last time he sees her, she's... she's insane. She's clearly completely insane. Watching the film, I mean, you can see that, right? She says you have to do this thing, this horrible, awful thing, and we have to do it _now_, because you are _dying_, and he walks right up to the line, right up to the actual line, and he doesn't.

Annaliese said she had a hard time not crying at a couple points in the film and I wasn't tempted to cry. Maybe it was because I knew in theory what I would see up there on the screen, or maybe it was because I was in shock. Because I woke up and...

What I'm about to say isn't real, OK? I know it isn't real. It's allegorical. I know the difference between my life and a movie. Sometimes things that aren't real _feel_ real to me. The feelings are real. That's what's real.

The theater, I bought a ticket online and they have assigned seats. And I switched my seat to sit next to Annaliese. The movie was over and I look back at the seat I moved from and Maddy was sitting there. It wasn't Maddy, of course. It was just some white girl who didn't even look _that_ much like Maddy. It's like... you know when you see someone in a dream, and you know who it is even though it doesn't look like them? And things don't work like that in the real world. Except sometimes they do I guess because I'm an actual girl, a Girl In Real Life. And part of my brain says that's just as impossible as it was for Maddy to be sitting there in the theater in my seat, in the seat I moved from.

I wasn't _alone_, all those years, even though that's how I felt. I wasn't ever alone. She called to me. Over and over again. To do this thing. And a couple of times there she'd come visit and I'd walk up to the line, right up to the line, and I'd turn back. I mean it was suicidal, right? It would kill me if I did that, right? Except that I did, and it didn't, and I'm not dying anymore. I'm living.

Owen said he never saw her again, and I believe him, and I see her sometimes. I know that she cares about me. I heard her call my name.

That's how the movie ends, _my_ version of the movie, not the version that you actually see on the screen, the version anybody will be able to watch streaming in a couple of months probably. The film they're showing in the theater ends and that guy I saw up on the screen isn't real, wasn't ever real. It was just a movie I was watching. And Maddy is sitting in my assigned seat, the one I moved from. I don't look at her, she doesn't look at me, but she was there, watching with me. I walk out of the theater into this world that's weird and chaotic and scary like the one in the movie, except this world is real, it's the real one. And that's when I cry. Pain and grief and _relief_. It's over. Thank God. That movie is over.

I think a lot of trans people have their own version of the story. That's mine. Right now, at least, that's mine. As best as I can tell it. How it _felt_. Not the facts, how it _felt_.

I'm watching it tomorrow and I can't wait

Saw this today and liked it, it does a lot of interesting things. My reservations mostly have to do with it all feeling a bit on-the-nose, unlike World's Fair it felt to me like Schoenbrun really wanted to make sure everyone got the point. Which I respect, different movies are trying to do different things, and this is more or less a Statement Movie about something vital that she wanted to share. I really like her visual style, some of the scenes reminded me of Gregory Crewdson photos. Cast is good, especially Brigette Lundy-Paine. And shout-out to Fred Durst for showing up, and to Emma Stone and Dave McCary for producing.

This was several steps up from World's Fair, which played like an partially realized idea. This one by contrast, with its blues and violets and nocturnal ambience and lack of outright laffs and terror-stricken closeups, reminded me of a lighter Inland Empire.

Yes, very accurate re the excellence of the lighting. Just got out myself. I found it very compelling and moving.

i can't remember what they said. "it's not too late"?

"there is still time"

Cast is good, especially Brigette Lundy-Paine. And shout-out to Fred Durst for showing up, and to Emma Stone and Dave McCary for producing.

Fully agreed. Durst needing only one line to say what his character was all about was all that was needed, and the rest was action/inaction or presence. Lundy-Paine's monologue was a hell of a thing.

Also I was amused at the double duty of Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail both acting just-so as Tara and for the "Tonight, Tonight" cover.

really want to see this again. have thought of it every day since seeing it

Fully agreed. Durst needing only one line to say what his character was all about was all that was needed, and the rest was action/inaction or presence. Lundy-Paine's monologue was a hell of a thing.

― Ned Raggett

it was... one of the truest things to me. that's all it takes. less than that. not even a word. a _look_. that's, i think, is a lot of why he was hypervigilant watching _the pink opaque_, ready to turn off the tv at a moment's notice. i was like that. still am, in a lot of ways.

the thing is that... you didn't see it in the film, but the character durst played could have been fine. in every other way. and that sentence would have been enough. i don't think you could have made him a character like that, it would overcomplicate things, you'd lose the focus. i was talking with a friend today about how we never see the family owen talks about at the end, how it would have... "added a lot of emotional weight" she said. i think that's true, but again, i think it would... overcomplicate things. to me. the family we don't see is real. they're just...

they're shut out of that part of owen's life. i can't imagine him talking about the pink opaque with them. maybe he did. i don't know. i didn't talk about it with my ex-wife. more than anything else i think that doomed the relationship, that i didn't talk about it with her.

i think the axes on which the movie revolves are, like you say, action/inaction and... i'd expand it to presence/absence.

i haven't seen the "world's fair" film. creepypasta gets to me and... i hate watching movies alone in general. i definitely wouldn't want to see _world's fair_ alone.

i was talking with a friend today about how we never see the family owen talks about at the end, how it would have... "added a lot of emotional weight" she said

Me being me, I kept thinking "I wonder if they're even real." After all, who is he talking to throughout? (And does it say something that the ending isn't addressed to the camera?)

"But that's a girls' show."

I loved this movie and I too have been thinking about it a LOT since I saw it a couple weeks ago.

I know it's sort of ancillary to the point the film is making, but I was really charmed by the footage we see of The Pink Opaque. That perfect blend of 90's teen monster-of-the-week urban fantasy dramas, with a dash of fucked up underground SOV horror to give it an edge. I really wish that was a real show I could watch! I read some interviews with Schoenbrun and they cite Buffy, Pete & Pete, and Are You Afraid of the Dark as inspirations for it, and that checks out.

I've been looking for a real show with the same energy as The Pink Opaque and so far the best I've found is actually Eerie, Indiana. A preteen boy and his much younger neighbor, both with no other close friends, bonded by the fact that only they can perceive the surreal horrors in their town. And those horrors are weird in the same way The Pink Opaque's were... The first episode was about a new kind of tupperware that can preserve food for eternity, and a mother making her sons sleep in a giant tupperware to keep them in middle school forever. And the second episode was about a secret conspiracy among all the town's dogs to rebel against humanity. Great stuff.

The menacing presence of the father in both this and World's Fair is pretty notable. I didn't have a dad like that, thank god, but I had friends who did — one friend, we weren't allowed to park in his driveway because his dad would have a fit if it got even the tiniest oil stain. The kind of dads where once they got home, it was time for everyone to leave.

It's funny because it feels like a bit of a throwback character in a media landscape full of loving, involved dads, but of course there are still plenty of bad dads out in the real world.

Well TBF it's a throwback movie! But point taken.

I loved how few things were underlined, given exposition. Owen loved his mom for herself and for reasons they don't have to explain, therefore she only deserves a scene or two. No dialogue scene runs longer than necessary.

Indeed. Just enough was said, nothing more needed. His oafish theater/arcade coworkers are given just enough time but aren't active antagonists, they're just part of it all.

The menacing presence of the father in both this and World's Fair is pretty notable. I didn't have a dad like that, thank god, but I had friends who did — one friend, we weren't allowed to park in his driveway because his dad would have a fit if it got even the tiniest oil stain. The kind of dads where once they got home, it was time for everyone to leave.

It's funny because it feels like a bit of a throwback character in a media landscape full of loving, involved dads, but of course there are still plenty of bad dads out in the real world.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

i have a lot of friends who have dads like that, unfortunately. and it's not... it's not an either/or. my dad wasn't there. and of course there are people who will say i'm how i am because my parents didn't raise me right, that kind of bullshit, but you know. a lot of transphobia is just people twisting the truth around to suit what they want to believe. all of those implicit assumptions, the idea that shows where girls are the protagonists are "girls' shows". god forbid, you know, that girls could be _heroes_.

maybe i'm reading into things that aren't there, but i see a lot of us who come from really patriarchal backgrounds. a lot of us are ex-catholic or ex-mormon, which are some of the most patriarchal christian religions out there. my own experience is... i think people in general go along to get along. at some point i couldn't go along or get along anymore. i couldn't be the sort of "man" i was supposed to be. to quote a bad movie, the more they tighten their grip...

Well TBF it's a throwback movie! But point taken.

― Ned Raggett

it's a weird thing to me, honestly. a lot of nostalgia i see these days is for stuff _after_ my time. i was watching a video about nostalgia for "old, primitive video games", and they were talking about playstation 1 games. i've aged out of nostalgia media, haha.

I've been looking for a real show with the same energy as The Pink Opaque and so far the best I've found is actually Eerie, Indiana. A preteen boy and his much younger neighbor, both with no other close friends, bonded by the fact that only they can perceive the surreal horrors in their town. And those horrors are weird in the same way The Pink Opaque's were... The first episode was about a new kind of tupperware that can preserve food for eternity, and a mother making her sons sleep in a giant tupperware to keep them in middle school forever. And the second episode was about a secret conspiracy among all the town's dogs to rebel against humanity. Great stuff.

― OneSecondBefore

god, that's it, that's the show, isn't it? i've been thinking about the sort of shows that fits the vibe and "eerie, indiana" is definitely it. i guess every age has its shows like that. in the 2000s it might be, i don't know, the middleman. at some point you get to superhero influences in these kinds of shows. not sure how they'd hold up today. i got a really old tv rip of "the middleman" from demonoid full of those annoying fucking chyrons they used to put everywhere from right after broadcast, the ages before everything was released legit to streaming in amazing quality.

britain had a lot of those kinds of shows. a lot of it influenced the "scarfolk" aesthetic. "sapphire and steel", "children of the stones", "moondial", "into the labyrinth". it went on into the '90s, where you have shows like "dark season" and "the demon headmaster". idk if there are shows like that post-90s, other than, like, the doctor who revival.

"doctor who" was the show i saw growing up. i was (and am) obsessed with it the way owen and maddy were with "the pink opaque". i love those kinds of shows. honestly that was hooked me most about the movie - these sorts of recreations/tributes to shows like that. doctor who's monsters were often as crap as the ice cream monster (in the revival series too, for all the "oooh this has a proper budget" hype... stuff like that just doesn't always age well, is all.) the awful monsters, i'm still scared by some of them despite how crap they are. the doll from "terror of the autons" still scares me. (the plastic chair that eats people doesn't.)

my obsession with the show had nothing to do with gender, really, in my case. not in the way "the pink opaque" did. it was just this mysterious, _alien_ thing (not so much due to it being a show about an alien as due to it being british, haha). so much of it was... inaccessible. i grew up in '80s new jersey, which showed all the existing episodes, but there were 110 or so that were _missing_. a lot of my childhood memories to this day... i repressed a lot. there's stuff i know that i don't know i know. (the fucked up thing is that donald rumsfeld was right about that.)

Me being me, I kept thinking "I wonder if they're even real." After all, who is he talking to throughout? (And does it say something that the ending isn't addressed to the camera?)

― Ned Raggett

i mean that's the thing, i really do read it as a metafiction. the pink opaque is to owen as _i saw the tv glow_ is to us, the viewers. the narrative doesn't terminate _inside_ the movie itself. there's this aspect of t4t fiction, which transphobes frame as "social contagion", but it's more... the truth. everything we were taught about gender was wrong. all of us, including those of us who are trans. it's not a _conspiracy_, it's just, you know... ignorance. we didn't know any better. we're learning. to me it's like... if this is you, if this is your life, things can change. there is still time. the movie ends and that's _not_ what my life is like anymore. i've _changed_, for the better. the people who are watching the film who need to change...

it _doesn't_ need to be a trans thing. everybody changes. sometimes we put off changes we need to and we suffer from it. i still have a _need_ to change, am working to change. so it is a film for everyone, trans or no. it just centers that trans experience.

My wife and I were talking about that afterward, that it's a trans fable but can be read as about any needed/resisted/feared life transformation.

It's pretty much a literal presentation of the Gospel of Thomas quote: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

how gnostic!

How I like my gospels.

It's pretty much a literal presentation of the Gospel of Thomas quote: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

it's certainly something i've thought about! there's a lot of crossover between this and the queer thread, to the point where i can't quite remember which one i'm posting to and who my audience is, whether or not there are straights reading this.

when i was young i was really into occult religion, gnostic shit included. the Gospel of Thomas quote but also Matthew 5:29, KJV:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

i was really into Dick when i was younger. i still think Dick is one of the best writers on gnosticism, funny enough. the OG gnostics had some kinda nasty tendencies, like, they'd dehumanize and abjectify anybody who wasn't privy to their Inner Truth

i vehemently reject that way of looking at things. like i'm the opposite of it in some ways... the OG gnostics had this idea that the phenomenal world wasn't _real_, that the only truth was inner truth. that kind of thing evokes dissociation to me. my post-transition experience is more that of bringing my mind and body into, i don't know. communion? communication, at least.

it's anti-gnostic in that sense in that i don't feel like i revealed my true inner self. there isn't a core i'm trying to get in touch with. the tv glow within me isn't who i _really am_. i don't live inside the pink opaque.

one of my friends is having an orchi right now, and she's been scared, and all i could say to her is that it's ok to be scared. she's afraid of losing the person she was. and the thing about Matthew 5:29 is that my member which perished, it didn't _offend_ me. that's the thing that's hard to communicate, it _didn't bother me at all_. i didn't lose _anything of value_. that's not what the film is about, bodily change, hormones, any of that stuff. not to me. there's a lot of body horror in dysphoria, but _i saw the tv glow_ doesn't hit me that way. i just... don't take a gnostic interpretation to transness anymore.

Low-key but not bad piece here in that it's only indirectly about the movie, but hinges on Caroline Polachek's song that gets specifically featured in the movie and from there delves into wider thoughts re nostalgia/90s and more.

I come from a time and a place in which pop culture was not widely adopted as a marker of identity

not sure how this is possible

Easy, Soraya's a provincial Canadian. *badumtish*

in the q&a for my screening, the last question from the audience was someone who was like "the pink opaque is just buffy, right????" and it pretty obviously is, though jane also mentioned pete & pete and are you afraid of the dark as shows they were drawing from, which, i thought of the former as soon as the deranged mutant ice cream man appeared, bc pete & pete was one of the first really intentionally weird pieces of media i got into, it was much less frenetic and upsetting than ren & stimpy and had instead this droning rhythm like everyone was trying their hardest to walk through the sludge of the everyday, which is what i felt like all the time when i was growing up, and i also loved that all of the problems in that show were really weird, unimportant things that regardless had insanely intense stakes, and that was also what my childhood and teenhood really felt like, in retrospect

but also the question got me thinking about what my pink opaque was, because even though i'm jane's age, i didn't see buffy until college when i could borrow the dvd sets, and after considering it for a while i decided it was sailor moon. marketed as a show for girls. made even girlier in certain aspects by the north american translation. i looked down on it for a while as i was getting into anime, preferring the unhinged almost-parodic(-if-you-don't-think-about-how-almost-all-the-women-in-the-show-are-scolds) masculinity of dragon ball z. but sometimes i turned the tv on a half an hour before dragon ball z aired, and it was almost always sailor moon in that slot, and i became... entranced by it. it was a much deeper show than i imagined. there was time travel, there was a prophecy about a future tokyo encased in crystal, there were demonic yet humanoid enemies who were merged with objects in often body horror-ish ways, and there were these girls who were best friends, who loved each other so much and longed to preserve that love and make it the very thing that connected all life in the universe and i cried cried cried in a way i had never cried at dragon ball z during the first season finale when all of the senshi die protecting sailor moon, and the only other person i knew who loved that show as much as i did was this boy who was painfully obviously gay, and if we weren't ridiculed by our peers for enjoying the show we were at least looked at a little askance (iirc i often had to be like "the girls are hot, that's why i'm watching" like i was a byproduct of that one line in the barenaked ladies' "one week"). anyway i still love sailor moon

i did avoid anime for a long time. i don't know why, i just did. shoujo anime, though, magical girl anime, that's definitely one of those things where it's "for girls" but it's awesome and one was supposed to, like, avoid that. and it's stupid. still, people watch these mech shows and won't go near magical girl shows. they'll watch "gunbuster" but not the show it's a remake of, "aim for the ace". part of the thing for me, getting into anime late, is that it _doesn't_ have the gendered pop culture detritus so many forms of pop culture do. i grew up listening to music by men, afraid to listen to even great music by women. i once asked my classic rock, prog-head uncle if he liked kate bush and he looked at me and said "no" as if i'd asked him if he was a girl. i understand that and i don't understand it. it's stupid to listen to peter gabriel and not kate bush. you don't have to _like_ kate bush, but there's this idea that if you're a guy you shouldn't even _listen_. "isn't that girl music?" and i didn't, for a long time. i don't judge anybody for not listening, but i still feel like going out there and begging, please, if you'd just _listen_... but they won't listen to me, because i'm a girl.

with anime i don't have that baggage so i can watch "ashita no joe" _and_ "aim for the ace".

by the way ivy not to like... social contagion you but there are some _really fucking good_ magical girl shows. particularly in the sub. they cut out a lot of sailor moon for the us broadcasts, including the lesbian stuff. cardcaptor sakura? great. lyrical nanoha? great. oh god if you haven't seen "revolutionary girl utena", you _have_ to watch that one.

madoka is good too, but it's "dark magical girl". it's good, though. i prefer zombieland saga, which is about an idol group except they're all zombies. it's really good and very trans-affirming.

i started the utena thread on ilx!!! and i am thankfully acquainted with uncut sailor moon, which is the only reason i still have a hulu account, bc i rewatch it almost yearly. sailor moon s is probably my favorite season of television ever. but you did remind me i have to both read and watch cardcaptor sakura, my friend lent me the manga ages ago and i still haven't picked it up

oh sorry you may have been addressing all that to a general audience lol

nah i just have a hard time keeping up lol, you were there before me haha

A24's podcast just put up a new episode featuring Schoenbrun and Brigette Lundy-Paine in conversation (transcript is at the link as well):

https://a24films.com/notes/2024/05/eternal-sense-of-play-with-jane-schoenbrun-brigette-lundy-paine

Liked the first one but this one I really, really liked

This might be the most personally affecting movie I have ever seen. It absolutely gutted me and I cannot stop thinking about it. That monologue. That ending. All of it. MY GOD. What a revelation.

I saw aspects of my own experience as a trans woman (who happened to grow up in the exact era this movie is set in) that I have never seen depicted in a film until now, including things I’ve never told another soul about.

To be seen to that degree by a mere collection of sounds and images seems impossible but here it is, this strange, dark miracle. It feels like sorcery.

Sometimes you watch a movie and it resonates with you on some deep level that you can’t explain. But this movie…it watches back.

https://letterboxd.com/nolovedeeptrans/film/i-saw-the-tv-glow/

I thought this was an interesting review that made some really good criticisms and I kinda wanted to share my perspective.

Considerations: I am a white 48-year-old binary-presenting trans woman. I started transition at age 43 and have exceptional passing privilege.

First, I can't meaningfully speak to how this film represents or misrepresents Black transfem experience. I definitely find Liv's perspective here to be valuable and informative.

I do tend to agree with Liv's perspective in other ways, though. I agree that the film privileges the constructed notion of "transition". My personal story does fit that narrative really well, and yet, to some extent that's a retrospective framing. I didn't set out with the intent of being functionally identical to a middle-aged white woman. I didn't set out with any intent at all, in fact. For me personally, "transition" wasn't a thing I did, but a series of, well, _experiments_, really. I tried doing things that were stigmatized, things I'd been conditioned to _not_ do, things I thought of as "bad", and found that they worked very well for me, honestly. I found that I had what is termed "gender dysphoria" or "gender incongruence", and that doing these things, including changing my presentation, my legal name, my pronouns, taking hormones, and getting surgery, including a form of what is sometimes referred to as "bottom surgery" didn't just relieve that dysphoria, but induced a state of what might be referred to as gender _euphoria_ - a drastically positive change in my baseline level of happiness and sense of self-worth. That change has persisted, but no longer feels "euphoric" to me. It just feels normal.

In fact, that was what I found most valuable about _I Saw the TV Glow_. It's easy for me to overlook or forget just how badly dysphoria _hurt_, how truly awful I felt. I understand Schoenbrun's perspective here. I didn't transition until the age of 43. I didn't have a choice. I don't think of my past self as having been a failure. That past self kept me alive until age 43. Kept me alive and took care of me. Protected me, the best they could. I honor and value them. At the same time, I was a cartoonishly broken person with a receding hairline. And yes, I did have a wife. No kids. I find Liv's suggestion that "you have to be at least somewhat of a person to [have a wife and kids]" to be overly reductive and essentializing. The truth, I've found, is far more complex - but that issue is outside the scope of the film, so I won't address it further.

I did, like Liv, see the film as being essentially polemic and propagandistic. It didn't straightforwardly and unambiguously state its message, but others have: "You should transition." I'm personally uncomfortable with that. One of the narratives I've always tried to avoid is this sort of "scared queer" approach. My life before I transitioned sucked. It was awful and painful and horrible. _I Saw the TV Glow_ describes quite well the horrible and painful things I experienced. I didn't have a _choice_ in those things. I didn't have the ability to transition. This, I think, is where I see _I Saw the TV Glow_ in terms fundamentally different to Liv - I don't see it as passing judgement on its major character. The polemical argument I heard was not "Do this or you will wind up like Owen". The polemical argument I saw was the one scrawled in chalk towards the end of the movie: "THERE IS STILL TIME".

I can't disagree with Schoenbrun on this point. At age 43, I had the opportunity to change. It wasn't even a choice, not really. The second I had the opportunity, I took it. I don't see Schoenbrun suggesting that "it'll be a lot harder to be beautiful now", because, again, that's not my personal experience. I'm beautiful.

I also don't see Schoenbrun as suggesting that "transition" is some kind of a cure-all fix. I don't know how long Schoenbrun has been on HRT and don't care. What gets essentialized as "transition", well, for me, it's just a bunch of hard choices. "Transition" did address one major problem I had - the gender dysphoria. I get what Liv is saying. Two years in, I felt like the dysphoria was my Only Problem, the One Thing at the root of everything else that was wrong in my life. It wasn't. It was one thing. I have lots of problems. "Transition" made some of them worse. More than that, it forced me to change, in ways I wasn't always comfortable with. I don't regret doing what I did. Would I tell anybody else "You should transition"? No. I strongly believe that's an individual choice.

At the same time, I'm not going to say that I don't sometimes feel the urge strongly to say to someone "You should transition". I didn't realize until I transitioned how much the dysphoria was hurting me. What it was doing to me. To me, that's the value of trans representation - making the invisible visible. I don't want to scare people into transition, ever. For me, transition is first and foremost a question of joy. Fear and pain wasn't ever going to be enough for me. At the same time, that fear and pain was _real_, it _hurt_, and even though it is now gone, gone forever, the effects decades of repressing remain. That, to me, is the urgency. The longer one waits, the more it _hurts_. Whether or not one is going to be "pretty" or "pass" (which, honestly, I think is easier in some ways as a middle-aged woman than it would have been as a young woman) are secondary considerations, if that. (Since I personally both pass and am beautiful - and those two things are _entirely separate considerations_ - it's not something I can speak to _too_ much.)

Transition isn't easy. It's difficult enough that, going into _I Saw the TV Glow_, I asked myself sometimes "Why did I do this again?". Watching the film reminded me of parts of my life I try not to think about.

A lot, I think, of the issue I have with _I Saw the TV Glow_ is not in the film itself. It's in people looking at it and trying to see The Trans Story. I don't think it is or that it intends to be. I think it's _a_ story. There are no universals in trans experience. It's a good film, for what it is. Polemical, blunt, powerful. I'm glad it exists. I'm looking forward to seeing what questions people have as a result of watching the film, and how they choose to answer those questions.

I will be interested to see what the letter from Clare Wadd tacked onto Maddy's wall said when this movie streams and I can pause it!

oh i definitely take issue with the film itself

like if we're talking about actual film, in a tangible sense, and an attempt at an engaging narrative

i really can't get on board. i saw it on my birthday with a group of queer folk and as film goers we all felt pretty violated.

A lot, I think, of the issue I have with _I Saw the TV Glow_ is not in the film itself. It's in people looking at it and trying to see The Trans Story. I don't think it is or that it intends to be. I think it's _a_ story. There are no universals in trans experience. It's a good film, for what it is. Polemical, blunt, powerful. I

Actually, it's so powerful and ambiguous because it isn't polemical and blunt.

Swen, can you explain your response?

found that review very reductive from the jump but i generally hate 1/2 star letterboxd bombings

there is so much space in the movie that i don’t think it’s saying most of the things that review thinks it’s saying

Jack Haven is devilishly malevolent in Louise Weard's 'Castration Movie: Anthology ii - the best of both worlds', and Jane Schoenbrun is in part iii out next year.

A warning: these films are quite extreme. Best not to go in cold.

!!

What a good pairing of director and material.

And we got a release date for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: August 7.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-iw33lyFD4

And an Alex G soundtrack with Paul Buchanan? ivy are you the music coordinator.

Is that borrowing the score from John Carpenter's "The Fog"?

jane and i are basically identical, im a little worried about how much this movie will resemble my novel

lets goooooooo

wait I'm still excited about Black Hole, I want it all

Me irl
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/southpark/images/c/c4/S6TerranceTrailer-Thumbnail.png

ILXr's suggest the current stuff for a parent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA5NqUMEdbI

Looks incredible. A "new kind of horror remake"? Is that referencing this film or the sort of film within a film nature of the plot (at least as revealed thus far?)? Def. some nods to "Friday the 13th" but also "Videodrome" in there.

omg

This looks bonkers in the best way.

Anyone who plays ttrpgs should check out the game Public Access, which is kind of I Saw the TV Glow the rpg. Nostalgia-drenched horror rpg about young people in 2004 investigating the disappearance of a Public Access TV station in their hometown that no one else remembers.

Insanely great trailer. What a roll she's on.

And just hearing Buchanan's voice over all that...chef's kiss.

it’s a miracle hearing his voice. I really can’t wait

Absolutely psyched for this

per IMDb the cast includes Patrick Fischler, Zach Cherry, Eva Victor, Dylan Baker, Sarah Squirm, and Kevin McDonald (!)

The Skype call scene in WAGttWF is one of the most realistically upsetting horror scenes I’ve ever seen.

And now this!

https://www.fangoria.com/jane-schoenbrun-novel-public-access-afterworld/

Anyway, big ol' interview:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/jane-schoenbrun-teenage-sex-death-at-camp-miasma-exclusive-1236590110/

“Everyone except for Mubi passed on this movie, to be totally blunt,” they say. “Every major studio and distributor passed on the film ...

So no Neon, no A24, no ... anyone else? That's a little surprising, but reading between the lines of the interview a little bit ("bloody, vivid sex scenes," "Blue Velvet," “The movie represents the experience of somebody trying to find creative autonomy and maybe losing their fucking mind a little bit as they bash their head up against the limits of the highest Zoom rooms of capital”) it sounds like this movie is designed to be confrontational.

Works for me!

*jack nicholson nodding head gif* + *sicko at window gif*

Yeah, I'm all in. Her last one has stuck with me more than most movies do.

So no Neon, no A24, no ... anyone else? That's a little surprising, but reading between the lines of the interview a little bit ("bloody, vivid sex scenes," "Blue Velvet," “The movie represents the experience of somebody trying to find creative autonomy and maybe losing their fucking mind a little bit as they bash their head up against the limits of the highest Zoom rooms of capital”) it sounds like this movie is designed to be confrontational.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, May 12, 2026 7:46 AM (five hours ago)

speaking as someone in a, uh, _certain demographic_ that informs schoenbrun's filmmaking, i find it increasingly difficult to say anything without being "confrontational". that "every major studio and distributor" in 2025 passed on a film by a trans person is, uh, not surprising at all to me.

"i saw the tv glow" will be changing lives for decades to come. i'm glad they're getting a chance to put another one out where people can see it. who knows if they'll get another chance?

I have no idea what impacted her struggle for distribution or financing. But her last one was A24 with help from Emma Stone's production company, this one is Mubi with help from Brad Pitt's production company. Best of all, it got made. Seems like things worked out OK?

"their" is the correct pronoun I believe

I'm still most excited about the Black Hole thing

I'm equally excited, that book/material is a perfect fit.

I have no idea what impacted her struggle for distribution or financing. But her last one was A24 with help from Emma Stone's production company, this one is Mubi with help from Brad Pitt's production company. Best of all, it got made. Seems like things worked out OK?

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, May 12, 2026 1:42 PM (one hour ago)

sorry, i didn't mean to be confrontational

Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder is some A+ casting. Definitely hyped for this.

Early reviews seem positive.

Richard Lawson:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma-review-jane-schoenbrun-1236595127/

Rated R for "bloody violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use, and some language" -- which was all rather implied.

sorry about that last post, josh, that wasn't fair to you. i was feeling kinda pissy.

No prob!

Well dang this looks choice:

https://www.frameline.org/films/frameline50/teenage-sex-and-death-at-camp-miasma

Scored a ticket and looking forward to it.

thinking a little bit about schoenbrun as "confrontational" in the context of trans media. one of the things that i think is exceptional about schoenbrun is their ability to convey the trans experience very powerfully while still being _able_ to get an "R" rating from the MPA. a lot of trans media that i've run across has the tendency to be _transgressive_, no pun intended. an AMAB wearing femme-coded clothing in public is apparently a much stronger and more deeply rooted societal taboo than even i imagined, in light of the rather extreme actions taken by certain people in power to try and stamp out this behavior. footage of GRS was included on the "faces of death" video compilations back in the day. it's pretty grisly stuff to be sure, but no more so than, say, cataract surgery, which they used to show on the Discovery Channel back in the '90s.

i'm trying to think of an analogy for the taboo traditionally represented by AMAB femme-presenting behavior and the best analogy i can come up with is urolagnia. i can't say that i see urolagnia being able to be represented in an r-rated film. to be clear i'm not comparing me being a girl to drinking piss. it's more that _other people_ see the two things as comparable - the way people used to compare homosexuality to bestiality (and maybe still do, i don't know, i tend to avoid people who would say things like that).

one of the things i like about the early years of ILX being preserved (and i hope ILX's content is preserved and somehow accessible academically even if ILX itself becomes defunct one day... there's a lot of early 2000s history that has gone down the memory hole) is that a lot of us _did_ come from edgelord backgrounds, myself certainly included, and i feel empowered here to say things that i wouldn't in a lot of other places as a result. the trans cinema i know are things like drew burnett gregory's "chloe and jame", about a t4t relationship between the character of jame gumb from "the silence of the lambs" and anthony perkins' character in "psycho", or zackary drucker's 2008 short film with a long title which i'm going to put behind a spoiler cut because it's, well, transphobic: You Will Never Ever Be a Woman. You Must Live the Rest of Your Days Entirely as a Man, and You Will Only Grow More Masculine with Each Passing Year. There Is No Way Out. there's also louise weard's "castration movie anthology i. traps" from 2024, which both contains unsimulated explicit sex and portrays some of the worst shit that trans people do.

if i had to compare the trans media i know to something white cis audiences might be aware of, it'd probably be something like sayaka murata's _earthlings_. this is an _extremely_ transgressive work... ManCarryingThing put it on his list of "the 10 most disturbing books ever". and yeah i couldn't finish it. a lot of why i couldn't finish it, though, was because of how much it _resonated_ with my experience. sometimes people experience shit that's too difficult to talk about directly, that can only be expressed through taboo fiction. there was a whole _thing_ with girls who are sexually abused by their dads and get very into VC Andrews, because, i mean, one has to deal with that shit _somehow_.

for a lot of trans women... there's this weird sort of quasi-orientalism to a lot of transfem experience that i'm pretty equivocal about. it's "problematic". every fucking one of us is "problematic", in so many ways. i was introduced to sayaka murata by a trans woman who was a friend a couple years ago. she's since vanished, which is something a lot of us do. we're still alive, most of us, we just retreat into, well, the best words for it are japanese - "hikikomori", "NEET". existing in public is fine, really, better than on the internet, and so i don't really understand why it's so much harder for me to get out and be "real" than it is for me to sit in front of a screen all day.

J (i'm not gonna give her full name) was writing a book inspired by Earthlings and by her experience. she was also inspired by something called "denpa" or "dempa". my curiosity led me to some videos by a lady on youtube, amelie doree. she's a trans lady who talks about these visual novels, about the history of "denpa". it's one of the cases where i'm really grateful for youtube's content guidelines. a lot of the YT versions of these videos are basically nothing but meme "censored" images. one of the things that's hit me most is her talking about being exposed to all of this extremely fucked up stuff on the internet as a kid. that was edgelord culture, everybody knew what goatse looked like, tubgirl, lemonparty. i know the origin story of 4chan, why it split off from somethingawful, and it's fucked up, a lot of the stuff that was - i guess is - on 4chan was very very fucked up, and a lot of people on 4chan are, correspondingly, very very fucked up. i never went on 4chan myself. not my generation. and i kind of get it because most of the rest of the internet is a walled garden where you get "demonetized" if you say "fuck" or "hitler" or "fuck hitler".

anyway, that internet trauma, that's on top of a lot of us having fucked up childhoods. to circle back around to "teenage sex and death", the elevator pitch i heard was that it was schoenbrun's take on "sleepaway camp". i think sleepway camp is so resonant a film not _just_ because it's a story about a girl with a penis, but _also_ a story about childhood trauma - something a lot of us have experienced in forms that aren't necessarily related to our gender. there's a not-uncommon redemptive read trans women in particular have on sleepaway camp, one in which angela is unambiguously the hero, a sort of "rape-revenge" story where she enacts violent retribution on assholes who give her shit for having a penis. it doesn't _exactly_ work, but most of her killings _do_ very well fit that formula. of course that's problematic and transgressive, taking a movie about a serial killer and viewing the serial killer as a hero. i do think, though, that there's some sense in which angela's actions can be compared to the brutal, violent killings jennifer hills performs in _i spit on your grave_, though i should note that i haven't seen _i spit on your grave_ and don't want to. one of the key differences is that angela is a _child_. i mean this has always been part of the appeal of slasher films, that it's young people taking off their clothes and getting killed, so angela being a very young person _isn't_ necessarily read as being as transgressive as it would be in most other contexts.

one of the most accurate and most harrowing depictions of being a trans kid i've read is a seinen manga called "bokura no hentai". it's not a hentai, to be clear. it's an old fan-translation that uses the word "trap", which is a slur and _isn't_ an accurate translation. i'm not sure "bokura no hentai" could be published in america, even though it's not at all pornographic. it's just _transgressive_, and the fucked up thing that its transgression comes from its, like, realism. i'm glad i've read it and i also feel kind of sick and awful for having read it, not just because of the fucked up shit that goes on in that manga but because it's the most realistic depiction i've seen of what gender non-conforming AMAB kids actually go through, the shit we actually experience. it's so so so hard to acknowledge and accept that any of this shit is really, that it really happens, much less that it happened to me and a lot of the people i know, when we were kids.

i say all this now because i'm pretty confident that _whatever_ schoenbrun does in _teenage sex and death at camp miasma_, it'll be much different from all this stuff i'm talking about here. they have an exceptional creative vision and an exceptional ability to convey the psychological experience of transness in a way that's intelligible and palatable to a broader audience than trauma cases who grew up reading denpa VNs. i really admire them for that. the truth is that a lot of us _can't_ speak for ourselves, at this point, no matter how much we want to.

Just to be clear, the only reason I used the term "confrontational" was quotes like "I’m really hoping that they are wrestled with culturally in the way that Blue Velvet’s sex scenes were wrestled with culturally, or the most troubling moments in my previous works have been wrestled with."

Just to be clear, the only reason I used the term "confrontational" was quotes like "I’m really hoping that they are wrestled with culturally in the way that Blue Velvet’s sex scenes were wrestled with culturally, or the most troubling moments in my previous works have been wrestled with."

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, May 15, 2026 10:07 AM (two hours ago)

oh yeah to be clear i'm just kinda engaging in self-critique. what you said was totally appropriate. that long post isn't a response to you, it's more a matter of me trying to figure out why i reacted so strongly to you saying a totally normal thing. i thought it was worth sharing and i don't really write anywhere besides ilx - i just figure some people here might possibly appreciate it, me kinda thinking about schoenbrun and their place in the canon of Trans Art.

Gonna get happy and watch this again tonight. First time I got so into the vibe that I couldn’t tell you much about the story.

Bring it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dimCiC_hdoA

The brief clip of the Friday the 13th Nintendo game (or
a similar thing) has sold me.

I liked ISTTVG more on my second watch. There’s a clunkiness to it that I like a lot. The loneliness in it is heartbreaking.

great trailer, I'm hyped

Gillian Anderson did nothing for me back in the day, but she has been kicking ass the past few years. Loved her in Sex Education.

you should see her in the house of mirth

Seconding.

"Sex seems so easy for so many people but I've never been able to get there with someone else unless I'm really far away in my head."

schoenbrun do know how it be

I can relate to that Kate

If any of you haven't seen The Fall, it is an excellent TV show (3 seasons, 2013-2016) about a serial murderer played by Jamie Dornan and an investigator played by Gillian Anderson