Existential Horror is the New Pink

I Saw the TV Glow

***If you haven’t watched the movie idk how you’ll feel about this post just a heads up***

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That’s So Raven is a television show that aired on Disney Channel when I was a kid. I was obsessed with it. It featured Raven-Symone as Raven Baxter, a high school girl who designed and made her own clothes and lived in San Francisco. Also she was psychic. She had two best friends and parents who seemed like they loved her and each other and life. She had everything I wanted. Clothes that represented her personality, parents that cared about her, and she was free from the suburbs, unlike me. Also, everyone knew she had like special magical brain gifts and were chill with it, it was seen as just another idiosyncrasy of hers. None of this was within the realm of my experience except for the fact that she could never get a boyfriend even though she was cute, and the fact that, at the time it was airing, me nor Raven knew we were lesbians. It was one of the only things my parents would let me watch. Recently, I had made a joke in my head that the show feels so integrated into my child-aged psyche, and so subtly intertwined with my personality and experience to this day, it feels like I made it up. Like, Raven is really me in my ideal childhood reality. The show got me through being a black child in the Atlanta suburbs¹ with no friends and emotionally and verbally abusive family.

I bring this up because the film, I Saw the TV Glow, offers to the viewer the question of how and what media they’ve consumed, especially as a child, has shaped who they are. As a queer person especially, it seems like we often identify with fiction narratives laid out in front of us because we don’t feel we’ll live long enough to be in a world that will ever be kind to us, fully. So we live vicariously through screens. And, before screens, through other forms of art detached from oneself. And for those of us lucky enough to get the chance to be the ones doing the writing, we make sure the kids like us are represented and explored. I think we, queer people, identify so heavily with fiction because we were born equipped with the expansive imagination to do so. Many gifts lie on a bed of misfortune.

It was another day here, in this slice of space. Meaning, someone was mean to me again but it was way more visceral and lasting, meaning I needed to go watch a movie.

I have the mubi subscription that comes with a weekly film ticket. My weekly movie visit is a little time-container-portal that I stick myself into to relieve my bodymind from reality for a second (several hours). Rarely do films get me there as much as this one did. This film understood what a portal is. This film watched me back.

In the theatre, there are so many white normies it feels like a mob, which is how this entire city feels, and I am pretty much definitely the only black, queer, or otherwise different person in this room where a very queer film is about to be shown. Scary! But also contributed more to the sense of the film watching me back. Trailers peddling impending apocalypse, prison stories and other american film landscapes mostly fall flat (except for Maxxine <3). I’m here for the color, tired of the black and white.

I think it might have had something to do with the emotional state I was in, but I kind of think I was meant to see this movie exactly when I saw it. I’ve been thinking all of my choices have become some sort of divination. Art, especially, doesn’t come into my life without reason, because I am extremely intentional about when I go out, where, and with whom. A gut feeling is required.

Being in the way I was and seeing some positive reviews from writers I trust let me get really vulnerable with it. Like, I think I was a better viewer this time; I was more settled in and trusting. I had a couple of hallucinations of the feeling of a seatbelt a couple times during the movie, and, even through my adhd which makes it hard for me to stand still, I sat and stared the entire time. It was an emotionally immersive experience that I don’t think people who have not encountered acute suburban childhood loneliness will understand.

I Saw the TV Glow is what I would consider a film about the horrors of identity, time, and the sources of our senses of safety and belonging. It doesn’t have any serious jump-scares, but it left me horrified of who I could have been and who I am. When referring to Owen, one of two main characters, I will be using she/her pronouns because there is no separating the film from it’s transness and anyone attempting to do so is invalid in their analysis x

The film fleshes out the omnipresent sense of being trapped and emptiness of our reality. Maddy, the other main character, attempts to escape because she feels as though she’ll die in the suburb where she and Owen grow up, but it’s just as suffocating in Phoenix, Arizona. Maddy’s character exemplifies the fire that is sparked in us when we are young that grows, but has no where to go in our world, and is eventually snuffed out if not provided with the proper environment, which, let’s be real, is usually not what happens. Hence why once-activists like Angela Davis are now collecting checks from the same systemic boogeymen they so hated a few decades ago.

To me, Owen lives the real horror. She never (or at least we don’t see it) lives her true, or closer to true, self. She keeps eating the static of her identity and living in her dreams, and her dreams are projected onto The Pink Opaque (the television show they’re both obsessed with) which is imprinted with her times shared with Maddy, a confidant and true friend. The show that brought them together and real life become blurred. Time get’s all mashed up, as it tends to do while it passes. It passes, and you die, whether you self-actualize or not.

Pick your poison, indeed.

One night, at work, Owen cuts herself open just to get a glimpse at the static again. But she continues to put most of her energy into making herself smaller. We never know if she blossoms into who Maddy knows her to be. Into Isabel. Owen doesn’t know how to be the main character (And I absolutely feel her).

I know I am not where I need to be when I find myself feeling like Owen, hiding and making myself as small as I can for a sense of safety. But living like Maddy will not actually fix anything, it just has a sideways satisfaction of being certified and sure there are no good options. Coming out won’t make a difference to the people around you a lot of the time, and it damn sure won’t inherently improve your quality of life. I often think about how pretty of a girl I was, but it was still terrible being treated as weak all the time. I’d rather be a lonely, bookish, spinster dyke than a cog.

Maddy’s monologue was where I started the crack apart, in the best ways. “Those memories were put there to distract you” in reference to Owen’s childhood memories is extremely resonant I often feel that many childhoods, which consist of the substance that upholds cis-hetero-whatever-the-fuck have so much control over our future, because of course they do. Our childhood forms our entire soul’s imagination system, which informs the life we create for ourselves. I didn’t understand why there were astrological projections on her face as she spoke, but I felt that they were there just for me.

People in this section of space where I live do this weird thing where they laugh at things that obviously aren’t funny because they are uncomfortable. They do this with everything. Americans do this with everything. Laugh it off, not to keep from crying, but because the suffering of the Other juxtaposed your privilege doesn’t even feel real, so of course you laugh. You laugh because you are so relieved it isn’t you. Today, for now, while you’re reading this.

I think some viewers were left disappointed, thinking that the film should have been scarier or left them clutching their seats, or something. But, I did find the film scary, especially the ending. Feeling like you are running out of time and air to fully actualize is terrifying. This is the horror of identity. I live the horror every day of living as myself in a world that wants to kill me. Coming out, being in community, living out loud doesn’t fix that, and it won’t. Nothing will fix it yet I still have to find reasons to not kill myself, and I do, for now. For today, while you’re reading this.

On my way out of the theatre, I have to plug my ears immediately to keep myself from hearing cisgender heterosexual idiots say things like “the movie looked good, I just thought something was going to actually happen” and I feel as though my entire experience is being gaslit even though they have no idea who I am. In my mind’s eye, I am grabbing people by their collars and screaming SOMETHING DID FUCKING HAPPEN AND IT’S BECAUSE OF YOU but, in reality, I am just walking really slowly, scowling, and staring, looking extremely unapproachable, like an owl.

After the film, I stood in liminal spaces too long, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror and walked to the train really slowly and didn’t try to perk up my face to look sane. My resting face is angry and sad because why wouldn’t it be. I went completely nonverbal and listened to jazz on nts radio. No one else around me existed, for once. I felt like I also had been fed the Luna Juice and now I am slowly spewing blue out of my mouth onto the streets of whatever place in space this is. My chest is perpetually cut open, that’s why people in this place are looking at me like I am a freak. Because I refuse to sew it up. I just glow and glow and glow and no one’s going to make me stop.

I had to close my eyes the whole way home as to not get overwhelmed by the omnipresent injustices, because that’s how raw this film made me. Several silent and holy tears escaped me as people avoid eye contact. I just want someone to hug me, but I came to this city alone on purpose. I am lonely again, but still not as lonely as when I was a kid, and I guess I have to be grateful, but I’m not. I want more, I deserve more.

The second time I watched the movie, the theatre was empty save me and about 3 ghosts. I took this probably illegal photo of one of my favorite shots of the film:

There is so much potential for you. You don’t have to realize it all today, but it doesn’t mean its not there. Those of us, especially, who lost bits of our childhoods to abuse or being in environments that rejected us still have time to do all the things we want to do. You have today, and that’s enough. Live under the assumption that you have tomorrow, too. Have grace with yourself so it sprouts and grows to extend to others.

Ok i know its basic to say but like art is so important because feeling so alone in the suburbs (yes i am calling the third largest city in america a suburb because it basically fucking is a suburb with a few open-air prisons attached that it uses for fuel) films like this remind me that there isn’t anything wrong with me im just not like the people around me and that would be okay if people living on graveyard countries like the u.s. weren’t taught to hunt, kill, or otherwise inconvenience anything “different” and breathing.

If you are a very impressionable person who might relate to the setting of this film, I would probably go with a friend. Personally, I have kind of not been the same since I watched it so! Like literally hallucinating lol but it’s okay I am taking it with stride. I strive to make something that makes people hallucinate so, good job Jane Schoenbrun. I’m even more inspired now to never closet any parts of myself, even if coming out doesn’t inherently make life better; it kind of does?.

This is not a tidy trans film with a neat ending. It’s more authentic to the experience of being simply eclipsed out of straightness and cisness, knowing you can’t be because you just can’t. The feeling isn’t pleasant, it’s frightening, messy, and deserves more attention.

1. terrifying fact: I lived about a 15 minute drive from where the KKK resurged in 1915, a place called Stone Mountain, if you want a little glimpse into my adolescence