The Pink Opaque is real if you want it to be

On I Saw the TV Glow, Buffy, and life.

Hi! Haven’t written one of these in forever! I keep planning to come back and write here, but stuff keeps getting in the way (thank you to those of you who asked about it, you’re my favourite people in the world). But then you see a film you just absolutely have to write about.

This article contains spoilers for I Saw the TV Glow. If you haven’t seen it and really want to savour the experience, it’s fine, just bookmark this and come back later. But I put my whole heart into this newsletter, so it would be nice if people did read it. There are also spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but come on, the show ended more than 20 years ago, the warning has expired on that one.

“Time wasn't right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls asleep in the supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I told myself, ‘This isn't normal. This isn't normal. This isn't how life is supposed to feel.’”

It was late 2015. I was 23 years old. I had known for a couple of years by that point that I was, almost certainly, a transgender woman, but I had done precisely nothing with that knowledge. I wanted to at least accomplish something on that path, so I decided to come out to the only people in the world I knew would definitely be cool with it, a community of people whose friendship probably saved my life: the nerds on Twitter who I obsessed over TV shows with.

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen (Justice Smith), a lonely and intensely dysphoric adolescent who bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over their shared love of The Pink Opaque, a kid-friendly fantasy-horror show about teenagers Isabel and Tara (an obvious reference, considering Amber Benson’s cameo), who fight supernatural forces through their psychic connection. The Pink Opaque has a few real-life analogues, but it’s most obviously borrowing from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the supernatural teen show about Buffy Summers and her friends fighting the forces of evil.

I remember the first time I watched Buffy. I was 16 years old and, in one of my dumber life decisions, decided to start watching a 144-episode television series the day before school started again after summer. In the film, Owen has to rely on Maddy’s VHS recordings to watch The Pink Opaque. I was doing this in 2008, so technology had advanced a fair bit beyond video tapes. I, well, pirated the show, and watched the whole thing within about two months. From then onwards, I was obsessed. I did that a lot with TV, but this show held a stronger grip on me than perhaps any others. Sometimes, Buffy felt more real than real life.

This happened a lot to me. I always felt like a narrator in my own life rather than a protagonist. Things would happen to me without feeling like I was the one making them happen. I think this is arguably the most core facet of gender dysphoria: feeling as though real life isn’t as “real” as it’s supposed to be. If you talk to a lot (but sure, definitely not all) of trans women and transfeminine people, something becomes obvious pretty quickly: we’re absolutely huge fucking nerds. I think a big part of that is a coping mechanism for how empty and detached the real world feels. When real life barely registers as though it’s actually happening, disappearing into fictional narratives is so much easier. The movie talks a lot about not being able to separate fact out from fiction, and my god did I do this in my life.

This makes up a lot of what Emily St. James calls “egg cinema”. For those of you unfamiliar with online trans discourse, an “egg” is someone who has not yet realised they’re trans, or is in denial about this. “Egg cinema”, films that feel like they accidentally capture a truth about being trans and in denial, often obsess over the world feeling less real than it should do. The most famous example of egg cinema, The Matrix, is obsessed with this. I Saw the TV Glow is not egg cinema, and Schoenbrun had already started transitioning when they wrote the script, and that means it’s coming from a different perspective. While The Matrix presupposes that everyone feels this disconnect from reality, one of I Saw the TV Glow’s quietly brilliant strokes is that it never suggests this is a universal condition. Owen and Tara are not experiencing life the way everyone else does. That kind of alienation is not normal, and the movie knows it.

TV shows are like dogs. You might love them hard, but they’re not going to keep going forever. A human lifespan will outlive them. The Pink Opaque was cancelled after five seasons, and that was something that seemed to bother Owen as much as his own life spiralling out of control (this is, admittedly, also how I felt when Lost ended right as I failed my A-Levels and drifted into unemployment). It ended on a cliffhanger. The “Big Bad”, Mr. Melancholy (and truly, if there’s a better nickname for dysphoria than that, I don’t know it), captures both Isabel and Tara, rips their hearts out, and buries them alive in coffins to suffocate. This is the movie’s trans metaphor realised: the idea that you’re drifting through life feeling empty inside because the real you is trapped somewhere else suffocating in a coffin. It instantly feels destined to become the next “egg crack” in online trans terminology.

Buffy did not end after five seasons. It very nearly did, with the show’s original channel, The WB, deciding it was time. But another outlet, UPN, decided to resurrect the slayer from the dead. Quite literally. The fifth season of the show centres around Buffy having to protect her sister, Dawn, from the season’s main villain, Glory, and her plan to kill Dawn in order to rip a whole in the universe and escape this dimension (it’s a whole thing). She refuses to do the logical but devastating thing of killing Dawn, instead figuring out she can save the world by sacrificing herself. “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it”, she tells her sister in her final words. “Be brave. Live, for me”. That was supposed to be Buffy, and Buffy’s, final words.

But fans, audiences, and capitalism couldn’t accept that it was over and move on. Another channel paid up the cash, so Buffy and Buffy had to be resurrected. Season six of Buffy is messy, heavy handed, and wildly inconsistent, but it’s the boldest thing the show ever did, and certainly the season I most often find myself thinking about. Her friends, much like the fans, just cannot live without Buffy. They concoct a plan to resurrect her, on the spurious grounds that she could be trapped in hell. Except that’s not what happened. “I was happy”, she explained. “At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. And I was finished. Complete. I don’t understand theology or dimensions… any of it really, but I think I was in heaven.

“And now I’m not. I was torn out of there – pulled out – by my friends. Everything is here is hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch… this is hell. Just getting through the next moment, knowing what I’ve lost…”

She had crossed over to the other side. And then she was dragged back.

In a sequence surely on Schoenbrun’s mind, Buffy has to claw her way out of her own coffin. She feels detached and empty and depersonalised. I don’t think anyone making this season had gender dysphoria on their minds instead of good old fashioned depression, but seeing her feel like life isn’t really happening as she drifts through life and a dead-end job certainly spoke to me. She was meant to be in another place, as something else, and here she was dragged back down, going through the motions.

In the film, crossing over through the coffin is presented by Maddy as a means of escape and becoming one’s true self. She comes back into his life believing that the two of them are not Owen and Maddy but Isabel and Tara, the heroes of The Pink Opaque, trapped in another reality while their real selves suffocate. This is all ridiculous on the surface of it, and Owen says as much. But, well, that’s how it feels realising you might be transgender! You realise your entire life is a lie based just on feelings inside your own head. Everything in the world is telling you that you’re one thing, while you alone know that you’re something else. It’s very difficult to talk about without sounding like you’ve lost your mind.

Maddy’s solution to “return” to the world of The Pink Opaque is to bury herself alive. That is how you cross over to the other side in her mind, the route that Buffy took and was brutally dragged back from to the mortal realm of dissociation. Like a lot of trans people, I’ve had some suicidal thoughts over the years. Feeling like it’s the only way out is the natural response when transition feels inconceivable or impossible. When life doesn’t feel like it’s really happening, just ending it all is certainly a way out.

The film really articulates that dysphoria gets worse as you age. Things were already bad as a teenager, but once I got past school age, it just became more and more intolerable. Through that bleak, bleak darkness, I figured out I was trans, but the darkness was so great to stop me doing anything about it for a long time. It just seemed an impossible mountain to climb. In those years of my early 20s, the only thing really keeping me hanging on was TV shows. My friend Sonia Saraiya once said that “TV is great for depressed people, sick people, bored people. People who are trying to ignore some material condition of their life, or someone else in the room.” My god did that apply to me.

But the one thing that helped was building connections with other people. I became obsessed with reading the website The AV Club, particularly the TV section (if I’m honest, a lot of my football writing is just ripping off the style and tone of that place). I made a lot of friends with people who loved reading that place, people who commented there, even people who wrote articles there. It’s the only time in my life I found a like-minded community who felt so alienated and distant from the real world that they disappeared into fictional narratives.

I came out to them on Twitter because I knew they were good people who wouldn’t cause a problem. I didn’t realise how many of them would later come out and transition themselves. And it just felt impossible for me to take those steps. It would’ve probably been fine. I could’ve done it if I had more confidence in myself. But at the time, it just felt like it was a mountain I could never climb. The years drifted by and I felt deader and deader inside. I was Grace Robertson on the internet, but every day the toll of having to be something else in all other facets of my life grew harder.

The only way I dug out of the hole was to somehow will myself into a career writing about football where I never had to meet anyone or talk to anyone in person. I could just be Grace online without my family knowing the truth. It was a stop gap measure. The mission was clear: earn enough money writing about football to be able to move out, then start transitioning. It took me over 11 years from the moment I realised I was trans to the moment I was holding the hormones in my hand.

Owen never gets that moment in the movie. He doesn’t take the leap with Maddy and drifts further into an empty life. He never leaves his parents’ house and spends decades working as an assistant in a kids’ arcade. He never treats his intense and acute dysphoria, or even registers that it’s there. His final words in the movie are to apologise to absolutely everyone around him simply for existing, because he hates who he is so much that he naturally assumes everyone else must feel the same way. He’s still in pain he doesn’t even know he has because his real self is suffocating in a coffin. A butterfly flaps its wings differently a few times and that would’ve been me. It would’ve been every trans person I know. I don’t know how many people will read this, but it’s probably at least a few of you right now.

I started hormones in July 2023. I was finally doing this for real, outside the computer. About a month in, a strange thing happened: I didn’t hate existing anymore. I don’t really have words to describe the difference here, but I just stopped dissociating. I hadn’t even made any other changes to my life yet, so all I can think is that changing the hormonal balance just shifted my brain chemistry. For the first time in my life, my brain isn’t floating off in Sunnydale, or in the Tardis, or on the Island from Lost. I am here right now. I am present.

I don’t think it’s totally accurate that only trans people can emotionally relate to I Saw the TV Glow. Maybe something else caused you to dissociate in your life. Maybe you have other issues you need to work through. Maybe you just really love TV.

Or maybe you’re suffocating in a coffin and you don’t know it.

Life doesn’t have to be like this.

There is still time.