There is still time. But how much?
I'm about to take a chunk of it up with this very long newsletter
Hey, everyone! After not writing about pop culture for a while, I’m going to aim to get a newsletter out about once a month or so. That seems pretty clearly doable. This one is still about the movie I can’t stop thinking about, and I needed to get those thoughts down on the page. This one is less of a personal essay than the last newsletter, but I think I get into what the movie is trying to do a little better than I did previously. I’ll admit I thought this one wouldn’t go into trans feelings as much as last time, but that’s where the writing took me, and it ended up becoming a lot about trans feelings. And yeah, it’s long, what of it?
This article contains spoilers for I Saw the TV Glow. Proceed with caution. The film is finally coming out in the UK and Ireland on the 26th of July, and is currently available via video on demand in North America. Everyone else… you’re on the internet, that’s all I’ll say. I’m not really going to bother explaining the plot here, so you might get a little lost if you haven’t seen it, but you know what to do.
“I try not to think about it”
What happens if you spend your whole life refusing the call?
This is not how dramatic storytelling is “supposed” to work. Hollywood filmmaking has internalised Joseph Campbell’s rules to the point of death. I think everyone has taken the Hero’s Journey far too literally, as these are descriptions rather than prescriptions, but the notion has spread through to every mainstream film you watch: the protagonist will be called to adventure, then refuse the call before deciding to take the leap. The refusal is the “boring” bit, the part where the hero is standing in the way of the cool stuff we bought a ticket to see, and gets condensed down quite a bit.
All of us want to narrativise our own lives. You can argue that real life doesn’t work that way, that it’s just a whole bunch of stuff that happens on your way to the grave. But that’s not how people experience it in the moment. Trans people, I think, particularly like to do this. The moment your egg cracks, the moment you self-actualise and accept who you are, your entire life becomes reframed about getting to that moment. Once you accept the call, your entire journey thus far was about getting there.
When Neo takes the red pill, everything he ever did in his life becomes about reaching that point. The original Matrix presents this as a choice we can all make, but the most recent entry in the series, Resurrections, redefines this. “When somebody offered me these things”, the character Bugs says in the film, “I went off on binary conceptions of the world and said there was no way I was swallowing some symbolic reduction of my life. And the woman with the pills laughed because I was missing the point. The choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do”.
Resurrections is the only Matrix film made after Lana Wachowski transitioned (her sister Lilly was not involved), and it shows. It’s the first time the notion of the series as a trans metaphor seems to be tackled head on. It’s the film that actually deals with the fact that Wachowski did take the red pill after making the original trilogy. But here’s the thing: she made Resurrections well over a decade after making those decisions. This is a retroactive narrative of someone’s own life. It’s not about how it feels to make these choices in the moment.
Once you know you’re trans, it seems obvious, but up until that exact point it feels impossible. I can look back at my own life and say that, obviously, I was a trans woman who didn’t realise it, and that’s why I thought a particular way or did a particular thing. But right there, in the moment? It wasn’t on my radar at all. If someone had told me as a teenager that they thought I was trans, I would have looked at them like they lost their mind. That’s not something I could possibly be, don’t be so ridiculous. Even if I secretly wanted to be a girl more than anything, the idea of being transgender seemed so patently ludicrous until, one day, it wasn’t. But I had to figure that out for myself. I couldn’t have been told it.
I Saw the TV Glow captures that problem better than any artwork I’ve seen. Maddy lays out everything to Owen and he completely rejects it. He does what any rational human being does if told they’re actually a character from a TV show trapped in an alternate dimension, and dismisses it as obvious nonsense, even if he feels it’s true on some level. You cannot simply go up to someone and tell them they’re entire life is a lie. They need to be given a choice. They need to be given enough to make the right decision when asked to take the red or blue pill. But what if it’s still not enough? What if every clue has been left in someone’s life and they still don’t see it? What then?
Take a look at the very first shot in I Saw the TV Glow. It’s a tracking shot, so a still doesn’t quite do it justice, but we’ll make do.
Ok, that’s a little hard to see. But as the movie’s tagline says, look a little closer. Let’s zoom in.
It’s the ice cream truck. Ok, I would call it an ice cream van, but this is an American film and so the characters would call it a truck. The very same ice cream truck from The Pink Opaque. It’s right outside his house. All the answers Owen wants are sitting there on his street and he can’t even see them. He’s trying not to think about the thing staring him in the face. It’s always easier to ignore the idea that you could be trans, especially as more time passes. You might be wearing the wrong shoes, they might be digging into the soles of your feet and causing them to bleed, but you’ve worn them in at this point. The more that time passes, the comfier that cis identity gets, and the harder it is to throw it away in order to live your life as the person you really are. And so what do you do in that situation? You don’t think about it. You ignore the ice cream truck outside your house. You close yourself off to the gender feelings in your head and just get on with day-to-day monotony. As a trans woman friend of mine put it, “you keep doing things. You watch your favourite shows. You don’t think about it.”
A whole lot of people have argued on the internet about whether Maddy’s explanation is “true”. The movie is obviously built to make you ponder that question, giving you just enough reason to believe without ever providing the definitive evidence either way. Personally, walking out of the cinema I had the most annoying response possible: it doesn’t matter either way. Regardless of whether Owen/Isabel is literally trapped in a hell dimension or not, the point is that they’re suffocating. They (pronouns are hard here lol) know that their life is “wrong” and that they’re not making a choice about that. It’s the feeling of living a hollowed out life that matters, and that’s what the film is about. I spent a lot of time in the last newsletter discussing how the film evokes season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and you can definitely interpret it as in conversation with the episode “Normal Again”, in which Buffy is trapped between the show’s world and another dimension where she’s in a mental health institution and made the whole thing up. I don’t think it’s a great episode of Buffy, but I do love the way it sidesteps which world is “real”. What matters is that Buffy decided to live with her friends and keep fighting. The same can be true of I Saw the TV Glow. As someone who realised I was trans in 2012 and didn’t start doing anything about it outside the computer until 2023, it speaks to me.
I don’t think there’s a “correct” reading of the film either way. But the more I reflect on it, the more I find the idea that it isn’t real a little bleak. I am more often on the side of rational and grounded takes on these kinds of stories. I think Nora is lying at the end of The Leftovers, for example, and I’ll never be persuaded otherwise. I am temperamentally someone who tends to side with hard facts in these situations. But I can’t quite get there this time. I want to believe.
People arguing the case that it’s all true like to put forth the following theory: I Saw the TV Glow, the film we are watching, is in fact the sixth season premiere of The Pink Opaque. After Isabel and Tara get trapped in the Midnight Realm, we watch them play out their fake lives in what they think is a town called Void (ha ha). The movie directly references this. About halfway through, Owen finds a weird crater in the middle of the road with a collection of ephemera from the TV show. It’s hard to make out, but he reads a page from an episode guide for the show, describing the sixth season premiere in which our heroes are trapped in a fake world where the only sign of what’s really up is “the weekly transmissions of a dumb TV show”.
This gets at what I thought was an irrelevant and question I had watching the movie: is The Pink Opaque supposed to be a good show? On first glance, the answer is pretty clearly no. Owen watches the show back as an adult and it’s “cheesy and cheap, dated, and not scary at all.” That would be that. But the movie has such a genuine affection for the real shows that influenced it. Jane Schoenbrun clearly thinks these shows they really loved growing up have some merit. Maybe it’s just that I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer too much to have it besmirched even tangentially. But the idea that The Pink Opaque, which so much to Owen and Maddy, was all empty trash is almost as grim as the notion that Maddy is completely deluded. Maybe these hormones are just turning me into a complete sap (they definitely are), but I don’t want to believe that.
If I Saw the TV Glow is indeed the sixth season premiere, then it’d be one of the boldest and most ambitious episodes of television ever made. The cheesy version of The Pink Opaque Owen watches near the end of the movie would not be capable of it. So what’s going on? Buffy did its fair share of ambitious format-breaking episodes, and those feel like an influence here. But this is not an episode of TV that could have aired in the late ‘90s or early 2000s. This has knowledge of the world stretching all the way into mid-2010s streaming technology. This is something different. Then it hit me.
It’s Twin Peaks. We’re watching the third season of Twin Peaks.
If you haven’t seen Twin Peaks then I don’t know why you’re deciding to spend your precious time on earth reading this newsletter instead of watching it. You should watch Twin Peaks. But I’ve got you now, so stay with me. Schoenbrun cites the second season finale, the last episode of the original run, as a “mild inspiration”. In the episode, the show’s protagonist Agent Cooper (or “Coop”), becomes trapped in the Red Room, a kind of alternate dimension waiting room accessed from the middle of a forest, that plays home to BOB, a kind of mythical being and the series’ main villain. In the show’s very final scene, we learn that over in “our” world”, BOB has taken over Coop’s body, right as the real Coop is trapped in that other dimension. I know many people were disappointed that the episode answered so few questions, but I’ll never understand this mentality, as I find it a very haunting and fitting ending to the show’s original run.
It’s a pretty clear influence on Isabel and Tara’s fate in the finale of The Pink Opaque. I could summarise the fictional TV episode, but Owen already does that in the movie:
“Isabel follows the sound of Tara’s voice in the psychic plane, back to their old sleepaway camp. She finds her at the dock by the lake, the place where they first spoke five seasons ago. But then, as Isabel approaches, she picks something up. A stray signal from the psychic plane. It’s a desperate message from Tara. The real Tara. She’s buried underground in terrible danger. Mr. Melancholy had got to her first.”
The film then shows Mr. Melancholy capturing Isabel and subjecting her to the same fate.
“They cut out her [Isabel’s] heart. They feed her the Luna Juice. And then he makes his entrance. Mr. Melancholy, the big bad.
From there, the movie depicts Mr. Melancholy toying with Isabel in her last seconds before getting trapped in another dimension. “You’re gonna love the Midnight Realm. It’s such a wonderful, wonderful prison”, he explains, as he traps Isabel in a fate that definitely feels inspired by Twin Peaks.
He says all of this while holding a snow globe containing Owen in front of a TV screen. He shakes the snow globe pretty aggressively. It’s an obvious reference to the last episode of St. Elsewhere, another famously provocative finale that bends reality.
Schoenbrun described feeling almost “assaulted” by the Twin Peaks finale. “There was something horrible unresolved in my subconscious”, they explained. Owen has that kind of response to the end of The Pink Opaque, his consciousness getting sucked into the TV screen as the fictional character he may or may not be gets buried alive and sent to the Midnight Realm.
“They bury her… alive. And then… it just ended”
That’s how The Pink Opaque ends, and that’s how Twin Peaks ended. Until it didn’t. Laura Palmer told us she’d see us again in 25 years and, well, running a little late at 26 years later, she did.
The third season of Twin Peaks (I know a lot of people call it by its subtitle The Return, but to me that feels like a marketing invention since it never appears in the show) is a challenging, knotty and stunning work of TV. In its sparseness, it was able to evoke a kind of emptiness in the modern world. It’s not particularly attempting to comment on the 2010s but, like a lot of David Lynch’s work, evokes a feeling of truth better than anyone could actually articulate it. The town of Twin Peaks no longer feels like a soapy hub by the show’s vaguely 2017 timeframe, and that drift towards alienation made the world feel colder. It swaps the warm celluloid hues of the original run for a kind of aggressively realistic digital look that I would normally hate, but here it just added to the distance the show evoked. It’s very hard to write about because it resists analysis. Great show. You should watch it.
It’s also an exercise in delayed satisfaction. We spend most of the season not with the “real” Coop but with another doppelganger, “Dougie Jones”, a kind of mentally childlike facsimile of a real man who comically stumbles through life. “Lynch and series co-creator Mark Frost”, Vikram Murthi wrote halfway through the season, “are teasing Cooper’s eventual return by taunting the audience’s desire for something familiar, turning the most recognisable avatar of Twin Peaks into a childlike figure who has yet to fully awaken to reality […] Lynch and Frost have created the single most compelling character of The Return by refusing to provide the audience with what they ostensibly crave. Dougie-Coop represents Twin Peaks at its best — an unpredictable vision that challenges and provokes its audience rather than appeases them.”
Twin Peaks didn’t exactly invent this, so I can’t put all the credit here, but it spends a lot of time dealing with people being split between their bodies and their consciousness. By the third season, Kyle MacLachlan has played three different characters: the “real” Coop, BOB controlling Coop’s body, and Dougie. I Saw the TV Glow takes those ideas and bends them into the trans metaphor of feeling disconnected from your physical self.
The third season is how I imagine the sixth season of The Pink Opaque would feel. Bear with me while I go down a rabbit hole about the movie’s timeline.
The film opens on election night, giving us a hard date for the inciting incident: Tuesday November 5th, 1996. Owen goes to a sleepover at Maddy’s house the following Saturday, watches the show that would change his life, and then heads home the next morning. That’s the first timeframe of the movie.
We cut to “two years later”, which would put us in late 1998 or, as I think is more likely, early 1999. I promise you I’m going somewhere with this. This section at least feels like it takes place over a longer amount of time. Owen gets into a routine of watching the tapes Maddy leaves for him before finally bringing himself to talk to her. They’re both as lonely and alienated as each other, using the show as a coping mechanism for the emptiness they feel inside. We only get to see one more sleepover, though I feel like it’s at least implied it happened a few more times, and we’re watching a curated telling of the story. Then in what I think is July 1999, Owen’s mother dies of cancer, Maddy disappears, and The Pink Opaque gets cancelled at the end of its fifth season.
Eight years on, Owen is a twenty-something adrift in a dead end service job he seems to hate. All of this takes place years after the show was cancelled, so if this is the season six premiere, it was either made a long time after 1999, or it’s stunningly insightful about what the world would look like. We see a clip from Transmorphers, a 2007 “mockbuster” from ripoff slop factory The Asylum trying to cash in on Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie. It feels important that Owen’s life in this world is so soulless and bereft of meaning that he doesn’t even get the real Transformers, just a cash-grab copy. He meets Maddy again in a supermarket drenched in displays of the American flag, a clear visual symbol that this is post-9/11. He gets told everything and decides not to take the leap. The world around him is becoming coarser and more alienating as he becomes less and less of a person in a pit of dysphoria.
Maddy/Tara1 takes the leap and Owen/Isabel does not. Owen lives with that lingering thought for the rest of his life. He believes, on some level, even if he can’t rationally justify it. “The movie theatre closed the next fall”, presumably a victim of the 2008 crash, Owen moves to a different dead end job, and time just keeps passing. “Years pass like seconds” because we’re so far removed from any true version of himself that he’s numb to everything. By the time he’s watching The Pink Opaque on streaming again it’s, oh, 2017 or so? If this is the season six premiere, the numbness of watching an old favourite back on a streamer feels like a shot at nostalgia-addled fans and whatever platform hosts The Pink Opaque.
Ok, so this is season six, episode one, airing about 18 years after the show first got cancelled. Like Twin Peaks, the creative team have less than no interest in giving the fans the nostalgia they crave. Instead, it’s interested in alienation in an increasingly cold and cruel world, as fans of the show form unhealthy attachments with the work the creators made two decades ago. And sure, let’s say someone involved high up has transitioned since 1999, and wants to return to the show exploring those themes.
Knowing what we do about Twin Peaks and TV in general, we can imagine how the season will play out. Isabel will be trapped in the Midnight Realm for most of the season, perhaps Tara has returned to their world and things are increasingly broken and distant without the two of them united. Isabel might finally return very late in the season, before confronting whatever menaces the world now for a new ending that offers just as much cathartic horror without much in the way of resolution.
At least, that’s what I want to believe. I know I just made it all up, and it’s not much more than an interesting thought exercise. I want to believe it because I want to believe that Owen is going to be ok. I need some kind of narrative redemption here in a work very intent on not playing by those rules.
In reality, actual reality, neither reading of the film is real. This is the narrative we’re given, and Schoenbrun decides not to give us that closure. What we get instead is a middle aged Owen 20 years later, looking in the mirror and seeing the TV glow inside of him, before returning to his hollow shell of an existence at the menial job he still works in. He does the single most egg-coded act of apologising to literally everyone just for existing, and then the movie cuts to black.
Watching that ending, I felt stressed and saddened that I couldn’t get the closure on a fictional character I was relating to so intensely. But I, personally, felt a sense of closure in myself. The movie is a warning, a lesson I had already heeded. I am here transitioning. I had avoided Owen’s fate. Every day I’m on these hormones and getting closer to my transition goals, I feel less like an empty shell and more like an actual human being.
“Gender dysphoria” is a weird and confusing thing that I don’t think any of us fully understand. It’s not even clear this is something that actually exists, rather than a convenient fiction borne out of lies trans people tell healthcare professionals in desperate acts to get the treatment we need. But having lived with it for 32 years, I’m entitled to some thoughts.
I think most people imagine it as a kind of intense dissatisfaction looking in the mirror, a desperate longing to have a different body from birth. And that’s part of it. But for much of my life, I never thought of it like that. I wouldn’t have registered that as being my experience before I realised I was trans. I didn’t really perceive much about my own appearance at all. I tried not to think about it. I just kind of ghosted through life as though none of it was really happening, feeling like the world was less real than it was supposed to be, disappearing into fictional narratives because that was so much easier.
If you spend time online looking around in trans spaces, a lot of people questioning their identity ask the same question: “do I need to have dysphoria to be trans?” They don’t feel like they’re experiencing actual, honest-to-god pain at being their assigned gender at birth, so they can’t really be trans, right? And if they ask it, the answer always comes back the same: lots of us felt like this. I certainly did. When I first started poking around this stuff, my thought process was “well I think I’d prefer to be a woman, but I’m not screaming in pain with dysphoria, so maybe I’m not trans”.
Folks, I was screaming in pain with dysphoria. I just couldn’t see it. I didn’t understand at the time, but the emptiness with which I moved through life all stemmed from that dysphoria.
There is a word for this: depersonalisation. It runs through just about any trans experience. “Everything always seemed like it was somehow less real than it ought to be”, put one very prominent account of this experience. “Each day was like checking off a box, knowing that eventually the days would run out, but not really knowing how else to spend the time.
“You live for a while, and then you die, and that’s that. I didn’t think there was anything else to life. So why bother with any real long-term goals? When I did set goals for myself, it was just for the sake of it – not because I was motivated by any purpose that I genuinely cared about. Nothing made me feel truly fulfilled, like I was accomplishing anything meaningful. So why bother?”
I Saw the TV Glow is the great artistic depiction of depersonalisation dysphoria. It captures that exact feeling of malaise, of emptiness, of pointlessness just drifting through a life in the backseat that doesn’t feel like your own. This is the film’s real achievement: depicting something so acutely that we can all point to it when we’re trying to describe to people what this feels like.
We’re over 4,000 words into my ramblings about this film I liked so much. If you’ve made it this far, maybe I’m just that brilliant a writer, but for some of you, I have to think you resonated with at least something in the movie or what I’ve said about it. And this film isn’t subtle in what it’s trying to say. And if you felt even a little bit of the alienation and emptiness in this movie… I don’t know you (unless I do, but play along, here). I can’t tell you what you feel. But if you’re engaged enough to read this deep into a trans woman’s thoughts about this film, I’d at least ask the question.
I genuinely think everyone should at least consider their gender identity at some point in their life. The worst case scenario is that you are the gender you thought you were, at which point, congratulations for knowing yourself better! But if you feel any kind of mix of feeling like you’re drifting through life and even an inkling of ambivalence about your gender, all I’ll say is there might be something there.
Gender dysphoria is like the Earth’s rotation. You can’t feel it because you’ve never known anything else. And yet it’s at play in everything you ever do, every thought you hold. If you’re in its grips and don’t know it, you cannot truly be happy until you confront it. It’ll eat away at more and more of your life the longer you let it run its course. But you can always turn things around and take action. You can always decide to live the life you want to be living, the life you need to be living. As the movie says, there is still time.
“There's an extended ending”, says Justice Smith, who plays Owen, “where he comes out of the bathroom, he's apologising to everyone for his panic attack, and as he slowly picks up speed, he runs through the arcade and the [light], and essentially, gets out. And Jane decided to cut that and just end it on him apologising for his existence. And so it creates this dynamic of, Will he ever get out?”
As for the actual ending that exists, Smith insists that “Jane and I think it's actually hopeful. Because it's more vague, because you see his expression in the mirror, he's very happy and he's moved by the light that he sees, and there's no denying it. And so, obviously, he's apologetic to everybody, but at least he's closer to who he truly is. At least he's accepted now who he truly is because he's seen it.
“[But it] is bleak. It's something that a lot of people experience. There are people who are lying in the graveyard right now, who never, ever lived their truth. There's a lot of people like that who will never accept who they are out of fear.”
For a very long time, I was one of those people.
I remember lying in bed, after months of thinking about it. I remember deciding that I was going to count to three, and on three, I would stop denying it and just admit I was a trans woman. I got to three and felt such relief at accepting who I was, then that was that. It was January 2012. I would turn 20 in two months.
By the time I finally got the hormones and started transitioning for real, it was July 2023. I was 31 years old. Time moved fast in those days. The years passed like seconds.
I could give you a bunch of excuses as to why I didn’t transition for all those years. The barriers did exist. But I know that I could’ve pushed through them. There were times in my life when I could’ve escaped the Midnight Realm, I could’ve crossed over, but I didn’t. I’m doing it now and I finally feel like I’m really alive, which is wonderful. But still, I should be further along. I should be beyond the phase that other trans women insist I’ll get over where I’m thinking about this stuff constantly. But I’m not. I spend every day thinking about those years that just didn’t happen, that I’ll never get back.
There is still time, but only so much of it. At moments in the past, that made me feel defeatist enough to never want to try. But now, having felt what it’s like to actually live your own life, it just makes every second more precious. There’s no going back, but you can always make things count today. I wish I had lived more of my life. But one second of my life is worth more than a thousand years of the life I was living before.
For that, I am grateful.
Everyone, myself included, mentioned that the name Tara is a pretty obvious Buffy lift because Amber Benson has a cameo in the film. Is the name Maddy a reference to Maddy Ferguson from Twin Peaks, the identical cousin who grows ever more like Laura Palmer as the series goes on before meeting the same fate? I have no idea, but it feels like more than a coincidence.