About a month ago I saw The People’s Joker. It’s a film about being unapologetically yourself as a trans person in a world that tries to constantly knock you down a peg in order from becoming that. It’s by no means a fully saccharine experience but you can ultimately tell it’s a therapeutic film about finding your own personal trans joy.

A month later I managed to see I Saw the TV Glow. It is not joyous in anyway, it is about trans hell and anguish.

Jane Schoenbrun has made one of the most frightening films of the year, one whose ultimate scares from a life of mundaneness and unfulfilled potential. It’s about the consumption of media young queer people partake in that slowly becomes their whole and they can only find solace through that.

We see our protagonist Owen find it with a new friend Maddy in a TV show, they see themselves in The Pink Opaque, a Buffy meets Are You Afraid of the Dark? pastiche that lets them find comfort in their queerness. Schoenbrun really lets you know that shit show is practically their savior in a deathly boring suburbia; the initial two year time skip sees Owen change from a pre-teen to a lanky tall nervous wreck as brilliantly portrayed by Justice Smith, like he has gone through a puberty he never wanted and is stuck with a body he can’t recognize. 

The film truly thrusts into gear the trans metaphor when after almost a decade after disappearing, Maddy returns and tells Owen that they are both main characters from The Pink Opaque; she refers to herself as Tara and to Owen as Isabel. Interspersed through a palpitation-inducing monologue perfectly delivered by Brigette Lundy-Paine's Maddy, we see select shots of Owen walking in a dress similar to Isabel’s. Owen is happy, but that route is terrifying and requires his old self to die and for Isabel to be reborn; and thus he chooses to run away from his only friend in fear.

About 5 years ago I realized I was trans, I tried to fight it thinking I could simply stop thinking I was. I only ever thought I could live vicariously through the media I consumed. It’s why I took my name from Shin Megami Tensei IV: I felt like I was Isabeau. For years I ran from any real opportunity to make it real, just like Owen. I also have lived through a gender inverted predicament of Owen’s situation, a father who es away when I was young from cancer and an emotionally distant mom who wouldn’t understand the feelings I am going through. It’s an added personal layer that disturbed me to my core. It also perfectly works to enhance the core of the film: about what it means to find your identity through the things you love and how hard it can be to break away from that.

The final ten minutes is just a showstopper of every dread I’ve felt regarding transition, Owen becomes a family man, loses his mom and dad, and for almost twenty years works a shitty job at a kid’s party place. His favorite show is nothing like he re, the specialness of sitting in front of a CRT every Saturday is replaced by the nonchalantness of the streaming era; the effects are cheap and it’s stripped of any edginess and personality he once perceived as a kid. Owen looks damn near death, his skin looks rotten and what remnants of happiness from his teenage years are fully gone from his eyes. He has a mental breakdown at work and imagines himself cutting his insides open. And all he finds are the glowing memories of his favorite show: the only way that he can go back to being Isabel now.

In a surprisingly hopeful moment before all that, while Owen walks home after running from Maddy, we see the same children’s chalk art on the street, but with a message this time: it’s not too late for you. It’s a message Owen never receives: but its intended audience is for that young trans person in the crowd debating on their transition. The message is clear: don’t let that fear reign over you, choose to be authentically you.

The worst option is to hold on to that TV glow.