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Aas a trans teenager in the 90s, I well remember the flickering glow of the television screen. Late nights, after everyone else in the house was asleep and I had some degree of privacy, was the main time I had access to anything that even remotely resembled my true self.
Watching trans director Jane Schoenbrunn’s new film, I saw the glow of the TV, brought me right back to that period of my life. As the title suggests, Schönbrunn’s film is all about the small screen and what it means in the lives of two queer teenagers growing up in the 90s.
These were times long before the internet as we know it now, long before the explosion in information about the existence and normalcy of trans people. It would be years before I had access to a website connecting members of the trans community, over a decade before I even imagined that I could transition and be my true self.
What kept me going through those years were the few feminine items I could get my hands on – which made me feel so right for some reason I couldn’t understand at the time – and the evening TV shows that seemed to make sense about me . I remember the shows that felt the most real dealt with the horror, the extreme, and the weird—things like Tales from the Crypt, The Outer Limits, weird movies that aired on PBS in the wee hours. These pastimes would flicker in the background in my darkened room as I took the time to feel feminine, against the abuse of my family and the constant risk of humiliation and punishment.
I Saw the TV Glow centers on Owen, a black boy just entering his teenage years, and the slightly older Maddie, who seems to be transitioning into a female direction and who becomes Owen’s guide of sorts. Maddie helps out mainly by smuggling Owen videotapes of a weird TV show called The Pink Opaque that mesmerizes the youngsters, even though it doesn’t seem like a very good show and seemingly has little to do with their reality.
Schönbrunn’s film is very much about what it’s like to be queer before you’re even in the closet. It’s when you know you’re different in some way, but you haven’t yet realized that maybe you have a different gender or sexuality than most people. It’s a strange part of the journey where you gravitate towards an identity without fully realizing it. Such a period was much longer and much more common before the internet and increased acceptance made queer identities more understandable. The 90s were probably the last time so many young people took on a queer identity, mysteriously drawn to all sorts of pieces of pop culture that seemed to speak to that queer sense of difference.
Schönbrunn’s impressive ability to create film-length metaphors guides viewers to how this feels. Intermediate metaphors create ideas that can work on a 1:1 or 1:2 level; creators of very, very remarkable metaphors can work at the 1:10 or 1:20 level. Storytellers like Schönbrunn reject the ratio altogether. They create vast metaphors of such complexity and energy that they defy our ability to map them from one conceptual terrain to another. It’s easy enough to say that Jane Schoenbrunn makes films that are about gender dysphoria, but trying to say exactly how or why they work defies our ability to put it into so many words.
Watching the flickering screen of Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, trying to understand how what I was watching spoke to me, I believe I felt something similar to what Owen and Maddie felt watching The Pink Opaque, experiencing the show’s hypnotic pull to others a terrain they could not fully articulate. Likewise, this movie allowed me to relive what it felt like to be a teenager watching these shows so many late nights in front of the glowing TV screen, connecting with a femininity that was beyond my ability to understand.
I Saw the TV Glow is a heartfelt look at the nostalgic genre that shows a great deal of empathy for the children at its center. He holds their uncomprehending naivety and trauma with genuine care, as if trying to give these children the compassion that they and so many others should have been able to receive in that era. His kindness is something I learned to give to this younger version of myself, fighting for years against the internalized hatred and judgment I was once taught to tolerate towards myself and children like me. Watching it made me feel how small and confused Owen and Maddie are and I wish they had something better than a TV show to guide them. I wish I had one too.
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