Out. Hold. In. (I SAW THE TV GLOW, 2024)

***MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR I SAW THE TV GLOW BELOW!!! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING!!!****

"In fact, I think it takes years, if not a lifetime, to undo that damage. And to undo it in our case in 2024, in a world where, at best, cis people want to be PC and nice and use the right pronouns but don't see me the way that I want them to, and, at worst, want me dead — it's kind of psychotic, and for the movie to end in any way beyond this, like, fledgling, furtive, maybe a first step that's still rife with trauma and all of the consequences of it, would have felt to me like I wasn't doing my job as an artist." - Jane Schoenbrun, on the ending of I SAW THE TV GLOW

Out. Hold. In.

It takes a long time to learn how to breathe when you’re accustomed to suffocation. When I was a child, all the adults in my life smoked. I couldnt stand breathing fumes so my breath became punctuated: out. Hold. In. It was the price I paid to be loved by the people who were supposed to do it unconditionally. I never questioned why something unconditional still required me to choke.

I remember my mother holding me in one arm, a lit menthol glinting in her other fist as she talked about how much she loved having daughters. It was not lost on me that she loved me in part because I was a girl. Sometimes I wonder how she would feel about the fact that she did not give birth to a female baby, but a baphomet.

She’s long cremated, and has nothing to say about my gender or anything else. But at least she went out smoking. 

I think she would have liked that joke.

Out. Hold. In.

I don’t remember much of my mother, thanks to trauma eating holes through my hippocampus. I have handfuls of fragments, moments in time that I mosaic together to try and create a picture of someone I never really knew. I remember one of the last times I visited her in rehab, the day I confessed that I might not graduate high school. She silently held my hand through an entire episode of the Twilight Zone. Then she asked me if I was going to be OK.

When Owen’s mom does the same thing to him in the first third of TV GLOW, I knew why she was asking, because it was the same reason my mom asked me. And I realized that Owen’s mother was going to die, and I knew exactly what was going to seal him away from himself for a very long time. And that’s when I started crying, for him and for me, and I did not stop until sometime the next day.

Out. Hold. In.

I was going to write an explanation of my theory that TV GLOW is Owen’s hallucination, and it ends as he digs himself out of the earth. I could go deep: the VIDEODROME portal shots, the way that locations and characters from Pink Opaque flood the “real” timeline as Owen’s awareness grows, the first scene of Owen in a dress obscured by a specific mark that shows us this is a crafted narrative instead of objective fact. Emily St. James beat me to it, and even included the “VHS” thing I was so proud of spotting. 

My essay would be good, but my frame would be dishonest. I did not discover that Owen escaped his living burial because of my media literacy or pattern recognition skills. I choose to believe it because I survived being buried alive for 35 years. I need to believe that people like myself and Owen can claw our way through the dirt and take a heaving first breath of good air, no matter how long it takes. 

I need to believe that there is still time.

Out. Hold. In.

The reason that cis people do not understand TV GLOW is that they resist understanding their complicity in the abuse of the protagonist. Cis people comfort themselves with the idea that transphobia is the province of villains, the isolated actions of Bad People. That allows them to maintain the norms of a society where trans people are marginalized and killed with shocking regularity for the crime of being themselves. 

To understand TV GLOW, they would have to think about the trans people they’ve abandoned for social propriety and convenience. They’d have to think about our empty chairs at their holiday tables, the times they didn’t defend us in front of bigots, the devil's-advocate conversations where they politely demand we just be normal. 

They’d have to acknowledge that their “normal” is suffocation for us, and they prefer that to the work of creating a world where we can breathe easily. They would have to let themselves realize that the price of survival is our lives, one way or another.

To a trans person, TV GLOW’s horror is obvious. There isn’t much transphobia depicted. There doesn’t need to be. Owen’s dead face while he drones on about the family he sacrificed his real self to obtain, as he clings to a widescreen TV like a life raft? That’s the scariest moment of all.

Out. Hold. In.

It is impossible to generalize the circumstances of every pre-transition life, but digging oneself out of a grave is an apt metaphor. The newest of us are frantic with the adrenaline of escape, lungs full of mud and blood, our near-death hanging in clumps from our backs. The oldest of us are mottled with callouses and scars, wary as feral cats, claustrophobic and frightened of the dark. It’s a miracle any of us survive. 

Here is another miracle to consider:

Today I woke up in a warm bed next to my partner. I whimpered at heavy footsteps on the floor above us. They rubbed my back and reminded me that it’s safe for me to breathe now. I looked around the room to see the evidence of our life together. A calendar of holidays with chosen family, days out with my community, the thrill of sharing and creating a safe home for people with the same scars as me. The sun streaming through the window and licking a body that actually feels like my own, without the stutter of dissociation between myself and the oxygen-starved mask I used to show the world. My life is new, whole and precious to me, and it is more mine with every lungful of air I claim for myself.

Out. 

In.