Three Film Recs for I SAW THE TV GLOW

I SAW THE TV GLOW is easily the best movie I have seen this year. If you are trans and weird, if you love media more than some people ever loved you, if you feel any kind of kinship in my writing; see it as soon as you can, and see it in a theater. 

I want to write about the way this movie impacted me, but I want to give you time to see it for yourself first. As someone who used to live at the denouement of the studio distribution system, I realize I should not assume y’all have had the chance. Here's a teaser made of film recommendations.

VIDEODROME (David Cronenberg, 1983)

It isn’t exactly accurate for trans people to call David Cronenberg “mother," but he is definitely the trans community’s most beloved Weekend Dad. As more serious film critics have explained, Cronenberg’s stories are not explicitly about transsexuality, but his transhumanist themes naturally resonate with trans people. While he did not make his movies for us, he does think it’s cool that we vibe with them.

If you are a Cronenberg fan, you will see the bio-gooped fingerprints of his work all over the mythology and imagery of GLOW. If you're new to Cronenberg, I'd recommend giving VIDEODROME a watch before or after you see GLOW. GLOW pastiches several prominent themes and visuals from VIDEODROME, the most obvious of which is the blocky old-fashioned television set that serves as a portal/portent for a seductive and dangerous realm. 

(Another gutting visual echo is [REDACTED UNTIL YOU SEE THE FILM]. We will discuss it soon.) 

Even if you don’t want to see GLOW for some bizarre and incorrect reason, don’t sleep on VIDEODROME. If I told David Cronenberg I was injecting science into my body every week to grow some cool new organs, he might not get what I was doing, but he’d probably give me a high five. Like I said, he's a weekend dad.

REVOLUTIONARY GIRL UTENA: THE ADOLESCENCE OF UTENA (Kuniko Ikuhara, 1999)

In the years after my mother died, I spent exorbitant amounts of money on anime fansubs. I bought clothes at thrift stores and sponged lunches off my peers, but I somehow always had money for the batches of escapism I scored off eBay. Every night I sealed myself in my room and fed tapes to a VCR, and lived in someone else's skin until I fell asleep. If asked, I would not have said I felt particularly depressed. I didn't have the words to say that I didn't feel like anything at all. 

I saw the UTENA movie by chance, a piece of flotsam caught in the stream of my late-night binging. I didn’t know what it was about. It didn’t matter. The mythology is confusing and complex, but it’s only a distraction from the bond that Utena and Anthy share. That bond allows them to see each other as prince and princess within the magical bubble of Ohtori Academy, but it also shows them the way they're damaged and stunted by maintaining those fictions for others. 

Eventually, UTENA comes down to a choice: stay in the comfortable cocoon you have built to hide from yourself, or find the bravery required to smash the world’s shell and see what’s waiting outside. The finale is jaw-dropping. Check your triggers, then go in blind.

UTENA shows us that it is impossible to free oneself alone. It would be a long time until I found what I needed to dig myself out of my magnetic tape tomb. It takes some of us much longer than you would hope, perhaps. But there’s still a way out, even if it takes you decades to really understand something you first saw as a damaged young adult. There is still time.

BIT (Brad Michael Elmore, 2019)

One of the most relatable themes in GLOW is the way the characters aggressively identify with characters that are queer-coded, even when that coding is ambiguous by design. It’s a time-honored tradition for queer kids, but it would not have to be if we were included in the first place.

A lot of people don’t like the movie BIT because it is a triple-length 90’s TV movie pilot about a trans cool-girl vampire learning the ropes and cleaning the pervs out of downtown LA. BIT is THE LOST BOYS meets teen primetime soap, from the cheesy soundtrack to the puns the vamps spit out every time they put a gross dude down. There’s a love triangle-ish and several angsty montages. There’s even a big bad who is literally an evil guy with a beating heart in a safe that looks like a prop from Charmed. The fact it does not end with a sick guitar riff and a “Produced By” credit seems like an oversight.

If I was a dorky goth trans teenager, my devotion to it would be extraordinary. BIT is the movie that GLOW's protagonists needed when they were kids, the media hole that their favorite television show was mined to fill. This interview with the director of BIT is telling. Yes, he’s quite proud of himself for figuring out that trans kids exist and they love stupid movies as much as cis kids do. But also, nobody else who makes stupid movies for kids seemed to figure that out before him. 

If you're an adult who didn't like BIT, that's fine. It's a low-budget thrill ride for baby bats, not grumpy adults with Letterboxd accounts. BIT is not an important movie; neither is EMPIRE RECORDS, but that doesn't mean I didn't imagine myself as Lucas when I was a teenager trying to look cool in a record store. Trans dorks deserve representation too.