I Saw The TV Glow (2024) Dir. Jane Schoenbrun

Searching for the ever elusive singlet trans girl

ok well I finished I saw the tv glow … for me I think what this movie depicts so well is the deadness you feel before you realise you’re trans. like I kind of thought I was a sociopath before I realised I was transgender because I didn’t really feel like I loved my parents that much and I didn’t really feel joy or happiness. I remember someone asked me once what the best day of my life was and I was terrified because I didn’t have an answer, not because my life was miserable but because I could not think of any moment in my life where joy made any sort of lasting impression on me. I didn’t have many friends or cared that much about the ones I had, I forced myself to be in relationships with men I didn’t like, everything was just pure social obligation. there was this membrane between me and reality at all times and I just thought I was insane for most of my life. I keep thinking about Isabel saying, completely deadpan “I even got a family now. I love them more than anything” and you know how fraudulent and horrifying that statement is. and what threads that needle is her revisiting the old tapes and thinking it all just looked cheap and cheesy, she says “I just felt embarrassed” because she’s so thoroughly suppressed her dysphoria that even the thing that led her to recognising it had no colour or feeling in it anymore. the movie is horrifying and idk if I have anything like coherent to say about it but for me the thing that connected with me the most is how monotone so much of Isabel’s life is. Once Maddy/Tara leaves there’s no colour in it anymore

be a good piggie and sniff out truffles in the underbrush for mommy.

god i’m so tired. i can’t do this. i can’t keep fucking doing this.

oh god. estrogen finally letting me feel emotions is unfortunately having the side effect of now allowing me to process how much i wish i had the opportunity to live a normal girl childhood instead of a depressed egg childhood, and how many times as a kid i was clearly grasping blindly at whatever scraps of girlhood i could get away with

I cant stop thinking about "to be a trans woman in the larger queer community is to surround yourself with potential ticking time bombs." I've fully lost count of how many time bombs I've essentially begged to see me as fully human. How many I can never know if I fully diffused or if I just prolonged the inevitable. I've lost track of how many have exploded in my face. I try and review the list in my mind and it's like be burned all over again

do you guys think Karl Marx would've liked Thrift Shop by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis because it promotes waste reduction and the subversion of both capitalism generally and brand commodification¹ specifically through second hand buying or do you think he would not like it because it still promotes consumption as an activity especially of items one does not actually need.² or do you think he'd like it cause it's a banger³

References

¹ Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. (2012). Thrift shop. s.n. [2:38]: ""They be like, "Oh, that Gucci? That's hella tight", I'm like, "Yo, that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt", Limited edition, let's do some simple addition, Fifty dollars for a T-shirt, that's just some ignorant bitch shit, I call that getting-swindled-and-pimped shit, I call that getting tricked by business, That shirt's hella dope, And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't"

² Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. (2012). Thrift shop. s.n. [1:29]: "They had a broken keyboard, I bought a broken keyboard, I bought a skeet blanket, then I bought a knee board"

³ trust

happy april fool's day

"You can't have [experience] because you don't identify as [label]!!!" how do I explain to people that experiences exist outside of and prior to the formation of specific language to talk about them

"You can't have [experience] because you don't think of it through [framework/explanation/etc]!!!" how do I explain to people that experiences exist outside of and prior to any formal cosmology, hypotheses, or explanation assigned to them