The Pink Opaque

Film: I Saw the TV Glow
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on massive television.

There are times when I watch something, and I realize I am not the target audience. I felt this significantly with a number of Blaxploitation films from the 1970s. I felt it culturally when I watched Celine and Julie Go Boating. In a lot of cases, these are movies that I liked, but I felt like there was something there that was preventing me from fully getting the sense that the filmmaker intends. That’s definitely the case with I Saw the TV Glow.

What is the deal here? This is very clearly and very obviously a movie about someone coming to term with (allegorically in the sense of the movies) with being transgender. The film is very much about living a lie and living your own personal truth regardless of the consequences and despite the risks. I certainly have felt this way in some respects, like the world that we live in is broken and that I was supposed to be something other than what I am, but at least I feel at home in my own body. Because of this, while I can appreciate and understand I Saw the TV Glow, I don’t know that I can fully understand it at its deepest level.

Don't Miss the Butter Cow

Film: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

When we dive into the stranger end of the cinematic swimming pool we have to be prepared not just for things to be strange, but for a lot of what we’re seeing to be metaphorical. That’s certainly the case with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a film that has been suggested to be about, essentially coming out, something confirmed by the writer/director Jane Schoenbrun, who is nonbinary. There are also potentially themes of gender dysphoria in this, and that’s not too hard to see.

There’s plenty in this movie that is going to pick the bones of some other classic horror. Specifically, this plays in part with the Bloody Mary myth or, movie-wise, Candyman. No one is looking in the mirror and saying the name five times, but there is something very similar happening here, and once it starts, we’re going to go on a very strange ride.