Pretty Good Year: I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

There’s a moment, midway through I Saw the TV Glow where the protagonist’s memory cracks open and their real life starts leaking through. It’s hard to talk about this moment without spoiling it — it’s hard to talk about any of the things that make I Saw the TV Glow so great without spoiling it, which is why I’m not even going to try — but, just to set the scene: 

The protagonist, Owen, spent his lonely and awkward adolescence obsessing over a Buffy-ish TV show, The Pink Opaque with his friend, Maddy, who made Owen tapes and let him come over to watch the show. Maddy, who disappeared at the end of high school, has returned, and is asking Owen if he remembers watching The Pink Opaque at her house. He does. We do. We flash back to the earlier scenes in Maddy’s rec room to confirm it.

When you remember it, Maddy says, was it just a show? 

We flash back again to Maddy’s rec room, and — for one split second, barely even long enough to register — Owen is wearing a dress. Owen’s memory has somehow edited this moment out, in every prior recollection of the night with Maddy, but in one tiny nearly-subliminal moment of self-honesty, Owen recovers, not just a different memory, but a different gender. 

I have told the story of how I realized I was trans a lot — it’s one of the few stories cis people want to hear trans people tell — but until that moment, I had never seen anything that actually showed what it felt like. The way your life turns into a story, and little pieces of it keep fragmenting off, being too irrelevant or weird or nonsensical to be worth remembering, how you construct an image of who you are and edit out everything that just doesn’t make sense about that person, until one day, you turn around, and you see all the little bits of stone you’ve chipped off the statue, all the things that didn’t connect, and you realize that they all connect to each other, and that there is a name for what you’re seeing, and you know its name — 

That kind of epistemological panic, I have only seen once, in this movie. Seeing it made me realize what had been cheap and false about my own stories; how I had, without necessarily knowing it, crafted my narrative to be empowering and affirming, to prove to a cis audience that I wasn’t making a mistake or ruining my own life or going crazy. 

I Saw the TV Glow does not try to make things easy. Owen is trans; Owen is a girl; Owen is a trans girl; “Owen” isn’t even Owen’s name. The gift of self-revelation, the peak of so many inspiring coming-out tales, is dumped on Owen’s head like a bucket of ice water, and Owen is not happy or fulfilled or liberated by any of it. Owen is fucking horrified. 

Owen has every reason to be horrified about being trans, given the world we live in. So do we all. But, having remembered the dress, Owen cannot un-remember it. There’s no going back, only forward, into the thing Owen wants more than anything not to know.