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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW I SAW THE TV GLOW SHOWS A TRANS SIDE OF HORROR  
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Mey Rude
May 16, 2024
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_ Director Jane Schoenbrun and stars Justice Smith and Brigette
Lundy-Paine talk bringing trans horror to the big screen. _

Director Jane Schoenbrun and stars Justice Smith and Brigette
Lundy-Paine talk bringing trans horror to the big screen., A24

 

Body horror, existential horror, and psychological horror have all
been hallmarks of this film genre since its inception. They're also
things that trans people become deeply intimate with as they grapple
with gender and transition. So it's no surprise that, when a horror
movie is told through a trans lens, it really flourishes.

That's the case with Jane Shoenbrun's new film _I Saw the TV Glow_, a
haunting and visceral look at the trans experience told through the
connection that two people have with a TV show from their childhoods.

For Schoenbrun, the parallels between their transition and a horror
movie were obvious. In fact, they wrote this movie about two months
into their physical transition.

"I had finally changed my name and I had finally started hormones,"
Schoenbrun says. "And my world as I knew it felt like it was over,
which I think is one of the early transition feelings that gets
carpeted over in more sort of handholding, Hallmark card-style movies
about transition."

"It's actually a totally terrifying first realization, because you
know that now you either have to continue hiding from yourself and not
living the life you're supposed to be living, or you need to
completely blow up any form of stability or belonging that you've
established for yourself," they continue. "I was 30 years old and that
was a terrifying prospect. So I wrote the movie in the immediate
aftermath of all of that… while I was both for the first time in my
life really running towards this thing that I knew I needed to be
pursuing to survive, and also as I was dealing with all of the fallout
and unpacking for myself. All of the ways that everything that I had
thought I understood about home and even my sense of reality was now
something that needed to be reassessed in a very visceral way."

"I had, for a long time, been... I don't know, it just takes so long
to figure out what you are, and you always think you've done it, and
then you're tripping into some next catastrophe of identity. By the
time that I started work on this, I was pretty sure like, 'Oh no,
roller-coaster coming up. I'm trans!'"

"And this movie was like [putting my] hands up. I am safely in Jane's
hands," they add. "This is the best depiction of this terror, but also
this beauty and the possibility of freedom, and I'm just going to go
for it."

Lundy-Paine's co-star, Justice Smith, says that playing a character
who is a metaphor for the closeted trans experience got him to
recontextualize the way he carried himself.

In the film, he transforms from a young, nervous, and curious teen to
a broken shell of a man in his 50s. Smith is tremendous throughout _I
Saw the TV Glow_, showing the pain of living in the wrong body that
builds and builds over time.

"I loved this character because it was a de-evolution of a person.
Most character arcs start with someone in a lower place and end with
someone in a higher place, and this was the opposite," he says. "I
loved this idea that his voice was detached from his body and me and
Jane talked about it feeling stuck in his throat. And I also wanted to
physicalize his discomfort in his skin, so a lot of his movements
didn't have flow or sway. Like when he's walking with the cotton
candy, his arm is stiff at his side."

"And then as he gets older, he's slowly dying," Smith continues. So I
just thought about what does that look like? Well, it looks like my
joints are tighter. It's harder to move. The asthma was written in as
he gets older, his asthma gets worse and worse. I thought about what
death feels like coming out of you, his breath, and it feels like a
wheeze. It feels like those really long wheezes. All that stuff was
fun because I felt like I was a little bit in a creature feature,
getting to play a monster of my own, like a monster that Owen has
created through himself for so long, he's turned himself into a
monster."

"Throughout the film, Owen is being pulled by his need to assimilate
in order to survive and his raw authenticity, and I think every
marginalized person knows that experience," Smith says. "I know being
queer in a predominantly hetero environment, being Black in a
predominantly white environment, that is something that I'm
continuously unpacking how to have the courage to face the backlash of
authenticity. Because I think what Jane paints is that there's pain in
ignoring yourself. So pain in accepting yourself and facing people's
reactions of you accepting yourself. And I obviously think the path of
authenticity, path of truth is the ultimate path of happiness, of joy,
but it is rocky. It's not smooth sailing. It is hard, and it makes
sense why people hide themselves for so long because at least the pain
of hiding yourself is familiar. Jumping off the cliff into the
unknown, to a different kind of pain. It's not as graspable."

The film is such a visceral and deeply affecting version of the trans
experience that people have come out as trans immediately after
seeing _I Saw the TV Glow_ in theaters.

"It's happened a few times now. A number of people have come up to me
in person after screenings, and I don't think it's the beginning of
their gender journey. I think they're kind of like, 'That was the push
over the edge that I needed,'" Schoenbrun says. "And that feels
amazing. What else could you hope for as an artist?"

"I think it really speaks to how starved as a community we are for
authentic portrayals of our internal experiences and internal
experiences that just aren't talked about, especially not in pop
culture spaces," they say. "They're spoken about on subreddits, but
those subreddits are scary places to go when you're still figuring
yourself out. And I really do hope that the work can speak to a large
subsection of people, whether or not they're trans, to help them
understand these feelings and experiences that I think are obviously
real and also widespread, but haven't really been allowed to the
surface in our culture."

_I SAW THE TV GLOW_ IS NOW PLAYING IN THEATERS.

 

* LGBTQ
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* Horror genre
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* A24
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* I Saw the TV Glow
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* trans experience
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