I Saw the TV Glow

I watched this last Saturday and haven't been able to get it out of my mind for long.

I'm not transgender. I'm not gay or bisexual. I'm a little less clear on whether I'm male; I've never really been comfortable in my own skin, but I'm not sure whether that indicates that I'm nonbinary or just not particularly good at performing masculinity. I grew up in a place with really prescriptive gender roles that I didn't quite fit, but I felt the roles were stupid, so 🤷🏻

I bring this up because some films like I Saw the TV Glow do seem very resonant for me, particularly what director Jane Schoenbrun said:

The tension between the space that you exist within, which feels like home, and the simultaneous terror and liberation of understanding that that space might not be able to hold you in your true form.

Or, as someone on BlueSky said:

"you just failed at being a man" no, being a man failed me. I upgraded my earthly vessel because the man-shell wasn't strong enough to contain my power, and was beginning to corrode.

I don't believe this is so much a "trans" or "nonbinary" thing as it is perhaps a neurodivergent thing, where I think some of us tend to wonder if we're space aliens or noncorporeal beings trapped in a human body. It reminds me of something William S. Burroughs Jr. said in Speed:

“Brian looked up to me; he said I moved like a cat, and when someone says that about you, you can be pretty sure they’re on your side. Everybody has a personal spell that they alone can cast, call it personality if you will, but it can become quite magical. Some people are sensitive to that magic and are easily taken. I am like that, I am constantly having to free myself from people after the initial beauty of their magic has led me to befriend them. Deep Southern gas station attendants with their friendly punches good-bye and their greasy gorilla hands. But then once I am close enough to them to talk freely it’s “Smell that finger, boy, I got in her pants in ten minutes.”

I read this as a feeling of alienation from, and deep discomfort with, the culture and behavior of the young men around him. I don't think that implies that he would've been any more comfortable in a prep school, or in a religious community, than bumming around trying to score paregoric or amphetamine. I think he was just uncomfortable being human, and I identify with that.

Maybe his father felt the same. He barely seemed human to me...

Today while exercising, my son and I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation S03E16, "The Offspring", in which Data creates an android child named Lal. Lal gets to choose their own body and gender. My kid nodded approvingly, though we were a little amused by the idea that you had to pick a gender, and that gender choice was permanent. TNG was incredibly, laudably progressive for its time, but not that progressive.

And of course Data and Lal have resonances for some people on the autism spectrum.

I'm very happy I get to share this show with him. And hopefully soon he'll watch I Saw the TV Glow with me too.