THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF I SAW THE TV GLOW, part 6
Welcome to #TransTuesday! Tillyvision burns through reentry in THE INTENTIONAL TRANS ALLEGORY OF I SAW THE TV GLOW, part 6! Dysphoria and transphobia are coming for us with everything they’ve got, and it exacts a heavy toll!
You should obvs start with PART 1!
And continue you PART 2!
And then go to PART 3!
Go directly to PART 4!
Following on to PART 5!
58:27 – Owen kept The Pink Opaque tapes in a pink pillowcase, hidden away from the world.
59:03 – He’s surrounded by dysphoria and fear. Owen: “A little while after Maddy disappeared, she sent me one more tape in the mail.”
59:16 – Owen is bathed in pink, watching the final episode. Isabel: “Mr. Melancholy is coming.” Tara: “If we’re going to defeat him this time, we’re going to need to harness the full potential of our shared powers.”
Again, community. Maddy is Owen’s axe. None of us can do it alone.
59:20 – Look at the sky over them, fear and danger and despair, but the transness covers it all.
59:40 – A shot of the back of Tara, in a black tank top, with her Pink Opaque tattoo on the back of her neck. Why is this shot here? It’s setting up a later shot, we’ll get there in a minute.
59:53 – Owen: “But then, as Isabel approaches, she picks something up. A stray signal from the psychic plane. It’s a desperate message from Tara. The real Tara. She’s buried underground, in terrible danger.”
1:00:27 – Isabel lies in a grave, spitting up luna juice, sadness and internalized transphobia fed to her by Mr. Melancholy. Trying to kill her transness. Static flies across the screen, transphobia obscuring the truth.
1:00:33 – As Owen watches, still covered in blue, we hear static. Transphobia is obscuring his truth, too. Because he is Isabel.
1:00:37 – A shot of the back of Marco, the bearded moon woman, but in a black tank top and with the Pink Opaque tattoo, matching the shot of Tara I mentioned at 59:40.
So when Marco turns, it’s revealed that’s not Tara, it’s a scary mockery of what you want to become. And that’s how you think the world will see you, because that’s what the world teaches you that you will see and become if you transition.
This confirms what I said when Marco and Polo first appeared. This is what society and internalized transphobia tell us, all we’ll ever be seen as are “men in dresses” or “women with beards.”
Again, neither or nor this movie are saying there’s anything wrong with that if that’s who you are! That’s cool! But this is metaphor, and that’s a very real bit of transphobia society worms into trans men and trans women, all to scare you and keep you from ever transitioning.
1:00:48 – As Polo drags Isabel away, the static returns, obscuring things. And it happens at her most intense screams. Owen hurt himself and obscured his own truth by locking Isabel away. And what did he do with her?
1:01:17 – Polo walks with a beating heart on a platter. Owen: “They cut out her heart.”
1:01:21 – The heart is put inside despair and dysphoria.
1:01:33 – And she’s given Luna Juice. This is transphobia from moon man Mr. Melancholy. She took the transphobia inside herself, literal internalized transphobia, and it buried her truth. Effectively “killing” isabel.
1:01:50 – Owen: “And then he makes his entrance. Mr. Melancholy… the big bad.” Dysphoria and despair, that’s all it brings.
And he’s got Owen’s transness trapped and held in the prison of a snow globe. Remember what Maddy asked Owen back at the Double Lunch? “Or do you ever have a hard time distinguishing between what happened in the show and what happened in real life? Like somehow the memories got jumbled around? Shook up in your head, like a snow globe.”
Transphobia has locked down Owen’s transness and jumbled his thoughts so he doesn’t know what’s real, so he will not and cannot accept his truth.
And it’s not just pink inside that snow globe, but it contains the tv with pink on it and Owen watching. It’s literally locking away Owen’s ability to access his truth and transness.
1:02:08 – Mr. Melancholy licks Isabel’s face. It’s domination, as Luna Juice leaks out of her, showing you it’s still inside her. Transphobia traps, controls, and owns isabel. And it’s disgusting.
1:02:18 – Mr. Melancholy: “Don’t fight it. Let my poison work its magic. You’re gonna love the Midnight Realm. It’s such a wonderful, wonderful prison.”
1:02 :40 – Mr. Melancholy shakes up the snow globe. Static. Chaos. Everything’s jumbled and unclear.
1:02:54 – Mr. Melancholy: “Shh. It’s okay. Soon you won’t remember anything. Your real name. Your superpowers. Your heart. You won’t even remember that you’re dying!”
And that’s what living with dysphoria, forced into that prison, is. It’s death. It’s worse than death.
“Death before detransition” is a saying for a reason.
1:03:22 – Static, both seen and heard, as Owen’s image, entirely blue, becomes fuzzy and flickers in and out.
1:03:43 – The sky now looks like a shaken snow globe. Isabel is in the grave, Luna Juice leaking out of her mouth. Owen: “They bury her. Alive.” Very much what suppressing your true self is, your life becomes a waking death.. “And then… it just ended. Forever.” Darkness. Nothing.
1:04:28 – Owen gasps for breath in front of the television, because Isabel, his true self, was just buried alive. Worth noting again that one of the ways I described my own GENDER DYSPHORIA was “like drowning” and being unable to breathe.
1:04:40 – That kitchen is all dysphoria and fear. A fire ALARM beeps. Owen’s dad walks through and down to the basement, where Owen is.
1:04:50 – A phone is off the hook. Communication with the true self is lost, due to… what color is the phone? Yellow. FEAR. And what did Owen just do to himself? It all tracks.
1:04:56 – Owen’s smashed his head into the television. He tries to get back to Isabel, to his true self, to The Pink Opaque, even though he just buried her and gave it all up. The sparks are blue, sadness and despair. But note in all the sparks and chaos and flashing lights… the PINK is still there. You can deny your transness but that doesn’t make it go away.
1:05:14 – In the very yellow, fear-filled bathroom, Owen screams: “This isn’t my home! You’re not my father!” This is him fighting back, trying to reject the false cis reality and to reject masculinity.
1:05:29 – Owen expels the blue despair of the Luna Yuice, trying to purge all his internalized transphobia. But notice the static returns.
1:05:45 – Once again we see the burning tv. On the commentary, Jane said they thought they needed this shot here but didn’t seem to know why. I think, subconsciously, they knew what this symbolized for Owen. His fear was still too great, and he killed Isabel, and then regretted it and wanted her back. But his fear still kept him from saving her.
1:05:56 – Owen is open and naked with himself in the mirror, there’s fear and dysphoria everywhere. That is not the face of someone who likes that reflection, or even sees themselves in it.
And so he immediately hides himself… in a MUTED GRAY. dull. Lifeless.
1:06:35 – He leaves the house, and sees the two men near the street. Chalk on the sidewalk behind them is jumbled, sadness abounds. There’s lots of transness still, but even the transness is sad now.
He is kept from his transness by, judging by their posture and silence, sad men. Which is what he knows he will become if he doesn’t let Isabel out.
1:06:42 – Inside the inflatable planetarium, which as we discussed before, was the place where he’d have to finally choose. And so it’s no coincidence this is where we get Maddy’s story, about her choice to become Tara.
Also note how IMPORTANT it is that Maddie TELLS us this story, rather than us SEEING it in flashback. This is all about what these events did to HER. Pay attention to the words she says, and what she doesn’t say, and her emotions and expressions as she says them.
This is some REMARKABLE acting, but it’s also FANTASTIC writing to know that telling us this story through Maddy is so much better and more intimate and emotional than seeing it as flashbacks could ever be. Because what’s important is what it all did TO Maddie, and how she felt about it.
“I made it all the way to Phoenix on the money I’d saved,” a phoenix dies and is REBORN anew, going through a transition. Phoenixes are very trans, conceptually.
“The trees looked different, but everything else was exactly the same.” The GREEN of dysphoria was DIFFERENT, but nothing else had changed yet. Transition is a process and it takes time, it doesn’t all change the moment you decide to embrace your true self.
“I started using a new name.” SUPERtext. “Sleeping at the cheapest hostel I could find.” Trans people are often poor due to losing homes and jobs and bigotry in hiring us. Being out and trans in a highly transphobic world is HARD, and it shouldn’t be.
”The Pink Opaque was over.” It was no longer the goal she couldn’t see past. “I got a job at the mall. At Build-a-bear, filling the dolls up with stuffing.” Constructing a body the way YOU want it to be!
“I got out of that town, that place I knew would kill me if I stayed. But something was still wrong. Wronger, even. Time wasn’t right.”
1:07:55 – Hopefully you’ve been paying attention to the colors on Maddy in the inflatable planetarium and on and around Owen as he approaches her. Look at when he enters the hall toward the gymnasium, and it’s all red down there. No matter what his final choice is, there’s DANGER. If he transitions, he could lose EVERYTHING but himself. If he doesn’t transition, he will keep everything he has but lose HIS TRUE SELF.
This is what society does for us, makes it dangerous no matter what we do.
1:07:57 – Maddy: “[time] was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls, asleep in the supermarket. stuffed.” You lose time from dissociating, like you’re asleep through your life. See the Trans Tuesdays on TRANS GRIEF and all the years I lost from dissociating, and the memories that were lost with them.
“And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over in a DVD. I told myself, ‘This isn’t normal. This isn’t how life is supposed to be.’ I thought about running away again, about moving to Santa Fe and changing my name one more time.”
I see this as Maddy thinking she was a trans man, but discovering that wasn’t right either, and she was in fact nonbinary. “But I knew that everywhere would be just the same. I had seen how it ended. I knew where I was.”
“A little bit after my 22nd birthday, I paid this burnout kid who used to hit on me in the food court $50 to bury me alive. I mean… he didn’t know he was burying me alive, but I doubt he would have cared too much even if he did.”
“I bought a coffin. I dug a hole. I got inside and I closed the lid. I said to myself, ‘This is crazy. What you’re doing is crazy.’ But another part of me knew that it wasn’t. That it was survival. And that I didn’t have much time. That what felt like years in this world was actually just seconds.” OOOOOF dissociation from dysphoria does be like that. It’s so messed up.
“So I waited. And then finally, the first spadeful of dirt hit the top of the box. And then another. And then another. I sang songs to myself. I counted to 10,000 without skipping any numbers. I pissed and I shit my pants and I forced my mouth to produce whatever saliva it could muster just so I’d have something to drink.”
1:09:41 – On the commentary, Jane: “I feel like if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. I find it so funny that people, in a lot of the Letterbox reviews of the film, people will be like ‘this long monologue that’s just exposition, they’re just telling us the story,’ it’s like… IS that what this is? I don’t think so.”
“I feel like if you’re not emotionally keyed in to the feeling of what happened and what is being described here, it is gonna just feel to you like exposition. But the idea of, like. this exposition is so beside the point to me. This is the emotional crescendo. And it’s a story of defiance and becoming. And I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you, like, talk about your commitment.”
Again, this is why it’s so much more important that Maddy’s telling us this, so we can see how it affected her, and what she’s trying to get across to Owen.
1:11:31 – Look at Maddy now, the most gender-neutral in appearance that she’s ever been. And no, this isn’t saying you have to be androgynous to be nonbinary, mind you, but visually it works as an excellent metaphor for showing her between, or outside of, “man” and “woman.”
“I screamed as loud as I could for help. I apologized for the whole thing.” Maddy told Owen to never do that. But we see, even here, she was doubting herself. “And I begged god for someone to come along and save me. I tried and tried to claw my way out, but that burnout guy had packed the dirt in too tight just like I had asked him to do.”
“And then, after I don’t know how long, I felt myself start to leave myself. And it was like I was watching myself on a TV from across the room. And I was moving further and further away from the screen, until the screen was so small that I couldn’t even see myself anymore.”
1:12:33 – Maddy hits a button that turns the constellations in the planetarium into art of fully-realized beings. This is when Maddy flipped the switch on herself, from being a mere outline of who she was to becoming all of who she is.
She approaches Owen, slowly.
“And then I was clawing my way up out of the ground. And then I was at the surface, gasping for air, rain pouring down on me, thunder and lightning. And I was finally back there. Back at our old sleepaway camp.”
“And just like I was waking up from a bad dream, that whole life… that whole reality where I was Maddy Wilson… drifted away. Like a brief hallucination, that after a few moments I could hardly even remember. And all those memories that had felt so real, washed away with the rain back at our old sleepaway camp. And I was me. I was finally me again. And it was the season six premiere.”
The season six premiere, again, being the escape from the Midnight Realm – transitioning to escape dysphoria and find euphoria and the authentic self.
She’s down on all fours, slowly crawling toward him, pleading.
“I tried looking for you, but Mr. Melancholy had covered his tracks too well. I knew you must be buried somewhere close by, but I didn’t know where. And your signal… that signal that I used to be able to close my eyes and feel so vividly… was nowhere. I wasn’t picking up anything on the psychic plane.”
She’s so intense here, so passionate, so breathless.
“I found my heart. Isabel, oh my god! I found yours, too. And it was still beating, stored indefinitely in… in an industrial freezer. I left our hearts there because I knew I wasn’t done yet. And I found Mr. Melancholy’s cauldron. I found the Luna Juice he used to send us to the Midnight Realm, then I took a big sip straight out from the ladle.”
She knew confronting someone stuck where Owen is would remind her of how she felt when she was stuck there. And then those internalized transphobic thoughts and feelings we have, that she fought so hard to overcome… might come back. But she did it anyway, because she couldn’t abandon Owen to that. Again we see the importance of community.
“And I laid back down, and I waited to fall back asleep. I knew I needed to come back here. I knew I needed to come back and save you. So that the show can continue. So that we can get to season six.”
Owen: “Maddy…” Maddy: “That’s not my name. And I haven’t told you anything tonight that you don’t already know. Tell me. Tell me you know it’s true. …you told me yourself you felt it. Remember? On the bleachers? You know what he put inside you.”
She’s talking about the static, the internalized transphobia, of transphobic society.
1:16:17 – Owen shakes his head no. Denial. “This is insane. I remember… I remember… playing in the snow. Driving to baseball games with my dad. Cooking with my mom.” He remembers that boys like sports and girls belong in the kitchen: he remembers conforming to the false cis binary.
1:16:28 – On the commentary, Jane repeats what Maddy said, that Mr. Melancholy put the static inside Owen, replaced his insides, and put his heart is somewhere else. Owen told her he felt it on the bleachers.
Brigette in the commentary: “To keep you drugged.” Also known as taking the blue pill, for you Matrix and Begin Transmission fans out there.
The static, the internalized transphobia, is there to keep you from self-actualization.
1:16:38 – Maddy: “Those memories were put there to distract you. To keep you trapped.” The DISTRACTIONS and OBLIGATIONS of your life to keep you from realizing and accepting your truth. Matrix Resurrections deals with this too.
1:16:49 – Owen denies it, he cannot accept the truth that he buried Isabel. Or accept that he then tried to get back to her, tried to remove the Luna Juice of his internalized transphobia… but we see here it’s still won out. He’s made his choice. Owen: “It’s just the suburbs.” What are suburbs? A LIMINAL SPACE, between rural and urban, a little bit of a purgatory between one place and the next, pre and post transition. (No shade to people who live in suburbs and like them!)
1:17:09 – Maddy: “…we need to go back down into the soil.” We need to bury the false self so the true self can emerge. “Tonight. The longer you wait the closer you get to suffocating.” OOF.
The Matrix franchise deals with this too, about how the older you are the more obligations to society you have, the more you have to lose, and the harder it is to do. But Matrix Resurrections also very, very pointedly says: it’s never too late.
Maddy: “I’ve got everything ready. …no one will find us there.”
1:17:46 – A shot of Owen in the dress, but now it’s cropped to the same aspect ratio that The Pink Opaque was, so… it’s real, but filled with static and awash in fear. He lowers his head, and the green dysphoria towel behind him fills the screen. SUPERtext.
1:18:13 – They walk across the football field like before, Maddy is his axe, to help him battle Mr. Melancholy. But unlike before, his head is not held high. It’s drooped, his eyes on the ground, he’s dressed in despair. Maddy: “I know it’s scary. That’s part of it.”
1:18:39 – Owen: “It’s the drain lords. It’s just like the drain lords. It’s not real if I don’t think about it.” Oh babe. We’ve all been there. 🙁 You, and me, and Neo in the Matrix, and almost every trans person ever.
But not thinking about our transness doesn’t make it go away. It just makes the misery continue.
Maddy takes his hand. They’re exactly on the 50 yard line, Maddy’s gotten him halfway there. He tackles her and then runs off, again his fear has gotten the better of him. Remember from back in part 1, a little after 1:28, when Owen saw the first commercial for The Pink Opaque? There was a sad shot of Isabel waving goodbye and/or trying to get Owen to notice her. Foreshadowing this exact moment, when he chose to leave her behind.
He keeps doing that. Will he ever overcome it? Can he? Time will tell.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
