blackberrybonez - Tumblr blog

[blackberrybonez]

I wish it was easier to talk about mobile phone addiction without sounding like a boomer

[blackberrybonez]

thinking about "i even got a family of my own. i love them more than anything :/" with the tortured expression on owen's face and the fact that we never meet this family because they're not real in a way that matters. the LG TV product placement during this scene was almost distracting, but then owen lifts the box so the phrase "life's good" is in frame, and you can see so clearly that life is not good for this person fhjdkfnf

[blackberrybonez]

liking someone platonically is so embarrassing like. yeah i admire you. yeah i think about you all the time. yeah i look forward to every time i see you even if it's only for a minute. yeah it's all platonic and yeah i couldn't explain this because it'd sound romantic. fucking hell

[blackberrybonez]

there's still time!!! your heart is still beating!!!

[blackberrybonez]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

[blackberrybonez]

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.

And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.

[blackberrybonez]

i saw the tv glow is a beautiful tragic queer film about how repressiing yourself will destroy you from the inside out. that said the in-universe tara/isabel the pink opaque femslash fandom probably went so hard

[blackberrybonez]

this isn’t normal. this isn’t how life is supposed to feel. if you don’t think about it it can’t hurt you. I found our hearts and they were still beating. there is still time.

[blackberrybonez]

ichthyologists in 1938:

[blackberrybonez]

[blackberrybonez]

we have to do our research this election year it’s important

[blackberrybonez]

high lords during the blackfyre rebellion waking up in the middle of the night because brynden rivers sent them another mass fundraising raven asking for fifteen gold dragons so they can win the swing kingdoms

[blackberrybonez]

I wish people realized what a waste it is that they're not putting butches in their things. So often I see a male character and think if he was a butch woman he'd be the best female character of all time

[blackberrybonez]

if the muppet show was still airing chappell roan would guest star and thered be a running bit of miss piggy thinking shes trying to steal kermit but shes actually trying to flirt with miss piggy the whole time

[blackberrybonez]

deer teeth!

[blackberrybonez]

just found out about the Cinnamon-headed green pigeon... holy shit how gorgeous

[blackberrybonez]

i am so pretty and then i take a picture and it’s not the same but i believe my eyes because technology is evil