Cultural Diary, June 2024
I Saw the TV Glow, The People's Joker, therapyspeak, gnosticism, superheroes
I Saw the TV Glow is a movie about two miserable ‘90s teenagers who become obsessed with a horror TV show called “The Pink Opaque.” One of those teenagers disappears under mysterious circumstances, and then reappears, bearing an unbelievable message. The other, in a series of sequences that I found almost Beckettian in the specificity and power of their bleakness, just … lives on. The two characters say “The Pink Opaque” so many times that if you giggle at it once, you’ll never stop giggling and it will ruin the movie for you. That’s a good proxy for the movie as a whole. You will buy all its weird conceits — that the TV show may have really happened or may not have; that actors who do not remotely resemble each other are playing the same character at not-that-different ages — or you won’t.
The obvious reading is that the main character is trans, but has not yet admitted it to themself, and that that’s what the story is About. That’s why, for example, the actor who plays the middle-school version of the main character is impossible to reconcile with the actor who plays that character just a few years later: these are just successive cocoons for a person who feels totally unconnected to the person they look like, eggshells that haven’t cracked (as the standard metaphor has it). But the film’s images and metaphors are suggestive enough to leave room for many other readings while very definitely giving that reading to the viewers who need it. Contemporary horror films so often tell you exactly what everything means, what everything symbolizes, rather than letting troubling and less-troubling meanings pile up together. A good horror movie is a loose tooth you can’t stop troubling. This movie is a loose tooth, a lovely Gnostic fable about the irresolvable suspicion that we weren’t born for the world we were born into.
What is the era the movie is set in? The main story supposedly starts in 1996, but it doesn’t feel like the 1996 I remember. We keep hearing a recent cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” a song from 2002. Now I’ve always found that song almost unbearably poignant, like Smashing Pumpkins’s “Tonight Tonight” — we also hear a cover of that — in the way it evokes both living through and already missing an overly charged, overly eventful teenage moment. But it’s just not a 1996 song, although “Tonight Tonight” is. The outfits are not quite 1996 though they are baggy and slouchy.
“The Pink Opaque” — the show-within-the-movie in some ways is obviously just “Buffy” — and we get a surprisingly moving cameo from Amber Benson, who played Tara on that show. But “Buffy” was part of the turn I was just talking about, toward making horror very explicitly about all its subtexts, making it direct them and clarify their routes like an air-traffic controller. High school is like a horror movie, it said. The way your boyfriend can turn on you after you yield up your virginity is like if someone suddenly magically lost his soul. The principal of your school is like a powerful warlock. Giving your girlfriend head is like using magic to cause her to float in the air. Getting too into magic is like having a drug problem. It was bracing, at that point in history. Anyway, the glimpses we get of “The Pink Opaque” are much more nightmarish and surreal, in that everything seems to have many possible meanings, or, as in a fairy tale, no meaning at all — that this is just the bizarre and specific way things work here. In that way — and also in the way that the show seems to exist as a half-forgotten cultural memory, a long-buried thing — “The Pink Opaque” is a lot less like “Buffy” than it is like one of my weird hobbyhorses, the Inappropriately Terrifying ‘70s British Children’s Horror Show.
There’s never been a moment, since “Buffy” was on, when we really forgot it. Even now, when the rap on it is that it’s aged poorly and Joss Whedon seems fairly firmly canceled,1 it’s still an influential and beloved cultural touchstone. It was immediately something people watched and rewatched by the season. It has never really gone away, and it probably won’t for a long time. It’s a great show. Even with Whedon’s bizarre obsession with getting characters to turn against each other in ways that even actual human beings are rarely fickle and short-sighted enough to do, you really can’t beat it when it’s at its best. Whereas the show “Pink Opaque” is supposed to be is the kind that gains some of its power from the fact that it disappeared for long periods and not everybody remembers it. You might have seen it or you might have dreamed it. That sounds more like “Quatermass IV,” “Threads,” “Children of the Stones,” “Sapphire and Steel,” or like Disney’s Black Cauldron and Watcher in the Woods, so frightening and strange and off that the company buried them for long periods.
Perhaps this combination of nostalgic ache and chronological non-specificity is tied up with the movie’s other theme. One hears trans men and women talk about feeling as though their childhoods barely existed, as though they were experiencing those years through a kind of weird fuzz. Anyone can feel this way to some degree about some period of time — just as anyone can feel anxious without it being general anxiety disorder. We’re talking about degree. I think.
In The People’s Joker, which I happened to see around the same time that I saw … the TV Glow, our main character/narrator/director basically says as much. The People’s Joker, on one level, is a satire of the Batman mythos, in which Batman oversees a dystopian Gotham City and comedy is almost entirely illegal. There is one exception, a “Saturday Night Live”-like show on which aspiring performers pay $15,000 to appear. Our main character, a trans woman who grew up in Smallville, Kansas, teams up with a strange-looking man named Oswald Cobblepot (the Penguin, obviously) to create an unlicensed, off-the-books comedy show, which the two of them label “anti-comedy” so as to avoid going to comedy jail, I guess, and also because it makes it OK that the jokes we see them doing mostly aren’t that funny. There’s a lot more to the setup, but I am not going to go further into it, for reasons explained below.