numb3r_5ev3n (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2024-05-26 09:02 am
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2024-05-26 09:02 am
My thoughts on the film "I Saw The TV Glow." X Posted from the subreddit of the same name.
I am a queer, non-gender conforming (back in the day we said "genderqueer") person in their late 40s. I saw this the day before yesterday. I'm about five years or so older than the main characters (Owen and Maddy.) The equivalents to "The Pink Opaque" for my friend group that were on TV when we were the same age as the characters were Liquid TV and/or the 1992-era X Men cartoon (so as you can imagine, I've been ecstatic about the X Men 97 revival.) We were also obsessed with the film The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension.
I liked Buffy, but I was already in my 20s when it was airing.
And woah, this movie is very powerful and made me feel all sorts of things.
Like Maddy, I experienced a "break from reality" in my 20s. And I was deadset on finding someone to go on that "break" with me, to experience a folie à deux with, I guess. To help me validate that the imaginary world I was living in was "the real world," and the outside world where I was expected to "get a job and be a productive member of society" was fake.
I know in the context of the film, it's supposed to be implied that Maddy's story is true. She is really Tara, and Owen is really Isabel. But as someone who has been through something very much like Maddy describes (apart from the "being buried alive" part) it was difficult for me not to see Maddy as someone who did exactly what I did - who rejected reality as it is, and tried to check out from it completely.
But also, it's easy to see what Maddy ended up doing as a metaphor for attempted suicide - and that she might have been trying to talk Owen into going along with her on a second attempt, together, when the first attempt failed. And this may have been how Owen saw it, when he rejected it.
Because for me, adulthood felt the same way. You get a job. You try and fit in, or at least fly under the radar. It's not what you want to do - but society is constantly telling you, pressuring you, hassling you, that it's what you should be doing, what you need to do. Maybe you meet someone and settle down, maybe you don't. Maybe you have kids, and maybe you don't.
But one year passes, and then another. And then five years. And then a decade. And then three decades have gone by. And you don't feel it. It's just like skipping forward to the next scene on a DVD. And then you're old, and wondering where your life has gone. You haven't been living your real life.
And the thoughts running through your mind go: "This wasn't how it was supposed to happen. This wasn't how things were supposed to be. This wasn't supposed to be my life. What happened to my life?"
And as someone with left-of-center politics and a not-always stable mental state, I think: "how much of this is down to reality being screwed up, how much of this is down to us living in a "Black Iron Prison"-style reality construct; and how much of this can be blamed on "late stage" or "end stage" capitalism, which never allows people who exist outside of a certain tax bracket to self-actualize at all?
The answer is to try and live your truth and be your authentic self, no matter what is going on in the world outside of that - no matter how difficult the world makes it. But not everyone is strong enough, or has the psychological tools to find their way to that.
I think I need to go back and watch this film again.
I also would like to recommend Matrix Resurrections to anyone who was bummed out by the end of I Saw The TV Glow, for what happens when the person who has been insisting "that beautiful, powerful person can't be me" suddenly decides to be that, anyway.
Current Mood:
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I mean, there's so much talk around it being a trans metaphor, but I did transition, and I *also* settled down and have a family, and I also haven't given up on woo stuff, even though I no longer am going to get talked into needing to save the world by calling off work and driving to the next state with no warning.
And I've been in enough places where "looking critically at woo and maybe saying no to some of it" was seen as a betrayal of belief that I am perhaps oversensitive to criticism that "having a stable job" or "prioritizing my family" is abandoning the truth or whatever.
Anyway. I appreciate your take on it because I know you get it.
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And I've been in enough places where "looking critically at woo and maybe saying no to some of it" was seen as a betrayal of belief that I am perhaps oversensitive to criticism that "having a stable job" or "prioritizing my family" is abandoning the truth or whatever.
I remember this phenomenon acutely form the soulbonding/otherkin/fictionkin part of Livejournal. And I've come to have the opinion that any idea, identity, situation, or condition you aren't allowed to question is just dogma. Especially when it's your own.
EDIT: This was a big part of the whole Matrix Cult paradigm (as I'm sure you remember.) He Who shall Not Be Named was very adamant that no one could do both. No one could have both. You were either 100% invested in "Woo," or you were 100% invested in Being an Ikea-shopping normie sellout.
What else can I say but "only a Sith deals in absolutes?"
My main issue is really the fact that capitalism doesn't want to let people do any of it. You can't self-actualize unless you are 100% committed to the conformist Rat Race - forget being even a little abnormal, because if you're asking questions about identity and what it means, you're not committed to GETTING THAT BREAD or ROLLING THAT BOULDER. Capitalism doesn't want to allow for anything outside itself to exist. It wants us all to be too focused on the struggle for survival to even question it, or anything else.
I tried to tell Draven that our biggest foe was consumer capitalism back in 2005, and he didn't want to hear it. Especially because there has always been that nagging gnat of a question in the back of every multiple, soulbonder or fictionkin person's mind, "what does it mean that my identity is sourced from an intellectual property?"
(EDIT again, I'm sorry about your inbox) and I think the answer to that is that it means whatever the individual soulbonder, fictionkin, or multiple feels it means or want it to mean. There's something there about the reclaiming of myth from the corporate capitalist entities who claim it as "intellectual property." There's something about the meaning of symbols, symbols transcending ownership, and about individual interpretation and individual identity.
I'm sorry about this, this movie and this whole topic of dialogue has stirred a lot of feelings that I didn't even know I was dealing with.
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Which is funny, since that's antithetical to the process of self-actualization!
I probably shouldn't watch this movie, since I feel like it could hit me in a realllll bad way, but anything that gets you thinking like that, I figure, is a positive.
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Which is funny, since that's antithetical to the process of self-actualization!
Exactly: but capitalism wants people to think that this is self actualization, regardless.
And you can't live in it and opt out. This was the real lesson I learned from the whole Matrix Cult situation, while Draven was constantly screaming that I was a brainwashed normie obsessed with money. But he wanted things from capitalism. It was a constant war to keep him in enough cigarettes and McDonalds hamburgers and Subway sandwiches and drugs and trinkets that he was happy and placated enough for him not to want to physically threaten anyone. And that took money.
But the whole time, I thought the whole point of the constant "bi-location" was to try and opt out? But that's not possible. Like, we'd have to really go "off grid" or leave the U.S. to do that, and "off grid" is the last place I'd want to be stuck with someone who has a tendency to wave a knife around when he wasn't getting what he wanted.
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