“What If I Really Was Someone Else?”: Black Trans Body Horror in I Saw the TV Glow

Isaiah Frost Rivera

Though the body horror canon has historically pathologized disabled, non-white, and queer people’s bodies on-screen, its explorations of the human form pushed to various extremes by monstrous forces present a valuable expressive outlet for marginalized communities in search of “stories that are not about demonizing or destroying the Other but confronting the least comfortable parts of yourself” (Doyle). Even as its pioneers have been largely cis, white, and able-bodied, body horror offers “revolutionary and inclusive ways of presenting disability that other genres haven’t yet attempted” (B. Anderson), a medium for creators of color to “acknowledge the mundane horror of living in a country that dehumanizes [them]” (Elliott), and, for LGBTQ+ people, “the only form of media that thinks about bodies as much as they do” (RickiHirsch 5:54 – 5:58), further underscoring its flexibility as a generic repository for a host of embodied experiences.

While writer/director Jane Schoenbrun would likely balk at categorizing their films as body horror, having notably claimed that “genre feels like none of my business” (Boone), I Saw the TV Glow is a major contribution to this ever-growing canon, as it explores how queer and trans people close the gap between their internal selves and their external (mis)representations in a world that reduces their bodies to “monstrous things made of only the abject” (Holtz). The film stars Justice Smith as Owen, a biracial suburbanite who discovers he and his best friend Maddy (Bridgette Lundy-Paine) are the main characters in their favorite TV show, The Pink Opaque, their real bodies buried alive and slowly dying as they traverse a nightmarish netherworld called the Midnight Realm, created by their archnemesis Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner). Yet even after Maddy escapes this sinister simulation, Owen remains stuck, so utterly disconnected from his own body that he ultimately has no choice but to destroy it.

Much like the body horror canon itself, which “has always been haunted by transness” (Byron), I Saw the TV Glow leaves viewers with a “contact-high gender dysphoria” (St. James), insofar as Owen’s identity crisis closely mirrors the plight of black queer and trans people “in a world that forces [them] to conform to white western hegemony, to remain palatable to white trans, queer, gender expansive society, always to [their] detriment, to [their] deaths” (Void). Yet critics and audiences have overlooked these racial resonances, not to mention how the Midnight Realm, Schoenbrun’s trans take on the Sunken Place, models “a distinct form of [black] body horror . . . a mentally invasive Othering coming from the racist thoughts, ideas, and creations of a more privileged class” (Simenson 43). Nevertheless, just as “[t]he inability to breathe, to aspirate, structures black and trans life” (Ridley 482), so too do blackness and transness structure Owen’s life—and eventual death by asphyxiation—in a transmisogynoiristic hellscape.

If I Saw the TV Glow displays “how often Black trans experience is flattened and erased in favor of white narratives of transition and becoming” (Void), its depiction of black trans body horror expands the cinematic parameters of what Jill E. Anderson calls embodied horror, a psychosomatic method of body horror in which “[predominantly cis] women’s bodies are both open to abuse and monstrous in the ways that abuse can and does transform them, in their despair and in their physical forms” (36). In the Midnight Realm, Owen is similarly “stuck in a liminal space between the physical manifestation of horror and [his] own psychological activity,” wherein the “constant flux, between outside and inside . . . erodes [his] sense of security in the world, forcing [him] to undergo adaptations that can be deemed as monstrous” (35). Thus, by the film’s end, Owen resorts to self-mutilation at his workplace “seeking proof of and evidence for [his] past traumas” (33); namely, the trauma of being forced to live as a man while his true self, Isabel (Helena Howard) in The Pink Opaque, is figuratively and literally buried alive.

‘I Know There’s Nothing In There’: Denying Owen’s Glow

Jane Schoenbrun has described the screen as a central focus in their work, “a versatile device, obsession, image, phenomenon” that captures the feeling of being “a little bit of a passenger . . . or an audience in your own life” (O’Falt 9:52 – 10:34). In I Saw the TV Glow, Owen’s screen—the glow of television static, a reflection of his idealized self in The Pink Opaque—“isn’t outside of [him] but quite literally is inside [him] and always has been” (27:35 – 27:48). Yet whenever faced with this inner glow, Owen insists on suppressing it, for fear it will “completely obliterate any sense of reality and stability that [he’s] built for [himself]” (4:05 – 4:21). This “internal horror” where something inside Owen is progressively “building to some kind of turbulence” (21:38 – 21:50) constitutes a uniquely trans rendition of embodied horror that directly confronts gender dysphoria and its earth-shattering effects on trans people’s lives—and, far too often, their deaths.

At the start of the film, a young Owen (Ian Foreman) flips through television channels before stumbling onto an advertisement for a new episode of The Pink Opaque, titled “The Attack of the Drain Lords.” As he watches the screen with rapt fascination, the voice of one of its protagonists, Tara (Lindsey Jordan), says, “They can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them,” a refrain that defines adult Owen’s life, such as his last exchange with Maddy (“It’s not real if I don’t think about it”) and his final voice-over monologue (“Time moves fast these days. Years pass like seconds. I just try not to think too hard about it”). This willful denial also shapes Owen’s self-image, as evidenced by a scene in the school bleachers where Maddy asks what his sexual preferences are, to which he replies: “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. And I know there’s nothing in there, but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check. I know there’s something wrong with me.”

Narratively speaking, this statement is partially true—in the series finale of The Pink Opaque, Mr. Melancholy’s henchmen cut out Isabel and Tara’s hearts, force-feed them an amnesic poison called Luna Juice, and bury them both alive. Symbolically, however, it reveals the deeply wounding effects of transmisogynoir on Owen’s self-conception in his predominantly white suburb. As K. Anderson writes, “[o]ur sexual interiorities—the way one a/sexualizes another based on desirability politics, the way we feel about sex, and the way we recount sex—are coded by pervasive logics of antiblackness.” If Owen’s sexual interiority mirrors how dysphoria affects trans people’s intimate lives, it is also fundamentally mediated by blackness in ways that white queers often overlook. To this point, it is telling that throughout the film, Maddy unwittingly evokes the age-old trope of “a white fem reacting defensively to a Black person asking her something innocently, someone who has never displayed a hint of desire toward her” (Void), such as when she jokingly calls Owen a ‘creep’ when he asks where she will sleep during their first sleepover and, later in their friendship, cautiously reminds him that she likes girls.

Importantly, Robert Daniels notes Owen’s self-denial coincides with the politics of the Clinton era, “when forced homogenization . . . created the illusion of progressivism and diversity amid consumerist fantasies” and “the curated lies of suburban life.” Rather than embracing the television as “a roadmap for revolt. . . . where Black subjectivity is shaken, reimagined, and then re-lived,” Owen opts instead for “the safe, stifling fantasy of blending in by leaving [himself] undefined” (Daniels). This assimilation is visually underscored by a tracking shot in which Owen walks the halls of the aptly-named Void High, waving at two white goth students while neglecting his black peers. Just as Owen fears the obliterative quality of transness, so too does he fear the disruptive potential of blackness, both of which coexist inside him despite his efforts to expel them—including a scene in which he literally vomits static. It is only when he resorts to self-harm in the film’s conclusion that “the trope of the TV static and the flesh inside are united” (Haus of Decline 34:46) and his true self can finally, if belatedly, glow.

Conclusion: Is There Really Still Time?

I Saw the TV Glow joins the rich lineage of body horror films that depict “the physical changes wrought by time that make [trans people] aware of the disconnect [they] feel from [their] own bod[ies]” (Smith), a theme that bookends Owen’s character arc (or lack thereof). Early in the film, Owen asks his mother Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler) if he can stay up late and watch The Pink Opaque, to which his father Frank (Fred Durst) utters his single line of dialogue: “Isn’t that a show for girls?” For Schoenbrun, this deceptively simple exchange symbolizes how cisheteronormativity can “ingrain enough internalized shame in somebody who is just starting to peek their head into any kind of queer identity to lose half a life” (O’Falt 8:35 – 8:48). Consequently, by the film’s end, Owen loses decades of his own life to the cisheteronormative and white supremacist pressures of Mr. Melancholy’s Midnight Realm.

This embodied horror is doubly amplified by Owen’s gradual decline into old age, like other late-in-life trans people “aging badly because [they] just don’t see [themselves] as a person” (Haus of Decline 33:32). Though I have argued elsewhere that the physical discrepancies between Ian Foreman’s young Owen and Justice Smith’s adult Owen betray the colorist casting trends of mainstream horror media (Rivera), they also display how unrecognizable Owen becomes over the course of his life. As a child, when he is most authentic to himself, Owen is bright-eyed and vulnerable, with moisturized brown skin and thick curly hair. By the film’s conclusion, however, years of self-repression in an inhospitable body have transformed him into a balding, pale shell of his kid self, haunted by Isabel’s lingering image: “What if I really was someone else? Someone beautiful and powerful. Someone buried alive and suffocating to death. Very far away, on the other side of the television screen. But I know that’s not true. That’s just fantasy. Kid’s stuff.”

As Imogen Binnie writes, for many closeted trans people “[d]eciding to will [being trans] away is a defense mechanism that is inevitably going to fail and [they’ll] be back where [they] started: trans. Just older and more entrenched in a life that itself is not much more than a coping mechanism designed to keep [them] from having to be trans in the real world” (205). No matter how much Owen tries to will away his own black transness, by the end of the film his defense mechanisms slowly crumble away until he can no longer ignore his truth. While catering a birthday party at his local Fun Center, Owen collapses and screams for help, crying out for his deceased mother as the partygoers around him suddenly freeze, suspended in time. Afterwards, Owen locks himself in the center’s bathroom and slices his torso open with a box-cutter. Standing before the mirror, he widens the wound and reveals a staticky glow inside that shimmers and throbs with life, at which he smiles.

This final act of self-mutilation epitomizes a major motif in trans body horror—that, as Jude Doyle argues, “[w]hen we cannot put ourselves together, we tear ourselves apart.” Thus, by witnessing Owen’s ostensible self-harm, viewers are confronted with “the suffering the cutting is intended to relieve. . . . [namely,] the baffled sense of being locked out of your own body; unable to connect with the person that is supposed to be you” (Doyle). To many, this ending is “full of an immense, beautiful hope” (St. James) that embodies Maddy’s last-ditch chalk message to Owen that ‘there is still time’ to break free. Indeed, Owen beholds his bloodless wound with “the characteristic light behind the eyes” of “trans people who have made the discovery” (Haus of Decline 1:02:00 – 1:02:07) and are ready to change their lives. Yet to black queer and trans filmgoers for whom I Saw the TV Glow hits much too close to home, the film’s final shot—in which Owen frowns, exits the Fun Center bathroom, and apologizes to everyone around him—is but another devastating reminder that, in truth, there simply isn’t enough time for us all.

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