The Monster in My Closet
It’s 2003. Suburban southeast Michigan. The Thumb as we Michiganders (Yes, that’s what people from Michigan are called and it’s hilarious) call it. It’s early September so it’s still hot and humid as the Midwest can be in the summer. A six-year-old boy is huddled close to his TV from 8 to 8:30 pm, just before he has to turn in for the night per house rules at 9 pm. The last couple hours of shows air on Cartoon Network before the broadcast switches over to Toonami and Adult Swim. The boy eagerly awaits the new episode of Teen Titans which had just started airing. The episode involves a body swap between Raven and Starfire as they have to work together to save the rest of the Titans from being turned into puppets. There’s a really cute scene where they both explain how they got their powers and mentor each other on how they work. A week or two earlier, that boy was in a car crash that nearly killed him on the way home from back-to-school shopping. He’s had nightmares about that and about how the previous summer his grandfather passed away and he fears the devil is lurking in his closet at night thanks to a middle American Christian upbringing.
I Saw the TV Glow (henceforth referred to as TV Glow) is a 2024 horror movie directed by Jane Schoenbrun, whose only previous work I’m aware of is the 2021 coming-of-age horror film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a movie that I am also going to discuss in this piece because I believe it contains very similar moods and textures to any discussion on TV Glow and is useful supplemental material for this dissection. It is also a movie that I have seen three times in the last month and very nearly a fourth time had a friend of mine been in the mood for a pretty tough viewing. It is a tough viewing. The film utilizes a similar visual and storytelling flare as famed director David Lynch, known for often delving into surrealist and unsettling shots and situations in his works such as the famous 1990 series, Twin Peaks and its sequels. It’s hard not to see the influence. TV Glow is a very uncomfortable film. It’s hard to watch especially if you’re someone who has experienced what is shown in the movie both figuratively and literally. There are gross creatures. The film plays with the flow of time quite leisurely. There are a myriad of incredibly uncomfortable and awkward moments brilliantly portrayed by lead actor, Justice Smith, that begin as sort of adorably quirky, but very quickly move towards distressing and completely and utterly heartbreaking.
It’s 2008. Financial crash. The boy’s family is forced to pay rent in his abusive grandmother’s house. Teen Titans has been canceled at this point, but Toonami had already overtaken it in the boy’s mind. The boy is now eleven. He’s still frightened of the monster in his closet. Toonami will be canceled by the end of this year. The boy is becoming increasingly anxious about the wide world outside his door and beyond his TV screen.
Schoenbrun’s previous work, which we’ll refer to as World’s Fair, is a very similar story about growing up in suburbia to TV Glow. I find it a bit more subtle of a film personally, but it also contains very many allusions to queer experience. It’s an important stepping stone to TV Glow if you consider them, as we are here, to be part of a single congruent metaphor for a particularly queer coming-of-age. In it, the main character, Casey, goes through a depressive psychological metamorphosis after engaging in an online alternate reality game known colloquially as the “World’s Fair Challenge”. There are scenes of incredibly intense, sometimes violent, dissociation where Casey acts out aggressively. One of these involves her beating and tearing her childhood plush toy down to the stuffing in a brutal, gruesome scene befitting of a murder. Indeed, it’s framed as a killing of a past self and a loss of innocence. More notable for me, however, is the character of JLB, a YouTuber and ARG enthusiast who assists Casey at a few points in participating in the “World’s Fair” game. He feels so…familiar. He’s like a vision of myself from another time. I was awkward and anti-social. I was hiding behind the computer screen only talking to friends online. I was living in the hazy ennui of American suburbia. I was obsessed with weird little internet cultures and communities. His timid, shy romanticizing in the final scene about an interaction with Casey which may or may not have happened given the circumstances of the film is just so genuine and heart-wrenching it feels like something I would have said of one of my friends online who once came to me with suicidal thoughts. He feels like a version of me living in the closet.
It’s 2015. Graduation. College. The boy has to become a man. The last several years have been a blur. There are memories here and there. The closet. New monsters. Hidden clothes. There’s a senior trip to the nation’s capital. All he can think about is how gross puberty made him. He can’t fit right into the clothes he has been hiding from his family anymore. He’s been on the internet for years at this point. All his friends are through computer screens. Anti-social. Awkward. He tries to ask a girl from school out but backs out at the last minute. Something just didn’t feel right about the word, boyfriend. Eighteen. The cultural moment of the world is about to turn and unravel. It’s roughly after this point that he even learns of the existence of trans people, sheltered as he is, through a few trans women who hang out around video gaming communities he’s in. Their existence is about to become the civil rights moment of our time, but not quite yet.
TV Glow opens immediately with transgender imagery and allegory which will be everywhere and everything in this film. From the moment you see the blue, pink, and white of the flag in the opening scene, you know what this movie is about. From the moment you see Justice Smith’s character, Owen, run from his one real friend back to the mental prison of his father’s home, you know this is a coming-of-age story gone wrong. Next, he’s out of school. Then, he’s in wage labor. His awful coworkers humiliate and chastise him for his lack of typical straight male hyper-sexuality. He gets one more, genuine chance to chase down his true self, a character from a late-night show for teens who is a young girl with psychic abilities. His friend is back in their nondescript, suburban town. She’s greatly changed and going under a different name. She offers to save him, but it will be painful. Transition can be hard. Your family and friends might reject you. Cisgendered society will reject you. Your body will go through stressful changes on hormone replacement therapy. You will question every single memory and aspect of yourself to uncover the truth, your truth buried deep within your very being. The hardest step of all is that initial plunge into acceptance. Owen does not take this step, not now. He lashes out against his former friend, refusing to use her chosen name and shoving her to the ground in a scene where you can feel the thread of fate between them being snipped in two. It’s shot quite brilliantly as we then see a cut to the next day and the hole Owen was meant to crawl out of in accepting himself. Time really does fly. We reach the end of the movie. Owen is middle-aged and still working minimum wage labor. He’s suffocating, quite literally suffocating.
It’s 2020. The pandemic looms overhead. They’re out by now to online friends and romantic partners, but still figuring things out. Haven’t started hormone replacement therapy….yet. The day is coming before the year is out. Can they escape? The years before have flown by like a dial spinning out of control. They know they aren’t a boy, but just what are they? Who knows at this point? They start writing poetry and building worlds that no one will ever see or read about. It’s a slowing down of time during the pandemic and subsequent lockdown that gets to them. So many plans and events in so little time, each so arduous and long. What will 2021 bring? They don’t know, but they do know that this is the last year as this….thing that has lived in their closet. Goodbye, Michigan. Go west, young daughter. Go west.
Owen cuts his chest open, very literally cuts his chest open. Inside he finds fragments of time and memories, episodes of television he watched as a child. It’s all right there so tantalizingly close to that final hurdle of realization and acceptance with the “beautiful and powerful” person within. He puts his clothes back on and apologizes to random guests at his work for the crime of existing with mental and physical illness. My tears pour out in the theater. I have nothing but love and compassion for Owen. He is me in a world where I didn’t leave, a world where I stayed who I was. He is JLB and she is also me. Isabel is her real name and I will tell her story to all. It’s 2024 and each day is a new one with new things to find about myself and new things to experience. Each day is a more authentic one for me. More real. Owen still has time. You still have time. I mentioned before the cost and hardship of those precious initial steps and left many reading this hanging as to the answer to one, single important question. Was it worth it? I cannot in good conscience give a less emphatic: YES. The new family you will find will love you so unconditionally. To make matters even better, they will love you as you. You will be as radiant and beautiful as the brightest stars in the night sky. The joy you feel will have you dance as the aurora. Even if who you were is over, you can look forward to the new being that takes shape.
“There is still time.”