We saw the TV glow

I'm a little haunted by the duo who were walking near us on the way out of I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun's fantastic psychological study of fandom and thwarted transition. They thought the film was interesting, but felt that its treatment of protagonist Owen's obvious transness was "ham-fisted." I thought: ah, yes, it would either be "ham-fisted" or "forced down our throats." The phrasing changes, depending on how you're processing your discomfort with trans people, but either way, the idea is that we're forcing something that shouldn't be forced.

The fact is that the charge of ham-fistedness only makes sense if you think something ought to remain subtext, rather than threatening to burst from the surface like the creature in Alien. I Saw the TV Glow is Alien if the chestburster got stuck; that's why it's horror, despite the lack of any conventional scares or gore. We know she's in there, Owen's girl-self. We do not get points for guessing it, and if we're frustrated because we wanted points, that's on us.

Schoenbrun was born in 1987. You can tell that they remember the '90s – the real '90s, with the shadowless hope of the end of history, the way everything stood still in the suburbs. They remember the gritty corrosiveness of television then, and the darkness we saw in it. That darkness comforted us, because it reflected our reality. The faker the monster and the more stereotypical the teenage emotion, the greater the paradoxical connection with a deeper realness – the cruelty we glimpsed in the airy gap beneath the silliness.

Like Schoenbrun, I'm talking mostly about Buffy. I actually never connected with Buffy – at the time, I was watching anime and reading wizard books – but I caught up with it in college and understand how it worked. It was as if the silliness was so weightless that it always slipped to reveal something ugly.

I Saw the TV Glow is about nostalgia for this darkness, which seems to me a unique affliction of former '90s kids, although I suspect that I am wrong. When you hit thirty-five, you just get nostalgic for the accuracy of your perceptions as a kid. It so happens that, for '90s kids, those perceptions centered around campy television. I am talking about camp here, the other side of camp – not the froth and pleasure, but the experience of being trapped in subtext. A camp reading is all about pulling queerness out of a text that either ignores or denigrates queer people. The price of it is that you're never present on the surface of the thing. You see yourself, but twisted, and you learn to enjoy the twist, and there's power in that, until it stops working. It always does eventually.

Owen spends the film's 32-year timeline being first freed by subtext, then trapped by it by choice. Her favorite show, the wildly plausible supernatural drama The Pink Opaque, doesn't offer her a vision of gender transition – it offers her a vision of cis lesbianism. It is the specifically lesbian character of her attraction to her fandom friend Maddy that allows her to imagine transition, but it's not a transition to womanhood. It's a transition to television.

One of the most painfully accurate (funny, ghoulish) aspects of I Saw the TV Glow is the way The Pink Opaque shifts genres and tones depending on when Owen watches it. When she's twelve, living outwardly as a prepubescent boy, it's a schlocky horror show with cheap and terrifying effects, all drippy latex and goo. A few years later, when she's staggering through her teens, the show is outrageously dark, psychosexually loaded, and more or less overtly about mental illness. When she revisits The Pink Opaque in her twenties, living outwardly as a man with a young family, she turns on the show to find that it's a totally different genre – a silly kids' network product whose central couple has been largely supplanted by an ensemble cast of smug children.

Schoenbrun could have done the straightforward thing – shown Owen watching the same episode shot in three subtly different ways – but instead they present us with the real ambiguity of revisiting something formative. The contrast is often shocking. Was it always this bad? Would it be better if we watched another episode, or in a different mood? Did it seem better back then because of what we brought to it, or does it seem worse now because we have less to bring? The effect is of a vampiric draining – The Pink Opaque is alive at first, then interestingly half-alive, and then very much dead. In the final coda, it turns out that Owen can't keep it in the grave, not with a stake through its heart, garlic in its mouth, and a crucifix at its head.

But what is draining the show of its power? It's not Owen; it's just time. Very few works of art survive contact with time. (I nearly wrote "survive context," but of course it's the loss of context that destroys them.) It's not the art's fault. It can't change, but we can. Owen spends the whole film trying not to change – not to age, not to transition – but the effort destroys her, corroding her until she collapses from within. Still, there is hope by the end of I Saw the TV Glow that she will get out of the subtext, crawl out of the TV, break through her own chest and come to the surface. It's not much hope, but it's enough to help the film transcend its influences. We can see something other than darkness in it, but it still seems like the truth.