I Saw The Mirror Flicker

& briefly, I glimpsed the future —

“What if I really was someone else — someone beautiful and powerful?”

Spoilers ahead for I Saw The TV Glow. Incomprehensible, in fact, if you haven’t seen it yet.

I’ve spent a lot of my life looking in mirrors. Not, as you’d probably expect, into the pool of Narcissus, but rather as an act of bargaining with the grey overcast of grief that clouded my entire adult life. I was twenty-five in March and April of 2018, newly single. A man had just broken my spirit nearly irreparably, and I was living that stereotypical TV drama story of a woman in her mid-twenties, after such tragic heartbreak, finding herself. Except she was nowhere to be found. I searched for her in mirrors everywhere. At one point I thought I had captured her for good. She stared back at me with the beautiful caramel brown hair I’d given her just months prior, and her clothes, picked precisely to straddle the line between tasteful and slutty, draped over her in perfect feminine illusory. I was really good at this, at one point. At dressing the doll. But what I couldn’t stand, most of all, was the look in her eyes. In all of my photos from this two-month period, where I’m posing semi-seductively in the mirror, I see such terrible, aching need to belong to that woman. That if I tried hard enough, that if I wore the right hair and donned the right clothes, that I could settle for being this person, and then all of my life’s problems would be fixed for good. 

Mirrors are portals. When we look at ourselves in the silver translucence, we invite in all sorts of attendant ghouls — ruination, transformation, etc. In Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, the titular character is a man who falls in love with Death herself. In one scene, he is prompted by Death’s chauffeur (another psychopomp) to step through a full-length mirror, and he stretches his hands out to touch the pane of glass, to touch himself, but then he pulls back, hesitating. “Perhaps you’re afraid?” the chauffeur asks. “No,” Orpheus says, “but this mirror is a mirror, and in it I see an unhappy man.” “You do not have to understand,” the chauffeur replies. “You just have to believe.” An exchange of words I know all too well. So Orpheus steps through the mirror and stumbles into the Underworld.

Perhaps, when I spent those months with my gaze trained in the mirror, I was also looking to die. I termed this: “soul death.” When I finally turned my gaze inward, and met my body’s burning desire to transition, I realized that transition meant that I would have to kill the version of myself that I knew for my entire life up until that moment, and that this person would never return to me. The knowledge of transmasculinity would change me forever. It was like Pandora’s box, toothpaste being squeezed out of the tube, unable to be squeezed back in. Even if I decided to detransition, I couldn’t return to the before point. The previous save file would be corrupted. That was the point. I was terrified of transitioning and put it off for a year because I realized that to do so, I would have to conduct a voluntary spiritual death. And it really is that violent — this type of thing can’t be done through half-measures. You have to unsteady yourself, you have to pull yourself up by the roots and destroy every compromise you ever internalized. Sometimes that means self-cannibalizing and then spitting everything back up again. Sometimes that means taking the shovel over the head and splitting open the skull. “Maddy”/Tara paid a guy $50 to bury them alive in a coffin. You have to be violent. This is the only way to transcend life. Every trans person you know is already the bravest person you know for being willing to die in order to step into the uncertain future. Into the Underworld of themselves. 

We don’t get to see that with Isabel. Somehow when Justice Smith looks at his naked chest in his mirror, his expression is a perfect communicator of how I felt when I looked in the mirror (how did he do that? how did he know to convey it like this?) — trying to convince yourself that you’re okay with this, this bedraggled thing, this hand-me-down, this rickety and downtrodden vehicle that fits you in all the wrong ways. That the other option is harder, scarier, so you won’t do it. You won’t entertain a possible mistake.

Time slips by. You’re still in the same place. It’s 2021, and you never grew up. Everyone around you is a full-fledged adult, or at least some semblance of human, and you are not even that. Why why why. 

My second time seeing it, I observed something interesting happening with I Saw The TV Glow, and it’s that it functions as an act of telling. Most of what happens in the movie is told to us, either through voiceover narration, or between characters, as reportage to each other. In the shadow of this movie exists another one, an alternate realm where “Owen” self-actualizes as Isabel and she defeats Mr. Melancholy with Tara. Where she runs away with Tara as a teen, or where she does actually bury herself in the football field all those years later. Just like the Pink Opaque exists on the underside of Mr. Melancholy’s world, so do these ghost movies that branch through TV Glow’s Underworld. Telling, or being told, also renders Isabel essentially powerless, unable to act except as observer or receptacle. The movie structurally pens her in, reflecting her own refusal to go out and live, and forces her to instead hear about all of these beautiful experiences secondhand through Tara, or through her love of a TV show.

I have joked to friends: I Saw the TV Glow is a horror movie made specifically for trans people. It’s a scare tactic for eggs. The ending is so existentially disturbing to me that I kept repeating, it can’t end like this, it can’t end like this, when I first watched the credits roll. But that, too, is the point. I love a movie (or any piece of art) that compels you to exit its warm fantasy and go out into the real world and live, truly and forcefully and guiltlessly live. (“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”) I think a discussion of whether TV Glow’s ending is “pessimistic” or “hopeful” is far beyond the point. Do not let yourself die at the end of season 5, the movie warns. The season 6 premiere starts after the credits roll. It starts with your life.