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woman trapped in a box made of fear and confusion in a box made of violent trauma in a box made of brimming rage in a box made of unhinged defensiveness in a box made of fragile self delusion just wants the world to see what she’s really capable of but she doesn’t know what that is or how to do it and she doesn’t know how to navigate inside her own maze so instead of asking for directions she just decides to try chewing and biting her way out but instead of finding an exit she just finds more boxes to bury herself in

#barry hbo #you know if were seeing barry s3e7 candy asses. were rbing woman trapped in boxes

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everyone clap and cheer for sally reed

#saw this again. i have incorporated another person into the official sally reed fanclub

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It’s classic situation of bottling it up. You keep who you are a secret because you cannot be who you really are. So, you’re trying to be two different guys at once, and that is simply not sustainable. So, naturally, there is… resentment, anger, distrust. It makes sense you would turn into human pressure cooker and shoot up all our friends and eventually yell at your girlfriend.

BARRY — 3.05 “crazytimeshitshow”

#barry hbo #this episode. god. #my friend saying the natalie and sally scene is nice. whooooo boy

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Not high stakes or anything, but I've seen multiple reviews of and reflections on tv glow that engage really thoughtfully with Owen's transness while reading Maddy as straightforwardly cis/a girl/a lesbian, and I think it's kind of fascinating

The way Maddy's "you know I like girls, right? Not boys" offers a (shameful/sublimated) form of gender validation to Owen as their relationship takes on moments of intimacy--and the way that Maddy isn't ultimately capable of fulfilling Owen's fantasies of Two Girls doing Cool Subtextual TV Lesbianism, any more than Owen is capable of fulfilling Maddy's fantasies--is a rich and messy and key part of their whole dynamic. imo

#i saw the tv glow #the posting economy desperately needs more hard nosed takes abt these twos relationship

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To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

#i saw the tv glow

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i wouldn't worry about it

#capturing a classic tabletop experience here #where the characters are reacting w shock and horror to smth #and the caption (non diagenic contributor ie gm) says blithely. dont worry about it

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💥DIMENSION 20: NEVER STOP BLOWING UP! This explosive, action-packed, high-octane new season of Dimension 20 premieres June 26th on Dropout. Starring Brennan Lee Mulligan, Ally Beardsley, Ify Nwadiwe, Isabella Roland, Rekha Shankar, Alex Song-Xia, and Jacob Wysocki!

#dimension 20 #really really into this

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reblog to reblog

#unnatural 20 sounds the most fun but in moment probably 20 not nat #altho much like prev. rarely if ever comes up anymore

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i cant believe that david chase would say fans were "bloodthirsty" for wanting tony soprano to die after hte way Edie Falco looked at him (making his son's problems all about himself to get a womans attention). like dude you were the one who cut to her grimacing three times. i want him away from her so fucking bad and have for years god knows she wouldnt actually do it

#the sopranos #and his fucking KIDS

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Matt: There was a moment a few years ago when a journalist reported that Chase told her Tony lived, and he got mad at that — as mad as he’s gotten at all the people who keep saying Tony died. But what he said, specifically — and he was directing it toward everybody — was, “Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point. To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.” I think the most important two words in those two sentences are “spiritual question.” And if we fixate on anything other than that, we’re missing the point.

When people ask me, “Do you think Tony died?” I sometimes answer, “Of course.” And then I pause and add, “Sooner or later, everybody does.” Which admittedly is a dickish thing to say — but you know what I mean? That bell, to me, is a tolling bell, as in “Bring out your dead.” It rings every time somebody goes through that door. I’m not saying “Holsten’s is Heaven!” or anything like that. I mean it’s a prompt for us to think about death and life, and what we’ve done with our lives.

Maybe the ending is moralistic, but not in the way that some of the people who need Tony to be dead might frame it. Maybe the ending is saying, “This guy never got it. Are you gonna be like him?”

this makes it really funny when you see david chase said "what are yall stupid? he's dead" like three years ago

#the sopranos #i dont think this show is like. doing shit with the kind of intentionality people percieve it as

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heh. get em boys. *the two large bodyguards next to me do not move* boys. come on. please

#bobby bacalieri energy

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the sopranos is so strange. i would probably be bawling my eyes out at meadow not being able to parallel park making her enter the diner to watch her dad die but journey's dont stop believing is blasting in full

#the sopranos

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the post that went around a couple years ago like “when you remember how character A says character B’s name and you lose your train of thought” or whatever and people were tagging it tomgreg. that’s me but with shirley from community saying Britta

#community

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i adore the breaking bad scene where all the guys at don eladio's place drink the poisoned tequila and start dropping dead because we the audience understand that this is an act of revenge that gus has been planning for years to avenge the death of his business and romantic partner, but jesse was never told any of this so he just got brought to a baller pool party by his new scary boss, a hot girl sat on his cock, and then everyone started dying and shooting at each other while he just stood there like

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All weed is slut weed when you're a slut btw

#the asexuality leaving my body when i have officially obtained wizard high status is strange to be sure #but it is. clarifying.

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#technically tswift bday. but i prefer the fact that i was born on friday the 13th

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damned if you’re employed damned if you’re not