Light in the dark / Things on more things

Today: Josephine Riesman, New York Times bestselling author of Ringmaster and True Believer; and David Roth, an editor and co-owner at Defector.

Issue No. 229

Two Movies Meet the Moment
Josephine Riesman

Having It All
David Roth

Two Movies Meet the Moment

by Josephine Riesman

For about a decade there, it seemed like trans people might be allowed to dream. Now, we are waking into a nightmare. But that’s nothing new.

In the efflorescent days of Germany’s Weimar Republic, trans people walked the streets of Berlin in clothing of their choice. They could receive transition care and contribute to pioneering research on gender at the Institute for Sexual Research. They could participate in the first mass political movement for queer rights; at the newsstands they could buy magazines geared to a “transvestite” audience. Then on May 6, 1933, accompanied by a buoyant brass band, Nazi students stormed, burned, and destroyed the Institute. The cause was set back for the better part of a century. Many of the trans people of Europe—our unknown family—didn’t survive the conflagration that followed.

They’ve been haunting me, those ghosts. It feels that we are about to follow them into the dark. Yet this past year two extraordinary works of art appeared, the kind of art that feels more like the beginning of something than an ending.

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker were both stunning leaps forward in trans cinema. Wildly unlike one another, yet destined to be intertwined, these masterworks are the yin and yang of contemporary trans consciousness. And now, just a few months after the films’ releases, I’m simply hoping the new American Nazis won’t get the chance to burn my Blu-rays of them.

Both films are triumphs, but neither feels triumphalist. Schoenbrun and Drew are both intimately aware of the precarity of recent gains made by trans people in America. They are queer Millennials, after all: our generation was born into a time of growing queer acceptance, suffered through a major homophobic backlash in our teens, watched representation and acceptance bloom in our twenties, and now live in a time when the President of the United States—who isn’t even Donald Trump, not yet—has signed the first federal anti-trans legislation in decades. TV Glow and People’s Joker feel emblematic of trans America’s current moment of liminal, uncertain dread.

I’ll eschew spoilers because not enough of you have yet seen these movies, and they should be experienced on their own terms. Suffice it to say they will make for a wild double feature. TV Glow should be viewed first, as it’s the more agonizingly ambiguous drama of the two: a story about two kids who are obsessed with the same TV show, then come to emotional blows over whether the show is, in some way, more real than their dismal lives. But if TV Glow is the shot of hard liquor, People’s Joker is (if you’ll forgive the term) the chaser: a half-animated, gloriously overstuffed parody of the Batman mythos that doubles as the auteur’s trans autobiography.