Movie Recommendations: Two New Trans-gressive Classics
The People's Joker (2024, dir. Vera Drew) & I Saw the TV Glow (2024, dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
I don't watch movies with the mindset of providing a critical review or seeking movies to write about. Rather these recommendation posts reflect moments I finished watching a movie and felt driven to tell the world about it!
I only recommend movies I loved watching and am eager for you to see.
Both of these movies deserve better. I wanted to write an individual recommendation for each of them when I first saw them, but I was too busy. Then, as the meme sez, “they lived rent free in my mind” while I sought time to give them their due. Now I have a little bit of time open, and I have to lump them together.
Which is unfair. Literally either or both of these deserve your individual, undivided attention. However, for what it’s worth, they’d also make a hell of a double-feature. So, let’s get to it:
This year has seen the release of two remarkable, extremely visual, experimental, and vibe-driven appropriations of popular culture for the purpose of describing the trans experience, and they both follow the famous statement about comforting the disturbed and to disturbing the comfortable.
However, they come from opposite poles of the transgressive aesthetic and mark a distinct milestone for where alternative film and narrative making stand these days.
The People’s Joker
The word for this one is daring. At root The People’s Joker is an autofiction about a person lost in antidepressants who thinks they’ll find self-expression in comedy, only to learn the real issue is that she is trans.
This story already has a limited audience; then Vera Drew stretches the limits of legal waters by appropriating the DC universe to tell it, and uses a great amount of the screentime to skewer the comedy world bigwigs and gatekeepers as well. When she’s not risking getting herself sued, she isn’t making friends with the sort of Upright Citizen’s Brigade —> Saturday Night Live pipeline straighter people than she would assume would be the open pathways to accept ‘subversive content’ or popular queer trauma narratives with her sendup of their ‘brave vulnerability’ structure.
The whole thing is an exercise in appropriation. Smilex is now no longer the Joker’s weapon but a militant form of Big Pharma crowd control. Batman is not only fascist but a child groomer. “Harlequin” is the name comedians give to backup performers, always female, and Harlequins can never be primary performers. And the entire movie is layered with collage-esque graphics of various types, from 2D backgrounds to CG Poison Ivy, cheekily obvious Penguin prosthetics to legit digital animated sequences.
I make a type of experimental film I call ‘processing films’ where you send a video through various algorithms or programs to remix and rehash them, and I can’t help thinking of The People’s Joker as a ‘processing film’ where Vera Drew fed popular culture into her brain and exported this glitchy, edgy, vibrant rant about the various ways society fucked her over. It’s really beautiful.
And one thing I love about the kaleidoscopic layers of imagery and graphic design elements is that I reminds me of the promise ‘digital cinema’ made about reducing the cost of entry to make unique, idiosyncratic, and personal forms of self-expression. It’s not just that The People’s Joker riffs against the DC verse but it also shows how unimaginative the DC cinematic universe is visually compared to Vera Drew’s own imagination.
BUT! It’s worth mentioning that through all the noise and graphics, layers and color, forced laughter through grimacing faces and real laughter from the audience, there’s some brutally touching, intimate scenes, particularly involving Joker Harlequin’s mother and her abusive partner (modeled off of the Jared Leto Joker and himself a victim of Batman’s grooming). At no point in the proceedings is there a question that Vera Drew is just being edgy to be edgy: this is clearly a meaningful, personal work that came out of her real life experiences.
I Saw the TV Glow
This movie turned out to be a complete surprise. I went in because I expected a horror movie and enjoyed how the trailer looked. Instead I was met with a very painful reminder of what life was like for a non-trivial number of teenagers of my generation.
I Saw the TV Glow is about an adolescent named Owen who shares a love of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Secret World of Alex Mack-like television serial called The Pink Opaque with a troubled older teenager named Maddie. The two use the show as a way of communicating with each other and escaping the suffocating weight of the seemingly quotidian suburban world around them.
However, Maddie disappears for a while and when she shows back up, it’s with news that The Pink Opaque is real and she and Owen are the two lead characters, slowly suffocating in hidden graves where they were buried alive by the show’s primary nemesis, Mr. Melancholy (styled as a half-remembered nightmare I assume Schoenbrun had after seeing the moon face in La Voyage dans la Lune). Owen has a choice between risking his whole life on Maddie’s crazy belief or continuing living as if slowly suffocating. What’s better, burying yourself alive or being choked to death?
It’s rare, but every now and then I do see a movie that reminds me of my childhood. Actual nostalgia flicks don’t do it for me, but the spark of recognition can sometimes come down to a certain character or how they’re performed. And folks: I grew up with Owen and Maddie.
My “Owens” were more than a few kids I befriended, kids who were not just ‘shy’ but brutally so, who had major social anxiety and shook like they were suffering torture when called on in class. One Owen I knew was obsessed with Tenchi Muyo and spent lunches discussing entire episodes in lengths longer than the episodes ran. Another Owen I knew communicated with the world by downloading German music over Limewire and handing out CD-Rs to make friends. Actor Justice Smith perfectly embodied Owen’s weird hysterical whisper, slouching attempt to hide when they walked, desperate need to be seen and abject terror at being noticed.
I knew more “Maddies” than I can count and am, in fact, currently writing a script about a character that amalgamates a few of them. I even knew a Maddie called Maddie. Beyond fangirls, these were girls who lorded their show over reality because it’s where they found the strength to evade their abusive or alcoholic families, or live without them — one I knew got emancipated from her parents at the age of 16. And Bridgette Lundy-Paine deserves the Academy Award for their performance here. Maddie is the girl you know who will cut anyone weaker than them, but who you were more afraid you’d show up to school one day to learn had been killed.
I have a fear that I Saw the TV Glow is going to be terribly, miserably misunderstood by a large cohort of people who see it as another “A24 aesthetic” film that overcranks vibes and undercranks plot, and I’m miffed with A24 for calling it a horror movie, even though it speaks to existential horror. However, anyone who was Owen or Maddie or knew an Owen or Maddie or even had the mild curiosity of trying to talk to an Owen or Maddie in their high school won’t misunderstand this movie one bit. All you have to do is hear Owen’s monologue to Maddie on the bleachers, and you know what a rough journey you’re in for.
I didn’t even know Jane Schoenbrun was non-binary when I saw the movie, but of course it also follows: in some sense the most horrific part of I Saw the TV Glow is seeing it as a description of what it’s like if you don’t come out.
And that’s why I think these two movies are especially important for people to watch if they are not queer, because they’re extremely discerning and careful stories that use recognizable popular culture tropes to explain what it’s like, and they are effective if you choose to give them the time and consideration.
In that sense, though, both of them are somewhat hard to pitch. The People’s Joker is underground in aesthetic and its ‘parody’ appropriation of DC universe virtually guarantees it very limited release. In the olden days it would be a VHS at places like Kim’s Underground in NYC or Alphaville in Albuquerque, but would never get within 1000 feet of a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. Whatever that translates to in today’s global streaming environment, I don’t expect to see it on Netflix.1 Whereas I Saw the TV Glow seems almost custom-made out of the A24 elements that annoy normies the most, so it’s rough to ask them to look past the neon noir lighting and Millennial nostalgia, and see at heart these characters are awfully real.
The People’s Joker is an actually subversive film made in a time when A24 is offering pop “subversiveness”. I don’t find I Saw the TV Glow to be actually subversive. The reason why is Vera Drew is biting, or at least barking at, the hands that people assume should feed her, while Jane Schoenbrun is queering the popular YA parallel world format for a Zoomer audience that will probably support their work into the future.
However they follow a rich history of queer appropriation for the purposes of subversion. Pop culture has always been mined by queer artists for the purpose of signaling to each other and relating their experiences to the mainstream. I follow queer cinema for some of the same reasons I follow experimental cinema: because they take what you take for granted and twist it on you, forcing you to see other options and other methods of meaning making. They make you not take things for granted, and that usually comes at the risk of being criticized by people who demand story, narrative, film, artforms follow rigorous guidelines to reinforce majorian, mainstream modes of expression.2
The key underlying strengths of these two movies are what I ask movies be, when they are made in the first place:
Highly visual
Structurally inventive
Very personal
Painfully real
and only use pop culture, nostalgia, and familiar tropes against themselves to make something new.
See more of my movie recommendations here:
I mean I honestly am not an IP lawyer nor know a ton about distribution, but I’m just saying it doesn’t seem likely.
Not all queer cinema is subversive or transgressive, especially recently as the industry has opened up more to various types of creatives. It would be just as problematic to expect a queer movie to be radical as to demand it be a normal drama. But my point here is that people who have experienced mainstream culture in a way that doesn’t give them the comfort or familiarity it assumes (and often requires as a cost of social acceptance) have takeaways from it that they can reveal but twisting the mainstream cultural cues to be as discomfiting to mainstream audiences as it feels to themselves.