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koberulz.bsky.social · @koberulz.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated We're All Going to the World's Fair 7/10

I concluded in my review of I Saw the TV Glow that I was simply not trans enough to connect with the trans themes everyone else was seeing, even though I did connect to the film in other ways. Interestingly, this isn't really being portrayed as much of a trans-coded work—the Criterion Channel synopsis describes it simply as being about the effects of the internet and of online communities—but I saw more of that reading here than I did in Schoenbrun's later film. Casey (Anna Cobb, Bones and All) decides to partake in some sort of internet meme game/challenge that's supposed to transport the participant essentially into a horror movie. She watches videos of other participants going through all manner of body horror transformations, and at one point expresses disappointment that the changes she's experienced have been minor. It did read to me as analogous in its way to someone undergoing a gender transition but not being able to offload enough of their past to feel like it was taking hold. Indeed, I've heard accounts from trans people saying they didn't believe their transition had achieved anything until they met people who had never known them pre-transition, and it feels like that's connected to Casey's disappointment in the fact that her skin hasn't turned to plastic, unwanted as that transformation may seem. I feel like this may have got people offside from the jump purely through its framing of Casey's desire to live in a horror movie—I don't care much for horror as a genre but even if I did I can't imagine actually wanting my life to resemble one, frankly—and the concomitant use of horror tropes to express what she expects her life to become as a result of joining the game. It seems to have led people to expect a horror film and judge it on that basis, when this is really more a coming-of-age tale in the mould of, as several others have pointed out, Eighth Grade. Both share the element of a lonely young girl seeking connection through YouTube (or not-YouTube-for-legal-reasons, as it were), with little success. The biggest difference is their attitudes towards it: where Eighth Grade's Kayla is almost obnoxiously upbeat and chipper—even if it's clearly a front—Casey is clearly content to sink into a loneliness and let that define her online persona, even as she farms that loneliness for attention, sympathy, and comfort.

#movie

Published 2026-07-02 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere