探索90年代跨性別青少年的隱私時刻與身份認同：《我看到了電視的光芒》影評

As a transgender teenager in the 1990s, I vividly remember the flickering light on the TV screen. Late at night, once everyone else in the house was asleep, I was able to have a degree of privacy, and it was the main time when I could access things that were somewhat similar to my real self.

觀看跨性別電影製片人簡·舍恩布倫 (Jane Schoenbrun) 的新片《我看到了電視的光芒》(I Saw the TV Glow)，讓我回到了人生的這段時期。如片名所示，美泉宮的電影講述的是小銀幕以及它對兩個90年代成長的酷兒青少年的生活意味著什麼。

早在我們現在所知的網路出現之前，早在有關跨性別者的存在和正常性的信息爆炸之前就已經存在了。幾年後，我才造訪一個連結跨性別社群成員的網站，十多年後，我甚至想像自己可以轉變並成為真正的自己。

那些年裡支撐著我的是我設法獲得的少數女性物品——出於某種當時我無法理解的原因，這些物品讓我感覺絕對正確——以及對我來說似乎有意義的深夜電視節目。我記得那些感覺最真實的節目往往涉及恐怖、極端和怪異——比如《地穴故事》、《外部極限》，以及PBS凌晨播出的奇怪電影。當我花時間感受女性化、反對家人的虐待以及始終存在的羞辱和懲罰的風險時，這些娛樂活動會在我黑暗的房間的背景中閃爍。

I Saw the Light of Television centers on Irving, a black boy just entering puberty, and the slightly older Maddie, who seems to be changing towards femininity and becomes a sort of mentor to Irving. Maddie mainly helps Irving smuggle in tapes of a strange television program called The Pink Opaque, which hypnotizes young people, though it doesn't seem to be a very good program and ostensibly has little to do with their reality.

The movie at the American Springs Palace is largely about what it's like to be the cool kid before you come out of the closet. It's when you know you're different in some way, but haven't yet realized that you may have a different gender or sexual orientation than most people. It's a strange part of the journey, being drawn to an identity without fully realizing it. It was a much longer and more common period before the advent of the internet, when increased acceptance made cooler identities clearer. The nineties may have been the last time that so many young people sleepwalked their way to cool kid status, mysteriously drawn to whatever pop culture seemed to express this strange sense of difference.

The impressive ability of Mizumiya to create movie-length metaphors allows the viewer to experience this feeling. The average metaphorizer creates ideas that might work at the 1:1 or 1:2 level; the very, very good metaphorizer might operate at the 1:10 or 1:20 level. Storytellers like Mizumiya completely break this ratio. They create metaphors of such complexity and dynamism that we can't map them from one conceptual realm to another. It's easy to say that Jane Scheinbren has created a movie about gender dysphoria, but trying to tell the story of how or why they work is beyond our ability to express in so many words.

Watching the flickering screen of I Saw the TV Glow at the American Springs Palace, trying to figure out how what I was watching was speaking to me, I believe I felt similar to how Irving and Maddie felt watching Pink Opaque, experiencing the show's hypnotic appeal to others. For the same reason, this movie allowed me to re-experience what it was like for me as a teenager to watch these shows in front of a glowing TV screen so many late nights, connecting with a femininity that was beyond my ability to comprehend.

I Saw the Light of Television is a heartfelt interpretation of the nostalgia genre that shows great compassion for the children who lived through it. It preserves their incomprehensible innocence and trauma with genuine care, as if attempting to give these children and so many others the empathy they should have been able to receive in those times. Its kindness is something I learned to give to a younger version of myself, who for years struggled with inner hatred and judgment that I had been taught to keep for myself and children like me. Watching it, I felt how small and confused Owen and Maddie were, and I wished they had something better than the TV show to guide them. I wish I had too.