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“I Hope It’ll Be Comforting to Trans People, Because the Butterfly Narrative Leaves Out the Reality of the Experience”: I Saw the TV Glow Director Jane Schoenbrun Interviewed by Gregg Araki
I Saw the TV Glow “I often don’t remember my dreams, and so when I do, I’ve learned to listen to what my subconscious could be trying to tell me,” director Jane Schoenbrun told Filmmaker in the leadup to the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where their sophomore dramatic feature, I Saw the TV Glow, premiered to acclaim. That admission could be seen as something of a mission statement for Schoenbrun, one that might also have been made about their 2021 microbudget debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. In World’s Fair, a sinister online role-playing game haunts the internet, becoming a sort of roiling unconscious for a lonely teenager seeking both connection and construction of identity.
The ways in which popular culture can function as hiding place and catalyst, sending out private signals decoded by those whose loneliness and estrangement function as a kind of antennae, is a theme bridging the two films. But if in World’s Fair Schoenbrun combined their own adolescent memories of ambiguous encounters in AOL chatrooms with the new-era pulp of creepypasta storytelling, in TV Glow they scale up by recreating not grainy online videos but a ’90s network TV show, complete with surreal monsters of the week, and by working with an arresting name cast that includes Justice Smith and Danielle Deadwyler, cross-generational music names Phoebe Bridgers and Fred Durst and nonbinary actor Brigette Lundy-Paine, whose aching, committed performance grounds the film’s most out-there narrative inventions.
I Saw the TV Glow begins in 1996, with 12-year-old Owen (Ian Foreman), at home in the suburbs, lured by a commercial for a YA horror series, The Pink Opaque that, alas, airs past his bedtime. In The Pink Opaque (shades of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), each week two teens (Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) battle the minions of the moon-faced Mister Melancholy (the latter a shoutout to Georges Méliès, whose poetic early special effects work is paid homage to here, as well as to the 1995 Smashing Pumpkins’ double CD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness). Bonding with Maddy (Lundy-Paine), an older teen who’s a fan of the show, Owen sneaks away to her house at night to watch the program. But after a dramatically charged yet emotionally confusing late-night meetup on the high school football field, where Maddy futilely tries to get Owen (now played by Smith) to skip town with her to parts unknown, Maddy disappears and Owen is left adrift, haunted by the feeling that he’s living in the wrong storyline.
The film’s back half is a sensually disturbing fever dream full of arresting imagery—a flame-spewing ice-cream truck, teens buried alive in homemade graves and Owen in more idyllic moments—that speaks to Owen’s repression, confusion and liberatory potential. Stylistically, there are nods to Lynch and Cronenberg (particularly Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Videodrome, respectively), but with I Saw the TV Glow Schoenbrun finds allegiance with a diverse group of filmmakers—Tsai Ming-liang, Panos Cosmatos, and experimentalists like Michael Anderson—who reference not only specific media but the memories and emotional textures associated with the watching of that media. I Saw the TV Glow will surely be a similarly productive work for many of the viewers who discover it in the years to come, serving as well as a manifestation of the filmmaking advice Schoenbrun wrote in Filmmaker when authoring their online “Continue Watching” column, which was appropriately subtitled “Exploring how and why we watch.” In a piece titled “Art and Commerce Are Stuck in an Abusive Relationship,” Schoenbrun wrote, “The landscape is bleak. But even so, I reject the indoctrinating allure of nihilism, of quiet and unconscious defeat and surrender to the forces of capitalism, and I implore you to do the same. Each of us, no matter our exact role in this system, has the ability to impact culture. A lack of money, a lack of influence, even a lack of power: These are not the same things as actual powerlessness.”
To interview Schoenbrun, we asked another writer/director who has explored queer themes and teen inner life in irreverent and uncompromising ways: Gregg Araki. The director of such films as The Doom Generation, Nowhere and Mysterious Skin begins his conversation with Schoenbrun with this exact discussion about art and commerce before segueing into questions about scaling up in budget and crew, the art of VFX and Gen Z sexuality. (Note that this interview does contain spoilers of a sort, a section, clearly marked, where Schoenbrun discusses directly the film’s arrestingly ambiguous ending.)
Following screenings at Sundance, the Berlin International Film Festival and SXSW, I Saw the TV Glow will enter limited released from A24 on May 3 in New York and Los Angeles, with national expansion to follow on May 17.—Scott Macaulay
Araki: I want to start by saying congratulations because it was super cool to see something so visionary and experimental at Sundance. Sundance is always in that place of like, “Are they selling out? Is it all just commercial shit now?” The indie sphere is so fraught, and there’s such an identity crisis going on around what kind of movies get financed, what gets made, what gets distributed, what gets seen. So, it’s refreshing to see something like your movie getting so much attention. I’m curious about the genesis. Was it always intended to be an A24 movie?
Schoenbrun: I think I sort of pinpointed that “art and commerce” thing pretty early on. I worked at Filmmaker and in the independent film space for a while, starting around 2009, and saw so many filmmakers who wanted to be from the art side getting swallowed up by the beast, even after their first short film. You make a short, and the agents start calling you. I feel so oppositional to the beast, to the machine, but in America in 2024, I don’t think there’s such a thing as “completely DIY” unless you have tons of money you inherited from your CEO father.
Araki: I’ve always had a dream of having a benefactor, someone who’s like, “I love your movies, and I’ll finance them all until you die.”
Schoenbrun: I think I knew early on that completely saying “fuck you” to any industry path wasn’t a realistic way to exist as an artist, especially in film, because films are so expensive. My first film, which I purposefully made as cheap as humanly possible, still cost a lot. There had never been a fraction of that much money on the line [in my previous documentary projects].
Araki: Was World’s Fair self-financed?
Schoenbrun: No. I had worked a tech job and put in a little bit of money myself. But we got most of the money from an amazing company called Dweck Productions.
Araki: Can you say what the budget of that movie was?
Schoenbrun: We shot that movie for $100,000, then there was post-production, which was probably another $100,000.
Araki: That’s a lot.
Schoenbrun: That’s a lot?
Araki: My first two movies were $5,000. I financed them myself. Then The Living End and Totally Fucked Up were like, $20,000, $25,000. They were financed by grants and money we got from Marcus [Hu’s] mom [Evelyn Hu]. Both those movies were tiny. It wasn’t until I hit Doom Generation that I
actually got a crew, shot on 35mm. That was around $750,000.
Schoenbrun: I do think times have changed a little bit. With World’s Fair, I knew that I wanted to make something kind of off-the-grid, and the money all came essentially from one place. What that bought me was freedom. If it had gone through the traditional means of financing in America— where you take it to the agencies, and they package it for you, try to get actors from television— there’s no way they would have let me make the movie the way the movie ended up being made. I had watched so many filmmakers make a movie for $2 million, or $5 million, right out of the gate, then get the movie taken away from them in the edit or watered down from the very beginning in various ways. I knew that the only way I would be able to build any kind of sustainable reputation long term for making the kind of shit I think is cool and want to see is if the first one wasn’t a compromise. So, I made that movie, and it did better than I ever expected it to. I wrote the script for TV Glow while waiting to hear back from Sundance on World’s Fair.
Araki: You were like, “In case World’s Fair doesn’t get in, here’s the next one.”
Schoenbrun: I feel like I’m always trying to stave off the void. Anytime I’m just waiting for something, I, like, dissociate—even just waiting for TV Glow to premiere, I dissociated by working on new things. Making movies is weird because I’m so proud of them, and there are so many opportunities to celebrate them: the world premiere, the international premiere, the New York premiere. But I feel like the most peaceful part for me is writing them. The best part of making a movie, or the part where I feel actually able to celebrate it or be proud of it, is those moments when you see it as a beautiful thing slowly coming into the world. Once it’s done, I tend to sort of hide from it.
Araki: Once it’s done, you’re kind of over it. For me, personally, I’m really into the edit because that’s where it really comes to life. For me, writing’s always writing and rewriting and rewriting. The development phase is not real fun, but it’s obviously important.
Schoenbrun: I kind of love it. To me, the editing and the writing process are kind of similar in that they’re solitary.
Araki: That’s what I love. They’re pure creative, as opposed to production, which is a fucking army with people on walkie-talkies everywhere.
Schoenbrun: What I’ve learned about production is that you just become almost like a manager, or the head of the company, and half of your job is putting people at ease or making people be less pissed off. Production is so strange because all of a sudden you go from being this solitary artist to almost being in charge of an event that you’re putting on. I’m a big believer also that if the vibe is bad on set, the vibe is going to be bad onscreen. I think that I felt that more on my first film, when there were literally just 12 people there. On TV Glow, there were days when everyone was just exhausted and I was in a bad mood, and it didn’t really impact things because we were just doing exteriors of a house or something. But I do think for the soul of the movie, and for the moments when you’re trying to do something that’s alive, if the vibe is bad, or if you or the creative people aren’t tuned into it, that’s going to show.
Araki: I used to be kind of that way. Doom Generation was my first movie with a crew, the first movie with a DP and everything. And it was just so many people with walkie-talkies! I was so disenchanted with the whole thing. But with each subsequent movie, I’ve gotten more and more used to production. I actually like production now. And when you’re more established, the vibe on sets, for me at least, is usually really positive. Because I’ve always made these low-budget indie movies, the pay is shit, so people are there for the right reasons. They’re not there because it’s like, “Oh, I need a paycheck.” That’s always a good place to start, I think.
Schoenbrun: How do you feel you changed that from the time you walked on the set of Doom Generation? Was it about changing the infrastructure around you?
Araki: It’s growing up. I was not grown up. I was kind of an immature punk—more angry and less grateful. I was also coming from a place of just doing everything myself. The most crew on Totally Fucked Up and The Living End was three or five people. I was shooting, doing the art direction, doing the cut, producing. I was so used to doing everything that it was a relief, on the one hand, to have a DP who could worry about the focus and lighting. But at the same time, it was just like what you’re saying about managing so many people. And the walkie-talkies! It was like being in the army. “Show up at 0600!”
Schoenbrun: With World’s Fair, because we had, depending on the day, a seven to 10 person crew, we weren’t going to be able to get away with things that a larger infrastructure would have given us in terms of set design and scope, and I planned the movie that way. That nimbleness was something that I missed so much on TV Glow. On World’s Fair, Anna [Cobb], our actor, was doing tarot card readings for everyone one night, and I was like, “Let’s start the day tomorrow with you doing a tarot card reading for the camera,” and it’s maybe the best scene in the movie. That would have been unfathomable with the size and scope and crew that we had on TV Glow. It would kill me on set because there would be days when we would be out on a football field, and there’d be the most amazing sunset you’ve ever seen, and we would be stuck for 45 minutes setting up for a new take. We would have a crazy monster in a costume, and I could do an amazing shot, but you can’t do that when you have a 120 person crew. The machine doesn’t work that way.
Araki: You had 120 people on your set?
Schoenbrun: I don’t know the exact number, but there were a lot.
Araki: How many days did you shoot?
Schoenbrun: I think we ended up doing 27. It was scheduled for 26, then we added an extra day by the end.
Araki: What was your budget?
Schoenbrun: I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I believe it was a Tier One movie. [IATSE Tier One movies in 2022 were up to $7.5 million.] But even at that level, it’s still considered a low-budget movie.
Araki: My biggest movie was like $2 million, I think. Not counting Now Apocalypse, which was $1 million an episode, 10 episodes, and we shot the whole thing in 40 days. It was the gnarliest shoot I’ve ever been on because it was like making a five-hour movie.
Schoenbrun: I think the best compliment about the movie that I got from somebody during a test screening was a friend being like, “Oh, yeah, knowing you that is what you would spend about $10 million on!” I don’t think it was lost on me what that [budget] could buy me, and then also all of the dangers of stepping into that kind of space. When there’s that much money on the line, even just psychically there is a different attitude that you bring to it. Like, “I can’t mess this one up.”
Araki: Well, that’s one of the things about my movies—I like to work in this sphere where it’s less pressure. There’s less need to be more mainstream when the investment’s low.
Schoenbrun: On this one, my DP [Eric K. Yue] and I spent so long shot listing. We literally went to each location before production and photographed every single shot we were planning on. That kind of formalism, I feel like it’s half of the puzzle of a good movie to me.
Araki: That’s what I think I appreciate about the movie. I’m just not a big fan of random mumblecore movies. I like images that are cinematic—Hitchcockian and very controlled—where you feel like there’s a director and things are planned and shot and composed and the images are kind of beautiful.
Schoenbrun: Well, in a cool way, that’s what [a bigger] budget buys you, like the sets we built on this movie, and even just doing CGI with the VFX house and going back and forth for months to get these weird monsters just right.
Araki: The monsters look kind of lo-fi to me. It felt handmade, not slick.
Schoenbrun: The VFX people made the mistake of sending me early renderings of certain monsters where it was sort of early ’90s Lawnmower Man–quality CGI. When they showed me the final versions, which were like state-of-the-art Marvel-style CGI, I was like, “Bring it back to Lawnmower Man.”
Araki: One of the things I found kind of cool is that the VFX had that feeling of some guy running around in a papier-mâché mask. It didn’t feel super CGI to me.
Schoenbrun: The idea was that it’s a movie about memory and how it felt to be a kid in the ’90s up late watching these TV shows. If you actually go back and watch these TV shows, they’re made for nothing, and [the monster] is a dude in a silicone suit—not scary at all. But when you’re a kid, it takes on this whole proportion and mysticism. With everything in the movie, I was trying to toe the line between how it actually would have looked in that kind of early ’90s pastiche but also wanting to have the scope I remember those shows having as a kid.
Araki: Let’s talk about your cast. Justice [Smith] is somebody I’ve been following for a while. His performance was kind of amazing in the sense that he goes from 15 to, like, 50 years old. The movie starts and you have somebody else playing that character. He’s 28 in real life, so was it just too far of a stretch [for him to play a pre-teen]? Because he does stretch all the way to the top [age range], and those scenes are certainly very unnerving.
Schoenbrun: I wanted a different actor for the beginning of the film. But, yeah, the movie takes place in these different time periods. It does stretch around 40 years. It’s long, but it’s also kind of surreal. I didn’t need it to feel like a great American epic—that wasn’t necessarily the idea. But I think it’s trying to talk about the way that time can feel very strange, can just sort of drift, when you’re repressed and not coming out.
Araki: Yeah, well, the characters talk about it—“It’s just like time’s all fucked up.” I thought that worked super well.
Schoenbrun: Owen and Maddy are two grades apart at the beginning of the movie, and it’s like when you’re in seventh grade and you haven’t quite hit puberty yet and meet a ninth grader who you’ve got a crush on and it just feels like you’re generatons apart. I thought it was more fun to have that age difference be dramatic at the beginning of the movie, then to bring Justice in. Also, because it’s a movie about dysphoria, obviously—a movie about what happens between childhood and adolescence to a trans person—I wanted there to be a pronounced shift from the character when he’s a kid and is maybe able to inhabit his body in a way that’s un-gendered versus what happens just two years later after these changes start happening physically.
Araki: Is the rest of the cast because of A24? You have Danielle Deadwyler, and Fred Durst is kind of randomly there—he has like two lines. Then there’s Phoebe Bridgers.
Schoenbrun: No, it was pretty aggressively me. I was definitely a control freak with cast. On my first film, I worked with my casting director, Abby [Harri], and cast a lot of kids from the internet. I really like bringing in people who are spiritually or psychically connected to the movie in some way and playing with who they are to me and to the audience. On this movie, I knew I wanted a pop culture cast, a cast of people that were recognizable or, in the case of Fred Durst, iconic in a very specific way. It was a fun puzzle. You see the cast list and you’re like, “This is so weird and gnarly. Who would cast a movie this way?” But hopefully it all adds up to a specific kind of uncanniness and queerness, a universe that feels in line with what the movie is trying to talk about.
Araki: Music is clearly a big thing in your movies, as it is in mine. It’s funny, every review I read of your movie, nobody got The Pink Opaque. [The title of the program in I Saw the TV Glow comes from the title of a 1986 Cocteau Twins compilation album.]
Schoenbrun: [Laughs] But, of course, Gregg, you do.
Araki: Yeah, because in Doom Generation there’s that Cocteau Twins reference to [their single, “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops”]. Did you work with the same composer as World’s Fair?
Schoenbrun: Yeah, Alex G. In World’s Fair, the music was very “bookend-y.” That film is more naturalistic than TV Glow, and [the music] was almost like chapter headings. You’d be in a naturalistic world for a while and then his score would take over, whereas in TV Glow, the whole movie is filled with music, and it was just fun to push what we had done the first time into more ambitious directions. The score is super complex because he’s scoring a fake ’90s TV show, and then he’s scoring a real movie, then merging those two sounds together in psychotic ways. And at one point he’s scoring the background music of an arcade from hell. He’s so versatile. He can really do anything you ask as long as it’s fucked up and weird.
Araki: Were the source cues in the script or did they come after?
Schoenbrun: They came after, in the edit. I knew it was going to be a movie that was stuffed to the brim with music, like shows in the ’90s. And there were going to be moments where the movie did this thing that lots of movies in the ’90s used to do, which is give themselves over to an alt-rock song for two minutes. Again, this is the benefit of working with a studio and having resources. I said to A24 that I wanted to make the soundtrack for the TV show as the soundtrack for the movie, and they let me run wild and commission 16 original songs from artists who I curated, like a mixtape. I made each artist a mixtape on Spotify of songs I wanted them to listen to and think about. I’m a music nerd at heart but I don’t think I could ever be a musician, so movies for me become my way of writing [music].
Araki: I’m exactly like that. If I could play an instrument or sing I’d be in a band, but I can’t.
It’d be a lot easier!
Araki: For me, the music is there at the start. I listen to music all the time when I’m writing; it’s part of my creative process.
Schoenbrun: I remember seeing in the end credits of Doom Generation or Nowhere this note where you say something like, “Music is super important to me, and I just want to thank all the bands for being part of this.” I think for a lot of filmmakers, music comes last, and it’s almost like this afterthought, or chore. It’s like, bring the music supervisor or composer in and let them tell you how to do it. But, for me, even before I knew what this movie was about, I knew it was going to be a dream pop movie, or a shoegaze movie.
Araki: I have a question about sex and sexuality in the movie. It’s especially on my mind right now because I’m working on something that has to do with Gen Z and sexuality and the fact that Gen Z doesn’t have sex anymore; there’s a sort of asexual [thing] or just a general fear of sex. And I’m wondering if you might want to talk about that for a bit.
Schoenbrun: It’s funny, my next movie is all about sex—essentially a movie about learning to enjoy sex after transition. Pre-transition, it wasn’t that I was asexual—I had plenty of desire—but having good sex in the wrong body was impossible. What was available was full dissociation, which is obviously a theme in the first two films. That line that Owen has on the bleachers where Maddy is like, “Do you like boys? Do you like girls?” And he’s like, “I think I like TV shows”—I mean, it’s fucked up, but what he’s saying, essentially, is “It’s not that I’m not attracted to boys or not attracted to girls, it’s that I literally can’t be present in this world because I’m not myself yet.” And he doesn’t know that. He’s trying to articulate something that he doesn’t really have the words for, which is what I’m trying to do when I write a movie. By the time I was making this movie, I had, very belatedly, what I think of as my teenage sexual awakening, which happened for me at 35 because that’s when it became available to me. And I think I knew that what I was talking about in both World’s Fair and this film was a kind of sexual frustration that doesn’t really have an outlet until you face something about yourself that the characters in those films aren’t ready to face.
So, the way sexuality comes out in the movie is in this really aggressive and frustrated articulation or just through roleplay, or through other fictional characters, or through interactions that you’re sexualizing because the actual sex act isn’t something that you’re emotionally capable of sexualizing, like the tattoo scene in TV Glow. But yeah, I mean, this is literally what my next movie is about, learning to enjoy sex.
Araki: That sounds commercial! [Laughs]. That’ll be $20 million!
Schoenbrun: Just a fun movie about learning how to overcome sexual trauma and stop dissociating during queer sex. I think that is what the kids are asking for these days!
Araki: Sex and sexuality has always been such a huge part of my identity as an artist and as a person, and there’s just this weird level of repression, discomfort, fear and sex negativity going on right now.
Schoenbrun: I don’t want to make sweeping statements about Gen Z—
Araki: Oh, go ahead!
Schoenbrun: OK, it’s not a coincidence that that’s happening, right? I’m far from the first to say this, I’m sure, but when you’re spending your youth on the internet, or when you’re spending your youth completely dissociated from your body and the implications of your body [pause] I think it’s not that that generation is less sexual, it’s just that the things that they—and we, because I group myself in here, too—learned to eroticize as we were coming into our sexual identities were not necessarily the same as what pre-internet [kids] or even what boomers were doing when they were 13 and having their first sexual encounters. World’s Fair, that’s a film about weird shit with sexual undertones that happened to me on the internet as a kid. So, [in I Saw the TV Glow] it’s like Owen has a sexual relationship with this TV show. That’s weird.
[Spoilers follow.]
Araki: When Owen is 40 or 50, he talks about his family, which I thought was weird. Like, wait, he has a family, he has a partner? What is that about?
Schoenbrun: I mean, I was married before I came out. The way that you can sleepwalk through your life and sort of fake it, that’s real.
Araki: So, he’s in some sort of family situation that’s just sort of a roleplay for him?
Schoenbrun: It’s also like time is speeding up in the reality he’s trapped inside. To me, the movie is not ambiguous in the way that, at the end of the movie, you’re presented with this question, is his reality real or was Maddy telling the truth when she told him that everything in his life was actually the fever dream of a dying TV character? To me, there’s no ambiguity there. He is absolutely in a grave somewhere far away, suffocating. And so, in a sense, the whole movie becomes like—
Araki: Wait, so you’re actually spoiling the end of your movie! That’s one of the things I loved about the film, that it is so ambiguous and ambivalent about what’s a dream and what’s real. To me, it’s all just like a feeling, you know what I mean? It reminded me a little bit of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, one of my favorite movies of all time—high school just soaked with fucking doom and dread. That’s why your ending to me is like, what’s happening? What’s real and what’s not real when Owen’s in the bathroom, that whole crazy part?
Schoenbrun: Everything hopefully speaks in an emotional, non-narrative register. But in terms of what the character has gone through at the end of the movie, those 20 years that have passed, it’s like Maddy says, “Time is passing and you might think it’s years, but it’s actually seconds.” It’s that. And that is kind of an absurd idea, but I think an idea and a feeling that pre-transition trans people who are just holding life in will recognize if they have felt it, you know?
Araki: You don’t think the Owen character will ever transition?
Schoenbrun: I feel cautiously optimistic for him. The metaphor in the movie is that he has to do this really unpleasant thing to become himself, right? Maddy comes back and essentially tells him, “You need to go through this thing that is horrible to be reborn.” This was a movie that I wrote in the first months of transition, which were hand in hand with my entire life blowing up—which is a thing about transition that I don’t think we like to talk about because trans people are so under siege that we have to make up these very simple narratives about how it’s the most beautiful thing, how we’ve always known we were girls and now we’re just becoming butterflies or whatever. But no, when you’re 30 and you stop being repressed and you realize that the life you’ve built for yourself is going to get completely fucking obliterated with no safety net below in pursuit of this thing that, at the time, feels as deranged as the idea that you might be a character in a TV show and that you could become that person—it’s like stimulation overload. Such an insane mix of terror, excitement, pride, fear, insecurity and doubt.
Araki: And dread.
Schoenbrun: Plenty of dread. But where the movie came from emotionally was trying to talk from right on the other side of that awakening about all of the things that led to it, you know? To me, the end of the movie, you don’t look in the mirror—like Owen does in the bathroom at the end of the movie—and see that you’re trans, then go like, “Oh, cool, now everything’s good.” You button up your shirt and go outside and say, “Sorry about existing,” and you take a little bit of time.
Araki: So, you see the last shot of the movie as somewhat optimistic, then?
Schoenbrun: I think so.
Araki: Really? OK. I didn’t read it that way.
Schoenbrun: It’s the same thing with World’s Fair, which was a movie that ended in a way that on the surface was optimistic, but actually to me, it’s like a completely bleak ending.
Araki: The ending of the movie felt very bleak to me. Part of it was that Justice’s performance was so unnerving.
Schoenbrun: It is, and I don’t mean to say that it’s not absolutely devastating. I’ve seen some people online describe the movie as sort of a Scared Straight for not transitioning, you know?
Araki: That’s a very interesting interpretation.
Schoenbrun: But I think that, at least to me, one of the points of the ending is showing the absurdism of this moment. It’s like this dude literally just cut himself open and saw that his insides were filled with TV static that the man in the moon put inside him to trick him into a life-in-a-hell dimension. And once he realizes that fact, his first instinct is just to go back out into his day job and start apologizing to people for acting a little weird? It’s completely absurd but hopefully gets something across about [what] Maddy says at the beginning of the movie: “Don’t apologize.” So many trans people I know have this instinct to apologize for our existence, right? We’re like, “Oh, so sorry that I am this disgusting—”
Araki: That’s why I found it quite bleak. It’s not like he turns into a butterfly and flies away.
Schoenbrun: But I think it’ll be comforting to trans people. I hope it’ll be comforting to trans people, because the butterfly narrative leaves out the reality of the experience, which is that you’ve just accumulated a life of trauma and now the job becomes “get over it.” I want to make movies about what happens next in transition, once you see yourself, or once you see the TV glow, or whatever. But this particular movie was written to capture that overwhelming dread and terror of first figuring out yourself. It would have been way too much to track the character beyond just the seeing of himself, which is a huge moment half a life in the making.
