The Great American Road Trip:
I can fall asleep within moments of sitting in the seat of a moving car. It makes me a terrible candidate for driving long distances. So, I remained in the passenger seat as my partner Billy did most (I promise I did some) of the driving from Iowa to Utah for their internship this summer. Still, I worked hard to keep my eyes open in observation. It was our first time seeing Nebraska and Wyoming, and we would spend a night in each on the way. We come from a notoriously isolated state; it takes seven hours just to leave our hometown in Florida. The possibility that within a few four, we could jump from Ames, Iowa to Omaha sends me reeling. On the drive, I stumbled across a viral tweet of someone surprised by where the NHL Florida Panthers are housed: Sunrise, Florida. How could it be so far from where all the “action” is? As if being perched directly across THE Sawgrass Mills Mall was not enough!
A born and raised Davie resident just a street away from Sunrise, I have always hated Sawgrass Mall. Maybe not always, but definitely as of late. It’s just massive, and after the shutdown of the best theme park ever, Wannado City, which you could access from inside the mall, what’s the point? My Instagram algorithm recently cracked my residence, and I got a “pov: you grew up in 2000’s South Florida” slideshow. In addition to photos of Wannado City, photos of the exterior area of Sawgrass Mall (a.k.a. the Oasis) from that era were featured. I was stunned. I had forgotten this decor existed. Multicolored titles formed a curved sitting spot, twirling into a blue and yellow striped pillar, then into a roof you would not dare see in any elegant shopping area today. It’s remarkable. Where has all the personality gone?
One of the worst things about having the eyes of a Floridian is that when you begin to drive in areas that have a different topography, in which the land seems to breathe upward and back down again, it takes a while to adjust. You physically can’t fathom how these hills are not made of trash. That the parks are not just guilty resolve to offer back up some land when the surrounding ground is garbage. The next worst thing is how woefully unprepared you are the moment you step out of the safety of your car and have to deal with elevation. Gasping for air after just a few steps because your ankles, calves, chest, and lungs have never moved in these ways before. Because your home actively denied you access to this sensation. You become so much more aware of your body and how it cries. It is the summertime, after all.
Consuming Media in a State You Don’t Live in, Yet:
“Back before my body became my own, I had always hated the summer, the way the heat and humidity could only serve as a constant reminder about the physicality I avoided like a stressful email I didn’t want to read.”
Director of I Saw the T.V. Glow, Jane Schoenbrun for A24
Sundance took my ticket away for I Saw the T.V. Glow. An accident or glitch they had to rectify, I guess. So, during my seven-day stay in Iowa before the road trip began, Billy and I drove to Des Moines to see it at a theater I had yet to visit but follow closely on Instagram. It’s an intimate theater, and there were only four other people there. I was seated in the middle. I described the feeling in my Letterboxd review. Of feeling both very close and alone with the screen, but also hyperaware that the tight quarters meant every move I made would be noticeable. Both my partner and I left the theater in a wretched place.
I’ve always loved party hats. I think they are awesome. I may even get one tattooed. That one of the final, most heartbreaking sequences in I Saw the T.V. Glow occurs on a birthday, everyone dawning the weightlessness of a party hat on their head while Owen screeches in agony at the dense burden of mortality and queerness, continues to itch in my brain. Seeing this film before a road trip that signaled the beginning of summer made me keenly aware of everything around me and within me. When I read the above quote in director Schoenbrun’s words on the film for A24’s newsletter, I blinked rapidly in nonbinary recognition. Every day feels like summer in South Florida. Every day, I have to tuck paper towels under breasts I wish I didn’t have to pick up the sweat that prickles within moments of being outside. I have always felt the best in more androgynous clothing, especially ones with sleeves. I love to hide my body under sartorial safety, and living in Florida makes that impossible. It’s one of the reasons I brush off other people’s warnings of my moving to a colder climate. I crave it. I love the sun yes, but I hate not being able to wear what I feel best in.
The imagery of I Saw the T.V. Glow radiates within me, forming a thin pink veil over everything I see now. The nostalgia and sadness as the world outgrows the colors, places, and media you found beautiful, trying to drag you along with it. In an interview with Little White Lies, Schoenbrun said,
“I think of film as a medium that is going to disappear eventually; after 90 minutes, those characters you’re communing with are going to vanish from reality. I want to make work that’s actively engaged with the ephemeral space between unreality and the feeling that something is real because when we watch a movie, we’re entering a space where reality begins to untether, in some way.”
Wannado City was a place where children could play make-believe with different careers. I still have a video from when I did the fashion show experience, walking down the runway and hiding my face behind the hot pink gloves they dressed me in because I was too nervous to be seen. Schoenbrun talks about the idea of role-play in their films, in how their characters interact with the television screen. For a South Floridian’s childhood role-play to then disappear and be taken away from them, and any other children who come after, is a somber symptom of time passing. “There is still time” independently, but externally; time will happen to you.
I am reminded of the disappearing exterior facade of the Oasis. The comedic irony of destabilizing someone’s childhood and thrusting the discomfort of nostalgia on an adult by changing what they grew up with. The outlandish font choice and pigment placements that only vaguely remain in the movie theater you can sort of spot in picture 2. A cinema I admire because it was one of the few nearby theaters that played more independent films. But, it was no Cinemark 24. This theater was actually recently recognized by A24 in their zine “Dream Theater: An Ode to the Multiplex.” The only time I’ve given A24 money for something other than a movie ticket was when they dropped their mugs, and I got Billy the one for Eighth Grade. A day after I purchased this zine, A24 used an AI poster for Civil War. I hate it here. Check out Yhara Zayd’s video on A24. This zine celebrates the bright and gaudy interiors and exteriors of cinemas, one of my favorite sights. Turning the page and seeing my home city and childhood theater was unexpected. I had my birthday party there once. I loved going to Cinemark as a kid because it felt like its own amusem*nt park. I enjoy going there now; their wider selection of independent films is still satisfying. They’ve even renovated the seats to recline! But the Egyptian facade is cracking, and I always wonder if they are just waiting for something to fall apart so they can completely revamp the whole thing to be more modern. On the other hand, the Regal at Sawgrass has completely fallen by the wayside. The carpet smells, the chairs squeak, and they reflect stains too heavy to remain hidden any longer. It feels lifeless. Back in Orlando, I loved our Regal cinema. I even took my grad pictures there. I miss it a lot.
Sometimes, when I walk past the concession stands at the cinema, not the main ones but the midway ones that are consistently shrouded in darkness because they’re either hidden behind a rope or a cardboard cut-out of the upcoming release, I feel sad. I respect their convenience, so you don’t have to trudge back to the front and wait in a longer line. That is a perfectly great reason to maintain them! But maybe business is not busy enough anymore, maybe they don’t want to pay more employees, maybe they don’t care to keep the magic proliferating through the hallways. Like everything else, these halfway concessions have disappeared. What will disappear next?
My gender expression is best understood to me through the images of lost aesthetics. Most particularly, the 80s with its shoulder pads and puffy sleeves, but also through these theaters and their dazzling carpets and neon signage of the 90s and 2000s. It’s the androgyny and fluidity found in media from this time, especially in synthpop music, that helped me identify as nonbinary and find freedom in my gender. Yet, I Saw the T.V. Glow employs this melancholic, forgotten aesthetic as a vessel for its queer characters, not a solution. Interacting with this media and imagery can be a gateway to truth, but its allure can also be a suppressant. When the narrative reckons with this, showing how The Pink Opaque loses this quality as time passes and people age, it is deeply heartbreaking. Like a Floridian in a new state, Owens’ eyes feel programmed to look at the Other and see cheap trash.
I don’t live in Iowa yet. I’m not at home in my body yet, either. In this Des Moines theater, sitting with this film, I am left to think about my future. Both what I want from it and what I don’t.
The Sunshine Opaque
The final stop on our road trip was Provo, Utah. Once Billy and I arrived, we took a trip to Salt Lake to revisit some sights from our first trip to the state a few years back. One of these stops was the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. The first exhibition when you walk in was OUT LOAD 2024. GROWING PAINS. It featured the work of teenage artists “focusing on themes of nostalgia for their childhood experiences coupled with anticipation for the challenges that come with growing up queer in Utah” (exhibition statement). There were 19 works in the exhibit, and one that stuck out to me was a multimedia video collage titled Everything I Kept. It was displayed on an old Triniton television. The first thing my partner did was press their hand to it to feel the static. “Bet that’s something you haven’t felt in a while.” There was no artist statement featured in the program. Creator Stella lets the T.V. glow all on its own.
The first stop on our trip was in Kearney, Nebraska. As the sun began to set, dark clouds brushed in and quilted the whole city in a surreal daze. On our way to pick up some food, I saw the familiar facade of a googie theater. It harbored the same beauty of a film set, so cool it seems fake. On the way back, I asked if we could pull in so I could take a picture of it up close. The lot was empty. On the digital marquee, all it said was, “Thank you, Kearney, for 18 wonderful years. - Your K8 Family.” It had just shut its doors a week before. Back in the elevator at the hotel, dated by its square white buttons, there was a sign of must-sees in Kearney. The theater was one of them.
Lost media and the loss of establishments that house that media can, and in I Saw the T.V. Glow do, echo the loss of our own identities. The film reminds us that though observing these texts and locations and feeling close to them is valuable, abandoning them, turning away from them, or worse, refusing to take up queer space within them is what leaves us hollow. Hiding within the areas in which we spent our childhood is not the same as finding sanctuary, but instead, self-inflicting stagnation. Owen is not making peace with who he is; but rather making himself small in places that render him powerless— a child.
As far as I know, this will be my last summer as a Florida resident. I’m scared of what will change while I’m gone. When I first moved away for school, my nearby shopping plaza, originally tinted orange and brown, was repainted a soulless white and gray. In the way that Maddy returns to rescue Owen, I want don't want to flee South Florida and see gray in my wake. Solace should be transparent and accessible to everyone, even in places we are reluctant to call home forever.But, that doesn't mean everything should stay the same. If it is going to change, it should be for the better, for the color. Only then is there a chance to find a brief oasis amidst the sprawl.
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