"...it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all of my insides and I know there’s nothing in there but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check. I know there’s something wrong with me."
I have an impossible number of things to say about this movie. Some are things I hesitate to share because of "spoiler etiquette," out of fear of ruining the mystery and the surprise. But others aren't that. Too many thoughts I have about this movie are deeply personal, thoughts that I keep inside and hide from all but a chosen few.
This movie made me feel raw and seen in a way that I didn't think was possible. Sure I felt seen when I watched The Peoples' Joker, but even a deeply personal piece like that only saw part of me. This saw all of me--my gender identity, my trauma, my sexuality, my Autism, my plurality--and shook me to my damn core. I don't know if I can say everything that I need to, and I don't know how much of what I have to say is actually based on authorial intent or if it's based on how I personally received the piece.
Regardless, know that there are things I'm leaving unsaid here. I fear that if I say them I will be left alone, ostracized, wandering through a crowded room and apologizing to people while I slowly die.
"If I don't think about it it's not real."
Being transgender isn't a choice, but transitioning is. The vast majority of trans people remember when we made that choice. I remember exactly where I was when I made that choice and the circumstances that led me to that place. I remember why I made that choice, and I remember what I believed would have happened if I hadn't. I remember the smell of the air, the cool breeze on my skin, the words I said to no one in particular.
This movie is, in part, about that choice. But it's not about the choice itself--it's about the raw terror that comes in making it. It's about the torment of the soul, the unmaking of your identity, the questioning of everything you are and everything you could be. It is so deeply effective at portraying that fear that I felt nauseous after the movie was over.
And, worse, it's about what happens if you don't make that choice. It's about what happens when that choice is robbed from you by those who seek to do you harm. It's about your true self being buried under the ground while you pretend to not suffocate under the dirt.
"Do you ever get confused? Like maybe the memory’s not quite right? Like time isn’t moving the right way? Like it’s all out of whack?”
When your life doesn't feel like yours, and when you're abused by the people you should be able to trust, it can be easier to believe in what you see on the other side of the screen. Reality is less clean.
In The Pink Opaque, time is delivered in neat half hour chunks each week, Saturdays at 10:30 PM. Time outside of that jumps rapidly, outside of your control. One minute it's 1996, then it's 1998, then it's 8 years later, and then 20 more. But the other side of the screen is constant, and that reality feels more tangible than your own. Of course you'd want to belong in it.
The suffocation metaphor is apt. When your life and your body and your sense of time feel like they're running away from you then how are you ever supposed to stop and breathe?
This movie plays with your sense of time in an incredibly effective way. It makes you feel the loss, the slippage of time, the sense of a life unlived pre-transition, while leaving you as a viewer with one core message to take home, drawn on pavement with pink chalk: "There is still time."
In the film, that is Maddy's message to Owen. You can still escape, you can still leave. You will find your heart on the other side. You can breathe again. The heartbreak and the horror of this movie is intertwined with that hope--it is scary precisely because you know Owen deserves to make that choice, but can't.
"This isn't my home. You're not my father."
And then there's the other piece, the thing that's hard for me to say. The people that made you hurting you so deeply that it splits you apart. The weight and isolation of knowing your different, and wanting to find realities where you feel like you fit in. Stories winding their way into your head, into your heart, becoming who you are, a way to tell a story of you that makes far more sense then what is allegedly real. Hyperfixation and obsession turned to identity, identity fragmented by those who sought to shatter you like glass. Reflective shards that mirror the stories you escape, and the characters within them.
The gender identity lens is very obvious. Owen replacing himself in his own memories with Isabel, clothes changing in each recollection to match the self he sees on the other side. Maddy becoming less gender conforming as time moves on, detaching from who they were in the midnight realm to become someone else, someone truer.
But I can't help to see this movie as a reflection of my neurodivergence, of my reality as an Autistic person with a dissociative disorder. I have more Isabels than I can count. The want to be Isabel isn't just about gender, it's about wanting to live another life so bad that part of you is convinced that it is your life. Or, really, was.
I cannot describe the pain of missing a home that is impossible to touch. This movie gets close. I don't know if that's intentional, but in many ways I hope it is. I want to believe that The Pink Opaque is real, and that Isabel will find her heart again, because if that's possible then maybe it's possible for us to do the same, someday.
"I think that I like TV shows."
I'll close this out by talking about the movie itself, as a movie, because ultimately it is a movie and frankly it is everything that I go to the movies for. Seeing art like this surrounded by other people, taking in their reactions, sharing that experience, that's always been really important to me. That I got to see this movie in a historic theater surrounded by a sold out crowd of queer and trans folks bookended by an introduction from and interview with Jane Schoenbrun is absolutely an important part of why it hit this hard for me. Certainly it'd still have been a 5 star "oh my god holy shit" type movie divorced of that context, but I'm so grateful to have had such a special experience for this film.
Jane Schoenbrun is a generational talent. I have not seen We're All Going To The World's Fair but damn it if that's not the next movie I'm watching. Jane's singular vision for what queer horror can and should be is a gift, and that this is only their second movie (and this soon after publicly transitioning) is wild. The pacing, the creeping sense of dread, the performances that they've pulled out of these actors, it's all so perfect that it's hard for me to put to words. The subtle effects work and the way the movie uses aspect ratio and film grain is utterly insane and I desperately want Jane to play in the analogue space as much as possible.
Then there's the way Eric K. Yue elevates and compliments that vision with a complete mastery over color and light. There are multiple shots in this film that left me utterly breathless, that I want to snapshot and frame on my fucking wall. Characters bathed in flourescent light holding a slab of meat, or falling headlong into a glowing television screen. Long wandering hallways riddled with oppressive slogans. "Pain is just weakness leaving the body." The movie feels like it's depicting childhood memory with pinpoint accuracy while also including imagery that is utterly impossible to even imagine.
And let's go back to the performances a bit, because holy shit Justice Smith where did this even come from? This is the Detective Pikachu guy? The sad mage from Dungeons and Dragons? Like yeah I really like his work in those two movies but they're not this. A cis, presumably neurotypical actor who, in this, portrays the physical experience of being Autistic and of being pre-transition so well that it felt like a mirror.
And then Brigette Lundy-Paige delivering one of the best monologues I've seen in a very very very long time, becoming one of the few sources of truth and hope in the entire damn movie, breathlessly convincing you that what Maddy shares about Owen's reality is true.
Fred Durst dominating entire scenes without saying a thing, Danielle Deadwyler staring wordlessly at her child with an expression that tells you she knows something wrong but she can't even hope to describe what, Emma Portner's absolutely chilling voiceover work. Just fantastic fucking performances all around here.
Also the soundtrack fucks severely, and there are multiple scenes in this movie that are just straight up a 2 minute cut to a music video, and I think that's beautiful. More movies should do that.
Anyway, go see this. If the fact that I wrote a damn essay doesn't convince you this movie's good then I don't know what will.
