Claw Machine — Sloppy Jane, Phoebe Bridgers

#365Songs: June 16th

I saw the TV glow, I
I’m in the eighth grade
Sending grown men grainy photos
Of my ribcage

Nostalgia is a funny thing, the way it takes you back to a place you don’t want to be, feeling things that aren’t quite true. I’m particularly sensitive to this phenomenon, a disorder triggered by smells, tastes, song, a blurring of colors on planes and trains and long drives. I travel to parts of my life that perhaps I haven’t quite processed yet, misremembering a past that doesn’t always add up. That’s the thing about memory, or mine at least: it’s unreliable, askew to reality, a way of scraping together a narrative that makes sense of how time passes and change alters us.

I just watched I Saw the TV Glow, a film that defies description. Like Stranger Things, the art direction and mood clearly conjure a specific place in time, a world built upon pop culture layers. The film is a trans allegory, but applies well to any queer journey, to anyone who has spent time questioning, reframing, or coming to terms with identity. When I look back at my own life, I’m never quite sure whose version I’m recalling: my younger self, my current self, or through someone else’s interpretation of who I pretended to be.

The film’s soundtrack is astounding, a celebration of ’90s Indie angst and emo music reinterpreted through a modern lens. I don’t think this is a spoiler, but warning nonetheless: there’s a David Lynch-inspired scene towards the film’s second half when performance artist / musician Haley Dahl (Sloppy Jane) dances and sings on a small stage in a dingy club as Phoebe Bridgers stands slouched, full blown shoegaze mode, playing guitar. The camera stays on them for a surprisingly long time before cutting away to the characters immersed in an intense, nostalgia-induced conversation. It’s right out of Twin Peaks, a standout song fueling a standout scene.

Haley Dahl said about the song, Claw Machine: “It’s about this deep, relentless longing that I felt as a teenager. I remember crying myself to sleep almost missing the future and feeling like I was in love with someone I didn’t even know existed. I knew that Jane wanted this moody teenage feeling in the film so I wrote from a time of having these abstract fantasies and having no agency. Phoebe and I were best friends in high school so it felt very celebratory and healing. We knew each other as fucked up teenagers and we got to write as adults with our shit a little more together. It was a real ‘we made it through it all’ feeling to record this together.”

My bedroom has no door, so
I can never close ‘em
I paint the ceiling black so I don’t notice
When my eyes are open
I paint the ceiling black so I don’t notice
When my eyes are open

I fell into a post-watch rabbit hole trying to wrap my head around the film. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and captivating — with some of the most beautiful visual energy I’ve seen in quite some time. I felt at home in these characters, their pain and retrospectives, the way as kids those of us who don’t quite fit the time and place hide within films and books in search of a place that understands us. The Guardian’s Veronica Esposito wrote: “Schoenbrun’s film is very much about what it’s like to be queer before you’re even in the closet. It’s when you know that you are different in some way, but haven’t yet figured out that maybe you have a different gender or sexuality than most people. This is a strange part of the journey, where you are gravitating toward an identity without entirely realizing it. Such a period was far lengthier and far more common before the internet and increased acceptance made queer identities more broadly legible. The 90s were probably the last time when so many young people sleep walked toward a queer identity, mysteriously attracted to any bits of pop culture that seemed to speak to that strange feeling of difference.”

And somewhere south of Tallahassee
A teenage boy with a summer job
He’s driving grown men around a golf course
He’s going home to a manicured lawn
And digging holes in his manicured lawn
I think I was born bored
I think I was born blue
I think I was born wanting more
I think I was born
Already missing you
Ooh
But my heart is like a claw machine
Its only function is to reach
It can’t hold on to anything
No, I can’t hold on to anything

I’ve read a lot of comparisons between I Saw the TV Glow and Donnie Darko, two films set in nondescript suburbs leaning heavily on music of the time to fuel its allegory and psychology. I grew up in a place like these suburbs, listening to music like that, as I tried on different masks, personalities, and identities within disparate social circles. As with the central characters in both films, I also have vivid memories of dissociative moments, when I couldn’t quite piece together the various parts of myself into one cohesive identity. NPR’s Reanna Cruz wrote a summation perfect for both the film, and the intensity of the personal experience: “I Saw the TV Glow is a singular film. It speaks directly to psychological horrors of the self, creating a hypothetical alternate universe where everything is the same, but you are faced with a deep, tacit unhappiness.”

And that gets us back to nostalgia, the ways in which we try so desperately to stitch together our lives with disparate details, both real and imagined. Like dropping the Claw Machine into a bin full of all your former identities, hoping desperately you snag the right one.

When my best friend started driving
We never went to class
The worst part of the car crash was
Talking to her dad
I said I wasn’t scared
But I was thinking it
You know it’s a mistake
When it’s me who was making it
It’s always the wrong thing
When it’s me who’s saying it

~

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