I was pretty active on Letterboxd last year.
If you’re unfamiliar, Letterboxd is a social networking platform that allows people to rate, review, and catalog films. It pretty much functions exactly like Goodreads with a laughably bad search function to match.
When I was a more avid reader growing up, there was nothing more satisfying than slamming my latest book shut and immediately typing away on my Goodreads account to publish the most unfiltered, long-winded review.
A friend or two—someone I knew in real life or Tumblr—would like my update, prompting feelings of immense pride and accomplishment to rush in. I was doing a great service. I was a critic offering well-regarded opinions. People trusted my taste in storytelling, an honor and responsibility I did not take lightly.
When Goodreads rolled out its recommendation feature, I was emboldened to continue pushing my favorite books at the top of my friends’ feeds like an absolute menace.
Now I slip my one-sentence, tongue-in-cheek, anonymous Letterboxd reviews in quick, smooth, easy conversations in person or via text. My comments are just as unsolicited, but the validation I get from making myself chuckle alone is enough of a reason for me to keep doing it.
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I watched Jane Schoenbrun’s A24-distributed film I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and finished New York Times bestseller The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020) in tandem.
On the surface, both stories are pretty different. If they were the same medium, they wouldn’t be in the same genre section in Barnes & Noble or Netflix. Their intended audiences seem far apart as we follow a 35-year-old British woman in present day in The Midnight Library and two queer pubescents in American suburbia in the late 90s to early 2000’s in I Saw the TV Glow.
Still, I came away from each story equal parts comforted and disturbed by the shared antagonistic passage of time, the mess of people and remnants of wasted potential lost or left behind, the fatigue of existence and repression in a stagnant world, and the life-saving, persisting art that emerges as a constant opposition for stragglers to build identities, homes, and whole communities around.
In The Midnight Library, Nora’s lifeline is the musings of old male philosophers and in I Saw the TV Glow, Owen and Maddy bond over a campy young adult show called The Pink Opaque.
Despite their respective outlets, we witness the nightmares of Nora and Owen actualize in real time: a dead-end, unfulfilled life haunted by what-ifs.
Nora’s what-ifs are a wide range of unrelated choices and passions. Owen dismisses and runs from gender dysphoria, or as it manifests in the film: the possibility that they are an unconscious Isabel, one of the two main characters in The Pink Opaque.
Nora lives out variations of her life through the purgatorial Midnight Library, each book a gateway to an alternate life she could have led. The Pink Opaque starts to bleed into Owen’s reality, but the harder they push this world away, the faster time skips ahead, leaving them with no memories of the past few years-turned-decades as they become more shell than human.
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The metaphors these stories employ to make their points can be heavy-handed and blinding. (Though personally I enjoyed watching I Saw the TV Glow more than I did reading The Midnight Library.)
I’m aware this is a common crisis among 20-somethings and that other stories have dealt with disassociating from a life passing you by.
When I reminisce and look back on my life (as it’s beginning, thank you), my brain naturally visualizes my Goodreads account, specifically the annual reading challenges and year-end summaries in books.
I can pick out a book and recall not only the year I read it in, but also the state of mind and circumstances I was in while reading.
If I go through my old rambling Goodreads reviews, skimming through the noticeable lack of punctuation and capitalization in some, and the ecstatic overuse in others, I can focus on the personal tidbits younger me threw in between the lines…as breadcrumbs, almost, leading to…I have no idea where exactly.
I can view my degression as an avid reader laid bare on screen. In 2015 and 2016, I read 53 books each year. In 2022 and 2023, I read a whopping total of 9 and 8.
Eleven months into 2024, I read 4 books including The Midnight Library and two of which being a manga volume and poetry collection. On the flip side, I logged 40 films in my Letterboxd diary.
One way or another, I’m getting my necessary fix of stories. As someone who has had difficulty being in touch with recognizing and feeling what’s real, media in its many forms has shaped and been shaped by how I’ve made sense of my life in that moment in time.
With an amorphous blob of a personality throughout my teenage years, using my favorite books, shows, movies, and music as an escape and front was always an intentional choice to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths.
Over time, I absorbed the stories so that they became a part of me, so that I was unrecognizable without them.
There are two aphorisms both The Midnight Library and I Saw the TV Glow really hinge upon. Without them, there is no purpose to either story.
Matt Haig writes “three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse.”
I AM ALIVE.
Jane Schoenbrun lingers on a shot of a street covered in chalk doodles and squiggles, framing a clear message.
there is still time
I want the stories I consume to be an extension of who I am, rather than define and form my entire being.
I’m working on talking more about the experiences I’ve lived and not only the ones I’ve lived vicariously through fictional characters.
In separate discussions about I Saw the TV Glow and The Midnight Library, two friends asked if I had any regrets.
I said I didn’t, I’m too young, but I also don’t know that I’ve made decisions big enough to live out their effects. Or perhaps therein lies the regret: the absence of risk.
The voice that narrates in my head sighs and tells me to keep going.
