it's definitely also out wherever you get movies illicitly, so you can watch it for free wherever you are. now there's no excuse not to watch it, for all the reasons i laid out in this post. great movie about drowning in dysphoria and suffocating in the closet
link
Nice; sounds about right. I only brought it up because it's something I haven't seen mentioned in the other threads about the film -- I read a lot of overlap between dysphoric malaise and autistic burnout with the way that Smith plays the character, at least in the first third or so of the movie, which is appropriate because of how many of us (myself included) are ND and, in a lot of cases, on the spectrum. I also posted that comment like 10 minutes before the dysphoria narrative went from "vague symbolism" to "blatantly obvious."
I can confirm, though: if you just got out of the spiral of loneliness, depression, and denial, it is a hard fucking watch. 8 hours later, and quite honestly, I still feel enraged by it.
mild spoilers?
I keep wanting to throw around phrases like "the Charlie Brown of gender questioners" or "what if Neo took the blue pill in The Matrix" or "what if Atreyu/Bastian just rolled over and let the Nothing destroy any and all semblance of hope" or "House of 1,000 Corpses-ass ending, but psychological."
And I'm enraged by the notion that it's too late to burn away the facade and be true to yourself once you're in your early 40s because fuck you, life isn't over yet and you know it -- stand up and fight, or you will die a hollowed-out husk. The writer/director knows this, and decided to go the [psychological] "torture porn" route with it.
I just watched it and it was pretty shocking how accurate the metaphor was. Im so far past a lot of my transition that it honestly made me angry. Like I was telling a past version of myself to wake the fuck up
I also definitely got the vibe the main character had something else going on too, autistic or pseudo autistic due to dysphoria and repressing the "real self".
spoiler
i really don't think the movie thinks your 40s are too late. the message of the film is "there is still time", and though the ending is depressing, the main character has opened themselves up and recognized who they are and finally taken the first step to understanding what's going on inside. not to say your read is necessarily wrong, if that's what you got out of it then that's fair and i'm not trying to convince you otherwise. but i read it as saying "there is always still time" not "there is still time right now while you're 25, but in a decade it'll be too late"
CW: Suicidal ideation
So, the part that really resonated for me was when Owen just whips out a box cutter and starts hacking open their own chest. Taken literally, it's a very "start living or die trying" kind of scene. I went through something similar on my own journey, and at about that same age.
I made myself very sick while dabbling with an overly risky form of DIY HRT after having decided that I would rather accept the risk of dying from liver failure than continue existing as someone I'm not. I had struggled with suicidal thoughts since I was 8 years old, and those first few weeks on shitty phytoestrogen and herbal T-blockers and liver enzyme suppressants and so forth were the first time I didn't feel that way. I saw myself in the mirror and for the first time in literal decades, I felt more intrigued than repulsed, as if something in my brain had just clicked into place.
I did end up stopping that HRT "program" after less than three months because I kept getting intense migraines and I was always sick to my stomach from the amount of stuff I was taking, but it ended up being a wake-up call. Let's just say that I felt like a complete ass when someone over here linked the DIY HRT wiki and I realized that all of that risk was unnecessary.
I guess it's not as dramatic as self-surgery with a box cutter, but what is?