Written by Joyo Smit
Thumbnail and Header by Moreno Matković
A lot goes into telling a compelling story.
To produce a movie, there could be thousands of cast and crew members who work hard to bring the story to life. Didn’t matter if it was my dad, my siblings, or a drunken conversation in the bar afterwards, it just helped me hone in on how to see that, and thus, myself.
For example, if a writer sees that queer people have to come out, they conclude that the main struggle queer people have is wrestling with coming out to friends and family.
Queer creators like Schoenbrun do the reverse, creating media from an inside-out perspective. On January 11th of this year, I took my first estrogen injection and the fear hasn’t returned since.”
The more time that continues to pass and the more stories that I hear from others, including friends who have come to the film later and then sprinted out for tattoos that feel representative of their identity more than the film, the more I realize that we’re all navigating the same general issues just in vastly different ways.
And just being like, ‘I’m not going to be coy with you about this. And I’ll keep it real for a second: There is some overlap with the pain of dysphoria I feel and the pain of dysmorphia they experience. It’s one of the only moments the character finds ease. He says, “I was just in an interview with Jane where they talked about there’s a reason why transness is not more overt in the film because transness traditionally is represented as an external change.
“It’s almost like I create an idea of myself that can go out in the world and talk to you. “A lot of marginalized people growing up, we find ourselves in characters that aren’t actually us, but are us in some way. I was like Owen, knowing that there was something “inside of me” (however corny and reductive that might sound) that I was ignoring for the sake of being comfortably numb.
They joke that creating The Pink Opaque was essentially them just doing their own Buffy fan fiction, giving their 13-year-old self the gift of paying tribute to the show. Schoenbrun can’t fully answer that right now, but they want to create a space for it.