Metro Weekly magazine: 2019-01-10 edition (PDF)
By Metro Weekly Contributor
on
January 11, 2019
A New Jersey school district has agreed to pay $950,000 to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the mother of a transgender student who died by suicide after allegedly enduring years of bullying and harassment.
Danielle Warshefski will receive $603,664.78, while the law firm that represented her will receive the remainder to cover legal costs and attorneys' fees.
According to the lawsuit, Warshefski's son, Myles Fitzpatrick, came out as transgender in December 2020, while Manville High School was holding classes virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lilly Wachowski is trying to get her latest project, The Hunted, into production. But the acclaimed filmmaker says no one in Hollywood wants to finance the film because of its all-trans cast.
"People like it, but they really don't want to make it because it's wall-to-wall trans cast," Wachowski, who came out as transgender in 2016, told KCRW's The Business podcast earlier this month. "I have to get creative and figure out different ways that I can get this in front of people."
Jane Schoenbrun makes movies for the weirdos for whom movies are realer than real life. In their films, old films and TV shows are portals to another world, vehicles of escape for characters whose own lives are weighted down by alienation and dysphoria. In 2024's extraordinarily haunting I Saw the TV Glow, two such characters find solace in a '90s TV show called The Pink Opaque, whose nightmarish visions, filmed with campy zeal by Schoenbrun, cross over and become realer than the empty contours of their unfulfilled lives.
The filmmaker is deeply attuned to the way pop-culture obsessions can both alleviate and intensify loneliness. It almost feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy; you can easily imagine Schoenbrun's own films, beginning with 2022's eerie We're All Going to the World's Fair, serving this role, being treasured and passed around by alienated youth the way previous generations latched onto Donnie Darko or The Nightmare Before Christmas. Loneliness seeps through the pores of Schoenbrun's cinema, but so does the possibility of queer connection and self-actualization.
