‘I Saw the TV Glow’ haunted me
Nostalgia and isolation fuel horror-drama.
Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a masterpiece of atmosphere. An aching mix of horror, fantasy and psychological drama, it examines nostalgia, isolation, loneliness and identity with rawness and compassion. It’s deeply scary, but not because of gore or visceral terror. Rather, it haunts, seeping into the bones. It unsettled me in a way few films have.
The movie takes place over several time periods, following Owen (Justice Smith), who we meet as a seventh grader. He’s at the local high school with his mom in 1996, who is casting her vote for “the saxophone player.” While she chats with some staff, he encounters Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who is sitting alone in the gymnasium reading an episode guide for a TV show called The Pink Opaque. It’s this program – a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-inspired horror drama airing on a Nickelodeon-type station – that will bind Owen and Maddy and serve as a source of obsession, connection, transformation and possibly madness.
When he meets Maddy, Owen has never seen The Pink Opaque, although we’ve seen him watch commercials for it. He concocts a lie that he’s staying at a friend’s house so that he can instead watch the show with Maddy and her friend. Although he’s too shy to initiate an ongoing friendship, Owen is taken with the show, and Maddy knows. She leaves him videotapes of past episodes and notes about the mythology. Two years later, he works up the nerve to stay over again. Shortly after that, The Pink Opaque is canceled and Maddy has disappeared. When she shows up again eight years later, has she lost her mind or does she hold a secret about Owen’s reality?
A melancholy mood
This makes the film sound more straightforward than it actually is. Schoenbrun, in their follow-up to Let’s All Go to the World’s Fair (which I have not seen) is more interested in mood than plot. They recapture a very specific period of growing up, in which parents were distant and connection was found with friends by the flickering of a TV screen. The atmosphere carries a weight of sadness and loneliness; no more than two characters are usually onscreen at a time, usually in rooms engulfed in shadow and lit by weak fluorescent lights. Even the local supermarket is empty and dark, but there are signifiers of something perhaps otherworldly that shine in the darkness using black light and fluorescent colors. I need another viewing to luxuriate in the visuals, but certain moments stand out. An ice cream truck on a deserted street. A TV set in flames. Chalk drawings that say “There is still time.” This is all backed up with a soundtrack that compliments the loneliness, confusion and anxiety roiling under its protagonists’ skin, including two musical interludes set at a bar that speak for what the characters cannot put into words.
Justice Smith is a revelation. As someone who suffers from fairly strong social anxiety, I recognized the severe weight he carries into every interaction. Owen is closed off to the point of collapse; his voice sounds like he could crumble with the slightest breeze. But Owen’s not just isolated from others; he’s afraid of what he might find if he digs into his own self. When asked about his sexuality, he first says “I think I like TV shows” as a defense and an explanation. When he digs further, he says that his insides feel like they’ve been replaced with stuffing, and that he hasn’t asked himself many more questions; he’s afraid of what he might find and what it might mean.
The film heavily implies that Owen is genderqueer, and I Saw the TV Glow has resonated strongly with the trans community. I think their reads are probably the most helpful way of looking at the film and unlocking its mysteries. It’s definitely part of the film’s text. Owen flashes back to (hallucinates?) memories of him wearing a dress while he and Maddy watch the show. His father (Fred Durst – yes, that Fred Durst) scoffs at Owen’s request to watch The Pink Opaque because it’s a show “for girls.” As a cis straight male, I’m not the right person to be wading into that read, but I will say that Emily St. James’ writing about it was quite powerful, and I’m glad to see so many in that community have a film speaking so strongly to them.
But Schoenbrun doesn’t make this a simple 1:1 allegory. There is so much on this movie’s mind. Most prominently is what it says about our attachment to pop culture and the nostalgia that can prove to be a dangerous obsession in our older years. For Owen and Maddy, The Pink Opaque feels more real than their traditional suburban lives. It becomes an obsession that haunts Maddy and, based on your reading of the film, has tragic consequences. If Smith excels at creating a character about to collapse in on himself, Brigette Lundy-Paine commands attention as Maddy, wrestling with her own sexuality and a home life she only wants to escape. Lundy-Paine is magnetic. They play Maddy with a chip on their shoulder, but then capture a manic liveliness as she details to Owen her beliefs about their reality.
Different readings
It’s here that I want to venture into spoilers, because I think what makes the film most fascinating is how different threads of what happens can affect our reading of the movie and its themes. These two takes on the film’s world have stuck with me all week. I’ll try to be vague – if you’ve seen the film, you’ll know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, I’ll leave the details for you to discover.
Suffice to say that when Maddy finds Owen, he’s not in a much better place than he was in high school. He works for a bit at a movie theater and a fun center, but he’s still withdrawn. Maddy returns with news that sounds like the ravings of someone who is mentally unstable. Her obsession with The Pink Opaque has consumed her life, to the point where it has warped her view of what’s real and what’s fake. Rather than face her own fears and trauma, she runs away and harbors a delusion that eventually leads to tragedy.
To read that film as a story of nostalgia causing the characters to descend into madness and depression is the take I see many walking away with. And it’s an especially timely theme. Generation X and Millennials were raised by pop culture. I was never a Buffy the Vampire Slayer viewer, but I did watch Are You Afraid of the Dark, which also is an influence here. I know what it means for TV to change your perspective on the world and break your reality open. On a much smaller scale, that’s what The Simpsons did for me in my cozy evangelical bubble, and as a teen and twentysomething, Friends shaped my view of how adult relationships should work. I never became obsessed (well, maybe with The Simpsons), but I definitely understand the feeling that our pop culture world might often feel more real than stultifying suburban life.
We’re the first generation that doesn’t have to give up our childhood playthings. We can replay our favorite shows – revisit our closest friends? – from any screen; we have our youth in the palm of our hands. Could we become so obsessed and closed off that it ruins our life? Owen and Maddy talk about days and years moving fast, and they use pop culture/screen-specific imagery – it’s like flipping past the chapters on a DVD menu, they say. Time in the film moves forward…sometimes a year…sometimes two…and then, without warning, longer than that. And Owen? He is still in his shell. It’s telling that he works at jobs that cater at providing entertainment distraction, particularly for youths. He’s stuck in a perpetual emotional adolescence, even as revisiting the show reveals that his memories don’t line up with its sillier reality. Schoenbrun uses deft body horror imagery to suggest that the pop culture has consumed him (an image involving Owen sticking his head into a TV is one of the most terrifying I’ve seen in a long time).
Or are they suggesting something else?
The thought that nostalgia has consumed Owen and Maddy is so depressing that it’s almost more hopeful to believe that Maddy is telling the truth and has learned a secret about the world that, to others, remains hidden. In another, more hopeful movie, it would be the moment where the hero throws off the shackles of conformity and embraces their truest self; all it needs is the moment where Morpheus talks to Neo about “the Real World.”
But perhaps the most unsettling and haunting interpretation of I Saw the TV Glow is that Owen is what happens when Neo takes the blue pill, too afraid to confront his deepest secrets and instead live out what society has deemed to be a respectable life. We see him in the future. He has a house and a job. He says he even has a family. But the film’s final passages suggest that he can’t bury the truth. Its last scenes have an existential horror that I can’t shake. Yes, some of it is due to very powerful body horror imagery. But overall, I’m shaken by the despair, numbness and resignation that coats every moment, of the thought that Owen will continually be running from his true self and constantly apologizing for being out of step with the rest of the world.
That’s a horrifying concept. Reading trans critics’ reviews, I understand how this film emotionally evokes the “egg crack” moment where individuals feel they need to make a change or they’ll suffocate. But Schoenbrun locates an emotional specificity. That feeling that the world we’re living in doesn’t fit our truest reality is nearly universal, as is the fear of taking risks to make those changes. Our youth is the best time to reckon with these feelings, but it’s also the worst. On one hand, it’s a terrifying and confusing time. On the other, it’s the only moment that allows us to embrace our identities and craft our reality. Later in life, as work, community and family commitments grow, the idea of blowing any of that up is too daunting to consider.
The emotional memories it brought up in me have much smaller stakes than it probably does for a trans individual. I thought about the close-knit, conservative Christian subculture in which I grew up, and the mounting realization in my twenties that while we shared a faith, I no longer comfortably belonged in that community. I had too much doubt about their locked-down theology. I disagreed with their politics and approach to gender roles. I wanted to pursue mystery, not fool myself into embracing their certainty. To realize it was okay to step away from many of the things that defined and knit together that community meant a great deal of discomfort and even conflict. It was worth it; my life is much more rewarding – especially spiritually – these days. But what if I had locked my doubts and discomforts deep inside? Would I be a miserable man attending buck dinners, demanding my wife submit and proof-checking every question against Calvin’s five points, ignoring the call that God might be more mysterious and unpredictable than my very specific niche of Christianity allowed? Again, much smaller stakes than others deal with; but it was where my mind took me when watching this.
I’ve seen some critics say that Schoenbrun’s movie is one of ideas that never takes a coherent stance on what it wants to say. I couldn’t disagree more. I think Schoenbrun knows what they want to convey and they do it so successfully that both readings of the film are completely valid. While I think the film might move too deliberately and be too inscrutable for some viewers, I simply can’t deny that it burrowed under my skin and lodged there for the better part of this week. I still don’t know that I fully understand all of what Schoenbrun is saying – and I ask for patience as I try to untangle a film that rightfully means so much to a demographic I am not a part of.
The mark of a great film is not that I understand it and not even that it’s particularly likable. It’s that I can’t stop thinking about it; and the more I think about it and discuss it, the more rewarding it becomes. I Saw the TV Glow is that film for me right now. It’s one of the year’s best movies.
I Saw the TV Glow is available to rent on digital.