Full Review: I Saw the TV Glow
A beautiful treatise on hopefully overcoming the unknowability of self
What kind of person do we become when shaped by the warm glow of our childhood television sets? Cut off from outside feelings and realities, nestled into our own sliced-out corners of existence, populated with meaning through our own imagination and the radiant light of our parent’s TV. Not only do the shows and media of our youth shape us, but we in turn shape it. Anything that we may find funny, fantastical, or scary in our youth is often warped through the prismatic eyes of young people completely unfamiliar with the world at large. This personal kaleidoscope that shapes our perception of our targeted media makes each show, movie, book, etc belong to each of us in some way; either collectively or individually. But then, there’s what happens when you go back to revisit these childhood memories, what you might find waiting for you, and how it might make you feel when confronted with the way in which your own experiences are warped from your own perceptions.
Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore film, I Saw the TV Glow, follows this feeling, from inception to conclusion, but without the finality of a traditional ending. I Saw the TV Glow is something of a coming-of-age story, but one that takes years of time to get to the point. Schoenbrun’s story is both quest and question, albeit both dutifully concealed under uniquely seductive bits of nostalgia and survivalist repression. What Schoenbrun sees in television is all that we see in ourselves, both as a projection of our own psyche onto the awe-inspiring wonder of early-teen entertainment and its projection onto us.
In 1996, a bashful, budding 7th grader, Owen (played in his early years by a very poised Ian Foreman), goes with his mom to his school on a weekend so she can vote. There, he runs into a 9th grade girl, deeply crumpled over a mysterious book, seemingly by herself. The two make small talk while Owen’s mom mingles with some other upright citizens performing their civic duty. The girl, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), tells him about the show whose episode guide she is so profoundly hunched over reading, The Pink Opaque. The show is about two girls who meet at a summer camp and discover their true calling: to use their shared psychic connection to battle the monster-of-the-week sent down by the big bad, named Mr Melancholy. The Pink Opaque is something of a combination of Buffy, Goosebumps, and a touch of Twin Peaks; mysterious, eerie, geared towards young teens and taking itself immensely seriously.
Owen, who’s never seen the show due to it being on past his strict bedtime, goes over to Maddy’s house to watch it with her and her friend Amanda one night, sneaking out by lying to his parents about a sleepover at a sorta-friend’s house. The trio watch The Pink Opaque’s new episode together in Maddy’s basement, an intensely familiar space adorned with wood paneled walls, an old couch (likely having been replaced by whatever nicer couch is in the family room), a glowing fish tank, and an assortment of random furniture that didn’t quite find a place elsewhere in the home where it may be more prominently displayed. It’s a room where things go to hide, a small nook where everything can live peacefully out of sight.
The film makes excellent use of its lighting as a method of communicating its tonality and ideas. Not only does light literally allow us to see that which is in front of us (lame), but it also leaves a mark, affecting everything it touches with its essence. The white light of a grocery store’s fluorescent bulbs beat the color out of everything under its exposure; the mossy glow of the fish tank offers a lightly viridian hue to the surrounding walls; the harsh extremity of lurid neon completely coats an actor’s skin, making them look red or blue or pink; and the iridescent glimmer of the TV screen shimmers across the dark room that it sits in, enveloping an entire world in its luminance, imprinting it’s presence on everything it touches.
After watching that first episode with Maddy and Amanda, Owen is still unable to stay up late enough to watch the show on his own and can’t sneak out weekly to watch the show with the girls, so Maddy takes the initiative to start making him tapes of the show and leaving them for Owen in the school’s dark room. Through this silent exchange of VHS tapes and brief descriptions, the two begin to form a bond of friendship in one of its most intimate forms: media. What Schoenbrun highlights so well in this somewhat extended sequence which shows the various VHS notes that Maddy had left for Owen over the last year is how personal the resonance of media can be. It’s well-trodden territory how vulnerable it can be to exchange media with a potential crush or a friend. Anyone whose sent an album to a friend or recommended a show to a family member knows the gripping anticipation before finding out what they thought of it, and how crushing it can be if it turns out they didn’t like it. Disliking a piece of recommended media can feel like being rejected. If you view that record as an extension of you and your personality, then to have it rebuked in some way can feel like part of you is being dismissed or criticized, being made less than or small. It’s certainly normal to dislike things, even things that your friends and loved ones share with you, but those feelings still lurk there the closer those pieces of media are to your heart, and the closer the person critiquing it is.
When you’re young, though, it doesn’t matter how close or distant the person is with whom you’re sharing yourself, nor does it matter how close you are with the media—largely because all media you’ve affixed yourself to at those early ages is positively vital to your entire personality and integral to your very existence. Sometimes, that can come back to make you feel incredibly silly when you take the time to revisit something you’d loved so much early on in your formative years, finding it wildly distant from your memories as well as your current identity. It’s the darker side of nostalgia, the feeling that coming back to something that meant so much to you in the past can hurt you instead of providing a soothing reminiscence. That doesn’t mean that these things shouldn’t be reexamined in your adulthood; it just means you may need to be ready for what you find.
A couple of years later, Owen’s mother is terminally ill and Maddy has been ostracized by her classmates after Amanda spread a rumor about Maddy making advances on her. Maddy is gay, which she’s open about, but her sexuality has been weaponized against her, used as a point of shame by someone who knew her better than anyone. Owen (now being played by Justice Smith) goes back to her basement to watch another episode of The Pink Opaque, just the two of them. Just like the last time, Owen prepares to sleep on the floor of this foreign space and hears a faint creaking behind him. This is the degree to which I Saw the TV Glow uses however much ‘horror’ it wields. There are no scares, jump or otherwise, in the film. What there are, however, are moments that are unsettling. Small moments that are tactile, occasionally ethereal, but that use fear as a form of dramatic tension rather than an excuse to get a fleeting gasp from audiences. When the floor behind Owen, protected only by his meager sleeping bag, creaks and gives, you can feel him straining with fear and anticipation, which quickly gets dissipated by the reveal of the source being Maddy, pensively ruminating on the bleakness of her situation. She’s unhappy being in the cloistered depths of suburbia, having to bear what we are led to assume is an abusive home life. She needs out, and she wants Owen to go with her. Owen can’t go, he’s not ready for that yet. He’s not old enough, mature enough, angry enough, independent enough; it doesn’t matter why because he hasn’t taken the time to look into himself far enough to find out. All he knows is that it isn’t his time yet.
The slow marching of growth permeates the subconscious of the film. It progresses in much the same way time feels to pass in life. Every year as a child is unique, distinct, languorous, and a little painful. But sure enough, the slow childhood years give way to the up-tempo teen years, the quickly moving college years, and the uncontrollably fast ‘adult’ years. The speed feels breakneck, with no ability to slow down and few opportunities to pause and take stock at where we find ourselves at any given juncture. The film operates in a similar mode of pacing, taking its time in the early goings to introduce its characters, visual styling, setting, and dynamics. As she moves into the latter stages, however, Schoenbrun begins to move things along much faster, and the time jumps between the eras increases in distance significantly. When Owen turns down Maddy’s offer to go with her, time isn’t moving fast enough for him yet. He’s still experiencing life at a modest rate.
Some time later, Owen’s mother succumbs to her illness. Shortly after, Maddy disappears. All that’s left of her is her TV set, smoldering in the yard of her parent’s home. That same week, The Pink Opaque is cancelled after five seasons. Time now begins to move much more quickly. We jump forward to 2006, where Owen still lives with his father and now works at the local movie theater. His existence is just as quiet and removed as it was when we left him, but not having the spark of his favorite childhood show and the friendship with Maddy has extricated much of the luster that helped provide some verve in his earlier years. It’s fitting, then, that one of the more outright displays of excitement Owen shows in the entire film is when he sees Maddy again, standing ominously behind him at the grocery store. They reconnect at a nearby dive that Maddy deems to be ‘safe’ for them to talk.
What follows from this point is truly the thrust of the film. What had thus far been a beautifully cryptic distillation of the experience of an awkward and upsetting childhood transforms rapidly into an existential crisis. Maddy questions Owen about their memories, how he recalls The Pink Opaque and if he’s ever considered that it may have been real. Are his memories real? Or are they jumbled? Has Mr Melancholy been lurking over their shoulders this entire time? It is here that Maddy opens up to Owen, telling him how she realized in her travels that time hadn’t been moving right for her. It was too fast, the years moving by her too quickly. She needed to seek a rebirth, to cleans her spirit and unite the disparate pieces of her being that had been split apart in the tumultuous era of her youth. She pleads with Owen to do the same, but, just like when she asked him to run away with her, he can’t; and he leaves once again.
Schoenbrun shows a tremendous depth in the specificity of her own memories and feelings around watching TV in the 90’s and ratcheting through old VHS tapes. The segments of The Pink Opaque that are shown on-screen have varying degrees of wear and age depending on if it is being shown as airing on TV or being played on a home-recorded tape. The red hues and speckles of light that distort the image are wonderfully nostalgic, and are exactingly presented. The distinct feeling they leave later becomes deployed in the film as a tactic of false recollection and oscillating memory. After Maddy asks Owen to reconsider his past, the steady use of tape distortion loses its objectivity, suddenly finding Owen shown at random in the snowy haze of the VHS tape and the girls at the head of The Pink Opaque in the stark clarity of 35mm. The past is losing its certainty. It’s a fantastical assertion, but this is a movie, right? Who’s to say it’s not possible?
What’s more pressing than whether or not the Owen has actually been a victim of Mr Melancholy is the existential question of whether his life has been lived ‘correctly’ and if it’s being lived ‘correctly’ even now. It’s a fascinating question because of how obvious the answer feels. If this film is meant to hang on to the relative realism it has shown, to say that Owen has actually been a TV show character this whole time is ludicrous to accept and obviously the ramblings of a mad woman. However, what else may be found in that type of retroactive introspection? What if there was something wrong the entire time? The beautiful thing about I Saw the TV Glow that makes it such a powerful, sincere, unsettling, and endearing film is in the way that it is quietly, but also sonorously, a trans allegory. To show that, here we are, some two thousand words into this review, and this is the first mention of what is the main point of the film. It is a testament to Schoenbrun’s directing that the allegory is so prominent and impactful, but never forcefully or bluntly asserted. It is almost a logical exercise, but with all of the allure and compassion found in a traditional piece of dramatic work. The question that Owen must answer is a real question facing every member of the trans community. Is your life proceeding ‘correctly?’ Are you who you think you are? Are your memories the way they should be, or is everything ‘off?’ These questions are presented in an astounding fashion, heightened in every sense of the word, but they aren’t unbelievable within the context of the film. Schoenbrun hasn’t just built a world in which these questions carry a plausibility, but she uses the medium of film to bring a further credibility to such an ostentatious prospect. It is our understanding of movies that allows us to potentially buy in to such an otherwise ludicrous claim, and Schoenbrun knows that, asking us to use that willingness to believe on something so intimate and personal, something so crucial to so many people.
There is no truth found in Owen’s scattered, frantic, anxious recollections of his past. All that’s behind him is an uncertainty; either a childhood he didn’t enjoy, or another life he was forced to forget and repress. Owen found safety and refuge in watching The Pink Opaque, but what good is that to him now? Is he living a life worth living? Is he happy and thriving? Maybe he was one of the lead girls, forced and crammed into this miserable body, in desperate need for resurrection; but he has spent such a long time forcing down every feeling he’s ever had. The question for him now is not what is right or wrong or how to proceed; it’s if he’s even capable of stopping long enough to actually look within himself to find out. We never see Owen grieve the loss of his mother, a major moment in life that gets left in the dust of a rapidly moving adulthood. Maddy’s pleas for Owen’s future may be unbelievable and histrionic, but she has found passion and fire, something in life that is motivating her to look within and change. She found The Pink Opaque’s refuge to be liberating, giving her the space to find herself. Owen could have had that too, if fear and uncertainty hadn’t quelled his ability to feel so strenuously that it may cost him his life.
I Saw the TV Glow is a declaration from a filmmaker who’s here to stay, that is certain. Schoenbrun has cemented herself as a director to be excited about every time her name comes up in the trades. It is a medium-bending, diaphanous, quiet thriller. Assigning a genre to it is futile, it exists within its own space and builds around itself a language all of its own.