'I Saw the TV Glow' A24
It was maybe halfway through Jane Schoenbrun's staggeringly bold sophomore feature, I Saw the TV Glow, when I noticed my breathing was getting quicker, my entire body was beginning to tremble, and tears were welling up in my eyes. In this scene, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) visits Owen (Justice Smith), her old high-school friend, eight years after she dropped off the face of the Earth. She comes to ask him, "Do you remember a TV show we used to watch?", referring to "The Pink Opaque"- a surreal young adult horror show that they watched together in the 90s. It was on a kid's channel, but it was too scary for most kids, so it played weekly at 10:30 pm before old black-and-white reruns would play for the rest of the night. When Maddy brings up the show, Owen is baffled that she would even ask such a question- of course he remembered! It was his "favorite TV show of all time" and "it always [would] be". But it was as Maddy continued to pry at Owen's memories that my body realized something was wrong. She asks him what he remembers- if he can distinguish his recollection of his own life from the events of the show, and the further she prods into his mind, the stronger the tension grows until it's just unbearable.
The scene is shot with the camera facing Maddy and Owen head-on, their eyes staring into the lens, so as Maddy asked Owen these questions, I felt as if she was asking them to me- especially considering my name is also Owen. Any queer person who watches the film will feel the same way when Maddy asks, “Do you ever feel like you’re narrating your own life—watching it play in front of you like an episode of television?” The film specifically interrogates what it feels like to be trans- to experience dysphoria and to uncover why you feel something is wrong with you on the inside and to decide whether to end your current life as you know it and live a new life as your authentic self, or to bury that part of you deep inside and never look at it again. It's a uniquely unsettling and overwhelmingly emotional depiction of this feeling that will certainly resonate with trans people all over the world. It is monumental that Schoenbrun, a nonbinary filmmaker, has the platform now to tell a story that faces this phenomenon head-on, never shying from the uncomfortable reality of it. It will change lives. For me, however, as a cisgender gay man, I recognize a similar feeling related to sexuality rather than gender.
When Maddy asks him the question about the feeling of narrating his own life like a TV episode, I am reminded of the strange way I experience the passage of time and the recollection of memories as a gay man. When you're queer, time moves differently. Periods are associated with different phases of your understanding of your queerness. There is the time before you realize that you're not straight, in which you know there is something different about you, but you have no words to explain it. As Owen says at one point in the film, it's like knowing there's something wrong going on inside of you, but you're too scared to check what's inside. Then, there is the period in which you start to identify your queerness and have to explore what that means to you. Then, you either make the choice to come out, or you don't. And after you make that choice, everything is different. But the distinctions between these times are not all that linear as I described. The lines blur as you look back on them, and you become unsure of what parts of you are things that your mind has simply made up to cope with uncomfortableness, and what parts of yourself are authentic experiences that truly belong to you. I came out much younger than most people, which may make it sound like I had it pretty easy on the surface, but because of how young I was, I had to experience all this inner turmoil post-coming out, like a searing pain that never quite went away after ripping the bandaid off. The pain reverberated through the clashing and converging blur of memories and fabrications entangled with my understanding of my queerness, and it has been a life-long quest for me to sort through these feelings through the films and TV shows I watch. This all becomes even more complicated when you have grown up engaging with different forms of media as an escape from your reality, and you drift farther into dissociation the more media you consume.
I was in 6th grade when I met my best friend, Mia, who was in 7th grade- similar to how in TV Glow, Owen is in 7th grade (played by Ian Foreman for this part of the film) when he meets Maddy who is in 9th grade. Mia was like Maddy- this cool intimidating older girl who listened to edgy music and dressed differently than others- and most importantly, was gay. I immediately wanted to be her friend. We had both individually come out to one of our closest mutual friends, and this friend set us up to talk to each other since we were the only two gay people she knew of in the school. We instantly bonded, and one thing that we obsessed over together was YouTube. We both loved the same creators at the time (almost all of who were queer in some way) and we watched their new videos every week. These people were our safe havens in a world where we felt no one wanted us to be ourselves. The screens we watched them on were mirrors in which we could stare at their faces and imagine different versions of ourselves- free, unafraid of judgment, living in Los Angeles where being gay was common and accepted. All of the things we wanted to change about ourselves were sitting deep on the other side of those screens.
In TV Glow, Owen and Maddy imagine better versions of themselves in the leading characters of The Pink Opaque, Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsay Jordan). These two girls meet at a summer camp and discover that they share a psychic link, and every week after they leave camp, they have to use their powers while living across from each other on different sides of one county, to defeat the evil monsters that Mr. Melancholy- the big bad- sends to trap them in the Midnight Realm. Their bond is signified by their matching glowing pink tattoos on the backs of their necks. When Owen meets Maddy, she is immediately open about how she likes girls. Years later, when Owen is a freshman in high school- the same age Maddy was when she met him- Maddy asks if he likes girls or boys, and he says, "I think I like TV shows". There's both a heartwarming innocence and a quiet sadness to this response. He says it with an endearing laugh, but it's also clear that he's hiding from sincerity beneath a layer of irony as protection from the darkness lying beneath that statement. It's okay for him to feel that way though; at this point in the film, he's still young and he doesn't need to know exactly who he is yet. It's one night when Owen sleeps over at Maddy's house to watch "The Pink Opaque", and she draws the ghost tattoo from the show on the back of Owen's neck with a shimmery pink marker, that he is forced to acknowledge what's going on inside of him. His transness physically manifests on the surface of his skin, and no matter how vigorously he scrubs at the drawing, the ink just sinks deeper down inside of him to the point that it runs through his blood.
'I Saw the TV Glow' A24
This pink, shimmery glow pulses through the veins of the entire film, infecting it with a hyper-stylized, distinctly queer vibrancy that is present in every moment from the thrumming 90s/early 2000s-inspired soundtrack that underscores every scene with the rumbling teen angst of a Gregg Araki film, to the oversaturated velvety 35mm cinematography that captures hues of purple, pink, and blue with a poppy buoyancy that reflects both the comforting allure of suburban adolescence and the sinister trappings of the false promises we feel are given by the media that raises us. In the glow of the TV screen, Owen and Maddy are blinded by the idea of freedom within fantasy to the extent that they can't see that experiencing life within the screen will kill them, and to gain true freedom, they must cross through the screen. The versions of themselves they are searching for lie on the other side buried deep in the ground, waiting to be awakened after all these years. In one particularly disturbing scene, Owen pushes his head through the screen and shatters the glass, sparks flying and smoke fuming as he desperately tries to force his way into the only home he knows. At this moment, I felt my body begin to tremble once more- just another moment on a list of physical reactions I had to this film which forced me to confront parts of myself that I never thought I would see portrayed so horrifyingly on screen.
There are multiple layers to this connection I feel to the characters and their experiences in I Saw the TV Glow- a connection that travels through the screen in the movie theatre, and then through the screen which the characters gaze into in the film. In watching this film, I am capable of falling into the same traps which the story cautions me against. I relate to Owen and Maddy almost as strongly as they relate to Isabel and Tara, and it's scary seeing how a medium so important to me- and to so many people- could also be the death of me. Everyone has likely experienced this kind of relationship with a movie or a show at some point in their life, but queer- and most specifically trans- people experience this feeling to such an extent that it feels like they're being ripped apart. Every time someone called Owen's name in the film, I felt my heart skip a beat as if the character had just looked through the screen and straight into my soul. I felt myself leave my body in a tug-of-war between me and the screen for control over my very presence in my seat in the theatre. Schoenbrun doesn't shy away from explaining these things pretty explicitly in the text of the film and elevates them to unthinkable heights in a stand-out scene closer to the end of the film in which Brigette Lundy-Paine delivers a monologue so stunningly hypnotic and powerful that all sense of time is shattered.
In Schoenbrun's previous film, We're All Going to the World's Fair (which is equally as brilliant in its exploration of transness within a life lived through screens), they made a point to shy away from giving clear answers, which lent to the film's strength in exploring the feelings of dysphoria and queerness that are more difficult to pin down. The trans subtext was more of a feeling that had to be understood outside of the context of the film to properly identify it as it played out. With TV Glow, it should be nearly impossible for anyone to miss what Schoenbrun is saying. This isn't a fault of the film though- Schoenbrun's eagerness to convey the experience of discovering one's transness comes from such a passionate and specific point of view that the beating heart of the film overshadows any possible criticisms of overexplaining. Enough is left ambiguous in the blurring of lines between Owen and Maddy's world and the world of "The Pink Opaque" that a consistently surreal tone develops and maintains a tight grip until the very final scene.
This sophomore feature is packed to the brim with deeply inspired imagery that clearly comes from a director who knows exactly how to make the most of the tools they are given. The designs of different monsters such as the terrifying melting ice cream cone creature, Mr. Sprinkly, or the "big bad", Mr. Melancholy, whose face is a moon filled with craters, all look like villains ripped straight from a middle schooler's worst nightmares. Pair them with the fuzzy VHS cotton-candy aesthetic of the world in "The Pink Opaque" and the haunting atmosphere of the movie theatre and the Fun Center Owen works at which would look right at home on a Tumblr thread of early 2000s liminal spaces, and you have an electric combination of sickeningly sweet nostalgia and pure dread that will leave you clammering to find your own reflection in what is left of the screen that has been shattered by Schoenbrun's unflinching, piercing vision.
By the final scene of I Saw the TV Glow, I found myself sobbing, my arms and legs shaking uncontrollably and my soul pouring out of my body in an overwhelming moment of ultimate catharsis that had been building beneath the surface of my skin from the opening moments of the film. I felt the TV glowing from deep inside the core of my very being. I felt my 20-year-old self reconciling with my 10-year-old self, all the memories of growing up as gay and not understanding what was different about me converging with visions of where my life could have gone if I never came out or what would have happened if I gave up on myself back in middle school. I remembered my best friend Mia and the movie theatre I worked at in high school and all the movies and TV shows that I latched onto as a teenager, and in that moment, I felt so close to Owen that I could reach out and touch him. All my pain and fears and desires were reflected to me on that screen. As the credits rolled, I thought to myself how lucky I am to be alive at the same time that Jane Schoenbrun is making films. Schoenbrun is an auteur of the highest degree- a defining filmmaker for this generation who is going to touch the hearts of so many young queer people just like me with this film. Soon, the whole world will get to see the TV glow, and that will be a monumental day to be remembered in cinema history.
'I Saw the TV Glow' Releases in theatres via A24 limited on May 3rd and wide on May 17th