I Saw the TV Glow

Spoiler warning for entire review.

Director Jane Schoenbrun's film I Saw the TV Glow is, in a word, captivating. I was nervous I wouldn't like it because I didn't care for Schoenbrun's previous film, We're All Going to the World's Fair, which I found incredibly boring. While I Saw the TV Glow is slow and meditative, it isn't boring (in my opinion). It's deeply emotional, devastating, and gut-wrenching.

In 1996, Owen (played by Ian Foreman as a 7th grader and by Justice Smith as a 9th grader and beyond) is a lonely kid who meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), an older girl who is obsessed with a TV show called The Pink Opaque, which airs at 10:30pm on Saturdays. Owen isn't allowed to stay up that late, so Maddy encourages him to lie to his mom about going to a sleepover and instead come over to her place to watch.

Two years later, Owen and Maddy aren't quite friends, but Maddy records video tapes of The Pink Opaque and gives them to Owen since, despite being a 9th grader now, he still isn't allowed to stay up and watch the show. While Owen is fascinated by the show, which features two teen girls--Isabelle and Tara--who communicate psychically and fight off monsters sent by the big bad, "Mr. Melancholy", Maddy is obsessed with it. She says that it seems like the show is more real than real life. Maddy also hates the small town she and Owen live in and tries to convince Owen to run away with her, but Owen chickens out the night they're supposed to go.

Not long after, Maddy disappears without a trace...and The Pink Opaque is canceled after a cliffhanger of a season finale in which the evil Mr. Melancholy buries Tara and Isabelle alive. 

Eight years later, Owen's mom has passed away from cancer. He lives with his deeply unfriendly dad (played by Fred Durst!) and works at a movie theatre. Owen leads a life of quiet desperation and Justice Smith plays him so well, with big eyes that seem both empty and filled with sadness. 

Maddy suddenly appears one day and while Owen is initially overjoyed to reunite with her, he quickly becomes concerned when Maddy tells him that The Pink Opaque is real and that after years of trying to live a normal life and feeling like time was slipping away, Maddy paid a coworker to bury her alive and she woke up in the show. She is Tara and Owen is Isabelle. What's more, the show ended with Isabelle also buried and alive and she's running out of oxygen. Maddy wants to bury Owen alive in this world so that he'll wake up as his true self, Isabelle, and he and Maddy/Tara can continue to show and battle Mr. Melancholy.

Maddy almost convinces Owen to go through with it, but he pushes her down and runs away, never to see her again. Decades later, Owen is a grown man with a family of his own, working at the "Fun Center" (basically a Dave & Busters), with crippling asthma and and even sadder look in his eye. During a kid's birthday party at the Fun Center, he freaks out, screaming that he is dying and calling for his mommy, while everyone around him freezes in place and doesn't hear him. In the bathroom, he tears his belly open with a box cutter to find a glowing TV inside. Owen doesn't die, he simply leaves the bathroom and apologizes to the partygoers, who don't even acknowledge his existence. This is where the movie ends.

So what is I Saw the TV Glow about? Well, it's most clearly a metaphor for being transgender. According to Maddy, Owen is "really" Isabelle. There's even a scene, remembered in flashbacks, where he dresses as Isabelle--in a pink dress--and Maddy dresses as Tara. His unsupportive dad remarks that The Pink Opaque is a show "for girls". And by denying who he truly is, Owen leads a sad life that never feels really real. He also makes a comment to the effect of, "If I don't think about it, it's not real". 

Schoenbrun is nonbinary and queer, and I Saw the TV Glow just feels very, very queer. But I think that straight, cisgender people can relate to it too because it's also about growing up and growing into someone you didn't think you'd be. Not living true to yourself and wondering what could have been. It's also about nostalgia. As an adult, Owen rewatches The Pink Opaque and finds it ridiculously juvenile and even embarrassing. Who among us hasn't gone back and watched a favorite childhood movie or show and realized that it...wasn't good. Or feels much "younger" than it felt when we were kids? 

But the thing about nostalgia is that it can be a tool for us to see how far we've come and how much we've matured. Personally, I don't deify my childhood at all. I didn't have a bad childhood, but I feel much more "me" as an adult. Aging suits me. Watching childhood faves makes me feel warm and fuzzy, not sad. I Saw the TV Glow has a much darker view of nostalgia. It suggests that maybe some of us were our truest selves when we were kids before, you know, life got to us. For Owen and Maddy, The Pink Opaque represents adventure, purpose, and true friendship whereas real life served up disappointment, conformity, and settling for something you tell yourself is happiness. Maddy chose a life of adventure, Owen chose to settle for less and lie to himself everyday, and now it's literally killing him. Suffocating him, as his alter ego suffocates in her shallow grave within The Pink Opaque.

Whether you feel the trans metaphor or the "life of quiet desperation" metaphor more, I Saw the TV Glow will devastate you in the end, and a lot of that has to do with the deeply embodied performance by Justice Smith. He doesn't not have to overact to express how the years of denial, repression, and boredom have turned him into a shadow by the end of the movie. I felt that achy-hot feeling behind my eyes in the last scene, wanting to cry for poor Owen. I Saw the TV Glow is a movie that aches. 

I'm so glad I gave this movie a chance. It's one of my favorites of the year so far, though I don't know if it will be an easily rewatchable film. But it is fascinating and deeply moving piece of art and I'll definitely be looking out for Schoenbrun's next film.

Grade: A