At an early screening of I Saw the TV Glow, the gentleman introducing the film told the audience that it was like writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, “on steroids.” Which prompted Schoenbrun to kindly correct him when they introduced the film: “It’s like World’s Fair on HRT.” A different sort of steroid, they suggested. It was a film written and created as Schoenbrun navigated stages of their own transition, and bound to that journey at scale.
For all that is irrevocably the journey, I Saw the TV Glow defies easy categorization by its very nature. It is a film that can be read under a number of critical microscopes, and enjoyed for many more besides. It is about transness and queerness, certainly, but it is also about the ways in which fandom can anchor lives, and the places we find ourselves in life that don’t fit. And it is a story about becoming… and about the violence inflicted on anyone who attempts to become in direct defiance of the world that they are crammed inside.
The story unfolds like this: Owen (Justice Smith) meets an older teen at his school named Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who loves a television series that he finds himself strangely drawn to, despite never having seen an episode. The show is called The Pink Opaque, the tale of two teen girls who are connected psychically and must use their joint abilities to battle the minions of Mr. Melancholy, the man in the moon. Maddy is obsessed with the show’s complex lore, and invites Owen over to watch it. In the following years, she tapes the show off the TV for him and leaves the VHS copies at school (though they rarely speak) because Owen’s parents won’t let him stay up late enough to watch it.
Maddy disappears one day, and everyone believes her to be dead. But eight years later, she shows up mysteriously to ask Owen a few questions—has he ever noticed that bits of fiction seem to bleed with their real lives? Does he ever feel like something about their world doesn’t add up? Is he sure that the place where they exist is real, and that The Pink Opaque isn’t who and where they’re supposed to be?
One might assume that this entire concept is metaphorical, that the whole conceit is just clever way to make a grounded statement using fantastical terms. But I Saw the TV Glow isn’t interested in telling us where the line between fantasy and reality lies. Is this a sticking point for me, personally, having watched the internet slowly ply every reader with a million “theories” nabbed from Tumblr and Reddit and YouTube that X character is really dead the whole time! or A secret tragic backstory is obvious if you pay attention to the dog’s scarf! Yes. Sink into the discomfort of never knowing. Let it rip at you like a cheese grater to the skin.
The fractured ambiance of this film deserves a concept album, and its soundtrack makes an incredible go of it, with songs from Sloppy Jane, yuele, Caroline Polachek, Florist, and more peppering the story. The performances are devastating: Lundy-Paine and Smith embody their own numbness to a haunting degree, a rippling tension running between them the whole film as they each wait for the other to act in a way that they can understand. (Or perhaps… recognize?) It feels strange to admit that I’ve been waiting for Justice Smith to receive a part worthy of him since Detective Pikachu, but I’m glad that day has finally come. His frequent gasps of life, the moments when he comes up for air amidst the vacant lot that is Owen’s reality, are where the true horror of the movie lies. And there are many thoughts lying between all of the choices Smith makes, alongside the script’s depiction of Owen—thoughts about queerness and neurodivergence and how often they exist in the same place. About how difference compounds until it becomes scaffolding that holds together rather than a renovation. About disconnection and how desperately we yearn for its inverse.
As an experience, the film is an exemplar of the form and proof that Schoenbrun’s powers are growing. The careful attention paid to film grain and aspect ratios, the flawless replication of goofy television tropes from three decades prior, the deadpan delivery of the actors creating a stylized atmosphere but also forcing the audience to listen to the content of the dialogue over the emotions present in the characters… until emotion erupts into the narrative, so sharp and hot it’s like being flash-fried. Schoenbrun talked of what it was like to play with large sums of money after years on the New York DIY filmmaking scene, and this piece of cinema gives us a glimpse of what movies could be were the current model more willing to fund them. Fragments of the inner strangeness that reside in us all, brought into the dim glow of the screen.
The experience of the ‘90s is hyper-real in this rendering, from the font used on the cover of Maddy’s Pink Opaque Episode Guide (I had an X-Files version just like it) to the ridiculous prosthetics used on TV villains to the messages Maddy scribbles on the VHS tapes she leaves for Owen in pink gel pen. (My VHS-recorded shows were mostly Farscape and The Invisible Man.) My colleague and I had an entire conversation about the Fruitopia vending machine in the school lunchroom after we left the theater. The Pink Opaque itself is built on the bones of a number of ‘90s shows—Buffy the Vampire Slayer being the most obvious—but also Charmed, Xena: Warrior Princess, Ghostwriter, The Secret World of Alex Mack, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and several more besides. Then there’s the anonymous sprawl of their hometown, which later prompts Owen to utter, “This isn’t the Midnight Realm. It’s the suburbs.”
It’s the toughest balancing act of all to heap a story with nostalgia while you stitch it to something fledgling and painful that fights to stay alive. And perhaps that’s why the setting of TV Glow never slips into the anodyne mistakes that many pictures fueled on our remembrance of the past offer. The ‘90s is where millennials like me grew up, but we’re a cynical bunch now, offered an optimistic glimpse of a future that never came to pass. And even while that future was held before us like a flickering candle in a ball pit, the persistent phobias of the era encouraged our conformity. We are, for the time being, the last generation that was widely, actively, and vehemently discouraged from coming out.
I Saw the TV Glow offers a glimpse into the places we retreated in order to find our own kind of comfort. Our safety. Our selves. It shows its audience what a lifeline these campy and clever worlds gave us when there was nothing else to model ourselves on. But these TV shows, with their punny dialogue and band cameos and haughty, attractive teens in belly shirts and moody lipsticks, could only provide a respite from the world. Not a cure for it.
The journey to being, to becoming, is far more agonizing than that. And not everyone makes it through. I Saw the TV Glow lives in that liminal space where you ask yourself the question: What would you risk for the chance to find out?
If you won’t, will you survive the alternative?
Perhaps that is the reason why the film offers no answers to its own mysteries: The answer will be different to everyone sitting in that audience. All of us took different roads and will find ourselves at different points in the journey. And so we can’t be given the conclusion. There’s an arcade game that blinks the words YOU’RE DYING late in the film. Startling, but also universally accurate: We all are. So how will we live?
