54274: I Saw the TV Glow

How do you know who you are? That seems to be the question at the beating heart of I Saw the TV Glow, the sophomore effort from Jane Schoenbrun. Before I get into what will surely be a concise and focused critique of I Saw the TV Glow, let me go ahead and tell you that this movie is not for everyone. The performances of the main characters are halting, almost stunted, and there is a sense of emotional suffocation that makes the movie hard to watch. The plot meanders, it jumps into magical realism, it engages in some light body horror, it features Fred Durst and does not have a neatly delivered resolution. There’s a lot about I Saw the TV Glow that is off-putting.

But there is so much more to love about it. It is beautifully shot, with suburban New Jersey standing in for a homogenized American dream world, and bold splashes of unearthly color throughout that put the dream and reality into stark contrast. The performances by the three leads are heartbreaking, and muted, and instantly recognizable to anyone who was more than one standard deviation away from normal in high school.

Schoenbrun also dips heavily into 90s nostalgia for the plot, the look, and the general vibe for I Saw the TV Glow, but it feels like they took elements from their childhood and ran them through an AI that only knew how to hallucinate. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is morphed into The Pink Opaque, but now it’s a late-night half-hour show, and maybe it’s more like The Adventures of Pete and Pete than The X-Files, and for some reason Fred Durst is there but, but instead of doing it all for the nookie, he’s now a suburban dad.

If it seems like the film is trying to figure out what it is, that’s because it is. I Saw the TV Glow is fundamentally about identity. For example, one scene finds Owen walking through the hallways of his high school, surrounded by bulletin boards with only the words, "to thine own self be true," posted over and over. The conflict at the heart of this movie is between knowing who you are and embracing your true self, even if it’s scary, or allowing yourself to be buried alive and crushed to death under the weight of the world. And, just in case this is the first piece you’ve read about I Saw the TV Glow, it is 100% an allegory of trans liberation.

The story kicks off in the present, with Owen (Justice Smith) telling us that he can’t sleep, so he’s started re-watching his favorite show, The Pink Opaque. We then roll back the years to 1996, when we meet Owen’s 7th grade version (Ian Foreman) just in time for him to meet 9th grader, and Pink Opaque super fan, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). Owen and Maddy are instantly drawn to each other, recognizing that they share a sameness/otherness that sets them apart from the rest of the kids. They quickly form a bond around their mutual love of The Pink Opaque, and as their friendship builds, so do their individual identities. Who they are, together or separate, is increasingly wrapped up in and defined by their love of The Pink Opaque, a show about two unlikely soul mates who find each other at summer camp, can communicate telepathically, and provide psychic support for the other as they fight evil monsters each week.

The show becomes the crux of their relationship, and its fantasy comes to be more consequential for these two kids than reality. Maddy talks about the show feeling more real than reality, and as their friendship grows, we start to get an inkling as to why these kids would want an escape. Maddy reveals that she is a lesbian, and bemoans how her former best friend (a girl) has used this information to make Maddy even more of an outsider at school. Owen, for his part, expresses ignorance as to his sexual identity, saying instead, “I think that I like…TV shows,” but also saying that there is something wrong with him, fundamentally, and his parents must know it, even if they never say anything.

Maddy also hints at a life of physical abuse from her stepfather, and a need to escape her suburban existence. She tells Owen that if she doesn’t leave, she’s going to die. She convinces Owen to join her in running away, but at the last moment, Owen cannot bring himself to do it. He instead confesses the entire plan to a friend’s mother. Shortly thereafter, Maddy disappears without a trace, her TV left burning on the lawn. Owen tells us that The Pink Opaque was canceled later that month.

This turning point marks a jagged break in the narrative. Owen is suddenly forced out of his co-dependent relationships, both with Maddy and The Pink Opaque, and is faced with defining his identity away from them both. And what he decides is, essentially, "there’s nothing special about me." He goes to work at a movie theater, he goes shopping, he lives at home with his dad, and ten years pass.

Now, if you care about spoilers, this is where you should really stop reading.

After a decade spent sweeping up movie theater popcorn and watching TV in his childhood room, Maddy returns to Owen’s life. She turns up in a grocery store and tells Owen she has to talk to him, and that she doesn’t have much time. This is where the movie takes a bit of a Twin Peaks turn. Maddy takes Owen out for a drink at a bar called The Double Lunch, and tells him that The Pink Opaque is real, and that they are, in fact, the two young women who star in the show. Now, given that The Double Lunch is the name of the bar the kids visit in The Pink Opaque (like The Bronze in Buffy) it is really wild that Owen doesn’t believe her. They are literally sitting in the bar from the TV show, while two bands dripping with indie cred play a double set (just like they did in the The Pink Opaque, and on Buffy), and Owen still refuses to accept Maddy’s truth. It must have taken a mountain of denial for Owen to reject Maddy's message. Incidentally, Mountain of Denial could be the name of a band playing at The Double Lunch; however, in this film we see performances by Sloppy Jane (featuring Phoebe Bridgers), and King Woman, before Owen flees from the club, and from Maddy's message.

As a cis-gendered person, I have no idea what it is like to know that your body doesn’t match your understanding of who you are. But I have to assume that it can be terribly frightening for some people, as it appears to be for Owen. He thinks he is a 20-something guy with asthma and an hourly wage, and now he’s being told that he’s actually Isabella, a teenage girl with vaguely defined superpowers and an evil archnemesis, Mr. Melancholy, who filled her mind with false memories and buried her alive. Maddy, on the other hand, has embraced her identity as Tara, and by burying herself alive (and dying) she was able to free herself from Mr. Melancholy’s prison and journey to the real world (i.e., the world of The Pink Opaque).

In these two characters, we see two vastly different responses to identity. Maddy embraces hers while Owen runs from his. He runs from it again and again in a way that is at once pathetic, agonizing, maddening, and utterly understandable. Maddy has warned him that he, as Isabella, is actually buried alive, with poison running through her veins, her still-beating heart cut out of her body and stored in an industrial freezer. Not only that, she will soon die in the real world, even as decades pass for Owen in his suburban world. At this point, Schoenbrun has apparently grown tired of ambiguity, and makes it abundantly clear that Owen is living in the simulacrum while Isabella is dying in reality. There is no kernel of doubt in the film about what is really happening, which is why it is so painful to watch Owen grow older and weaker in this false world he has chosen to inhabit.

The narrative skips ahead through the decades, showing Owen as an old man working at a family entertainment center. As his asthma worsens, and he can feel death approaching, Owen finally appears to accept the truth of the lie he has been living: he uses a box knife to cut open his chest and finds that his heart has been removed and replaced with memories of The Pink Opaque. He buttons his shirt back up and returns to work, apologizing to everyone around him for having an outburst during a birthday party, and the screen goes black.

There are a couple of ways to interpret the end. In one interpretation, Owen realizes that he has to kill himself in order to wake up as Isabella, and that’s what he’s on his way to do. The other, much more likely interpretation, is that even when confronted with the truth about who he is, Owen is unable to change and keeps apologizing to figments of his imagination until Isabella’s oxygen runs out.

There’s no doubt, it’s a dark ending. The idea of Owen trapped, both by his own fear and the curse of Mr. Melancholy, is a depressing fate to consider. I suspect that Schoenbrun, themselves a trans creator, is telling us a few things about identity, particularly for trans persons. Are they reminding us of the deadly path that awaits trans women? Even if Owen could somehow bring himself to undertake the daunting task of killing himself in order to arise again as Isabella, she would be waking up in a world where a malevolent magical being sends deadly monsters to try and kill her each week. Is that Schoenbrun’s understanding of the trans woman experience in our society? Perhaps. At the same time, Maddy runs away from home, reinvents herself, buries herself alive, and claws her way out of the dirt and into the reality of her life as Tara in The Pink Opaque. “She is reborn as a badass,” Schoenbrun seems to be saying, and also “that’s an option for you, too, young kids questioning your gender identities!”

I can't know what was in Schoenbrun's head. But I do know that I saw the movie in an auditorium of almost entirely young people, and I hope they took away from the film idea that rejecting your true self is a path to suffocation and ruin, while being true to yourself is a recipe for being awesome.

I recommend I Saw the TV Glow. See it, and see it on the big screen, if you can, and maybe give a nod and a smile to the one-standard-deviation-away-from-normal kids you see on the way out, and remind them that they’re not alone.