I Saw the TV Glow
Now we see a reflection, as in a TV screen.
When you’re a teenager, with your identity still in flux, finding pop culture that speaks to you can feel like finding a piece of yourself that you didn’t know existed. We talk sometimes about movies and TV shows that were formative for us, but the reality is a little more complicated. It’s possible to have a two-way conversation with a piece of pop culture, both to be informed by it and to think critically about it as well. Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun understands the heady rush of finding something that speaks to you. In I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun assembles a collage of their own teenage interest in TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Are You Afraid of the Dark? into an existential horror meditation on the way that pop culture can shape an identity and perhaps also lull them into losing the person they might become.
The film’s world is an uncanny mosaic of parts cannibalized from Saturday-night Nickelodeon shows and songs favored by lonely millennials who grew up in the suburbs. I Saw the TV Glow is an older sibling to Schoenbrun’s 2022 debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair: a little bigger and more self-assured and sleeker, but no less tapped into the aching isolation of teenagers who don’t really know who they are yet, let alone how they’re going to go about piecing their identities together. Both films examine the identities we assume in order to be accepted; the protagonist of World’s Fair performs a version of herself for her laptop’s webcam, while TV Glow’s own protagonist Owen (played at various ages by Ian Foreman and Justice Smith) is a little more passive. He is clearly hungry for connection but unable to get it, except through a tenuous friendship with slightly older student named Maddy (Brigitte Lundy-Paine), who keeps him supplied with tapes of their favorite TV show, The Pink Opaque.
For both Maddy and Owen, The Pink Opaque is a lifeline, a YA fantasy in which two teenage girls with a psychic connection battle monsters every week. Schoenbrun presents tidbits of the show like water in Owen’s personal desert: a close friendship between two characters who have a mission and a mortal enemy and the power to act. Owen’s own world is emptier and more nebulous, with its disappointments and villains more difficult for him to describe, let alone stand up to. He’s clearly frightened of his father (Fred Durst), who derides The Pink Opaque as “a TV show for girls” but who otherwise remains offscreen, basking in the glow of his own TV set.
In between shared tapes and stolen hours watching his favorite TV show, Owen walks alone, unaccompanied through the halls of his high school (Void High School, or VHS for short) and later his job at the local movie theater (the Dream Factory, an apparently soulless chain.) Production designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly infuses the locations with both dread and a sense of humor: the walls of the high school include boards with messaging that declares that “pain is weakness leaving the body,” while pep rally signs proclaim, “Go Vultures!” in an exuberant, unquestioning embrace of a symbol of death. Owen—especially when he’s played by Justice Smith—walks like he’s fragile, afraid that the walls are going to close in on him. He’s quiet, but when he does speak, it’s in a strangled, high tone, a voice that isn’t used to being heard.
Owen is the kind of person who lets his favorite pieces of pop culture speak both to and for him. Schoenbrun communicates this tendency both through the set design and through the soundtrack, which acts as a mixtape that bleeds through the borders of the movie’s scenes until one song springs, fully formed, into a performance at a concert where Owen and Maddy meet. The song brings to mind the concert sequences in Wings of Desire, in which Nick Cave channels something heavenly in a dingy German music club. Here, the venue is a roadhouse and the band, Sloppy Jane, is backed up by Phoebe Bridgers, but the sentiment’s the same: art opens up new possibilities, new worlds, new versions of you that you couldn’t have dreamed up for yourself. The plaintive longing of Sloppy Jane is followed by a different performance by King Woman, a smoky howl in aggressive profile. Sometimes pop culture isn’t a salve, but a primal scream.
This story could go in one of two directions: down a rabbit hole of fantasy, or else stagnant, trapped in the hard reality of the suburbs. Both possibilities are equally terrifying. Smith plays Owen as a character in denial, unwilling to live except through the touchstones of the TV shows he watches. Without ever saying the word “transgender” explicitly, TV Glow examines an unexamined life, specifically a life spent refusing to contemplate the possibilities—and freedom—of exploring one’s own gender, of breaking free of prescribed gender roles. It’s a movie about being afraid of being trans, about burying something unearthed by a beloved story. Owen sees a poor reflection, as in a mirror, in the glass of a dark TV set. He don’t love himself; he doesn’t know how.
Schoenbrun’s movie is not an allegory about being transgender; it’s much better and more expansive than a simple, all-consuming metaphor. But TV Glow is about horror of the deepest existential kind: self-denial so strong that it’s a rejection of the person you’re meant to be. I’m haunted by it. I hope it haunts you, too.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★★
I Saw the TV Glow is in wide release now.