‘I Saw The TV Glow’ Review – Within The Spectrums Of Time, Gender, And Fear

As a society, we’ve entered a stage that encourages and rewards the fascination and obsession of television shows. We live firmly within a world of streaming ongoing and limited series where talk of theories and open admissions of confession for allegiance to characters are commonplace. We explore our ideological differences within the pattern of characters in these shows as well as our similarities, and our explorations can and have often taken us to thoughts of our own identities, from notions of pure personality, gender, or even the overtly sexual. Are our favorite characters living their life the way I should be? How can I be more like them? At what point does the “me” that came before cease to become authentic?

These questions have always been at the forefront of the minds of the self-conscious. As someone who has experienced extreme discomfort surrounding their physical appearance, I’ve struggled with this specific discordance that now is named dysphoria. Something I once represented physically, by extension socially, has never fit with how I felt about myself inside. This is certainly not a new phenomenon for those of us who’ve experienced it. Awareness surrounding it is sharper than it was, and the desire to finally resist something so cosmically wrong-feeling has necessitated the tool of language to identify and distance ourselves from it. But not eradicate it, only really pushed off to the side. But in this, we make an important step: garnering knowledge. Amassing greater knowledge about the toxic state of dysphoria makes it easier to avoid inducing, as if we can see & feel its boundaries — whether or not it affects us.

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow puts us into the life of Owen, who grows into asking these questions after being introduced to what will be his favorite television show of all time. We’re introduced to The Pink Opaque, a show Owen has never been allowed to watch by parental decree but has nevertheless been thinking about endlessly. Once he finally sees an episode with new friend Maddy, Owen becomes hooked for life. Sometimes we can see ourselves in the things we watch, and I Saw the TV Glow recognizes that this can extend to an idealization, a goal we don’t realize we have. Sometimes these goals don’t really present themselves as goals in the moment.

It’s when we look back on things like this that tell us — shouts at us, even — in the growing distance where this message still stands to reach us where we are now, all these miles away that we can be this person. The film shows us from the very beginning that Owen is in an enclosed space at all times, from the play parachute in 1996 with alternating colors (that include those of the trans flag) to the present day where he works at the dilapidated Family Fun Center imprisoned in his deteriorating body.

In the decades before our current obsessionist streaming attitudes, it was considered strange to identify so intensely with things like TV shows. At the time, those with an unusual allure for Twin Peaks, The X-Files, or Star Trek as they aired were seen as others — specifically separated from what was wordlessly deemed “normal society.” But as generations who found comfort in their show-obsessed circles saw new generations come into the world with similar infatuations, societal pressure seemed to ease. Almost around the same time, commercial markets built on these infatuations (read: trends) designed with youths in mind repackaged this phenomenon.

It started with programs meant to connect with them, headed by some creators that aimed to really and truly identify with kids rather than patronizing them with tone-deaf cartoons or puppet shows. There’s not really a decade that did it as well and efficiently as the 1990s did, where a cavalcade of programming aimed at younger viewers decided to meet them respectfully on their level, creating a culture of TV-obsessed youngsters. Our Twin Peaks, X-Files, and Star Trek took the shape of programs like Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Animorphs, Ghostwriter, Erie, Indiana, So Weird, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and so much more.

Schoenbrun creates something special in The Pink Opaque that calls forth the memories of having been partially raised by a handful of the above shows, filtered through cathode ray tube displays and burning so deep into our brains. It burns for Owen and Maddy too, and becomes something mirroring their desires. They feel a desperation for a real, tangible identity like they see in Pink Opaque’s lead characters Isabel and Tara, two protectors of a small town. They communicate in the spiritual plane “The Midnight Realm,” never able to meet in person. Yet they share a bond, as well as a matching neon pink tattoo of sorts, a drawing of a simplistic ghost wearing glasses on the back of their necks that become their symbol to fight the supernatural evil plaguing their society. Each monster-of-the-week episode sees their intense friendship and trust grow as the defeated evil entities tie back to the “big bad” Mr. Melancholy (an amusingly cheesy jab at Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon that morphs into something much more sinister).

When we look back on what truly scared us at early formative ages, sometimes the concepts and perceived intentions whirl together in a tornado causing something similar to trauma in how it sticks to us for most of our lives. That accumulated effect can make our visual perception alter, like we’ve become dosed with something based entirely on experiencing something through just one of our senses. We willingly dive into this scary, intimidating lake with a hand-painted warning “BEWARE OF MONSTERS” sign posted at its edge; this informs who we want to or don’t want to be but remains in our power to contextualize and unpack. We want to be scared, to bear the mark of trauma and change, but on our terms. We get to take that experience and mold it into something that becomes a part of us, like the marks Isabel and Tara share in The Pink Opaque. Schoenbrun has swam in these waters like the rest of us, delightfully changed, still changing.

After his first taste, Owen wants more of The Pink Opaque, needs more of that self-driven terror. To get it he befriends Maddy, breaking through a previously-thought immovable social barrier. When this leads to a discussion about sexual intent, Maddy standing her ground that she is a lesbian, Owen doesn’t have the knowledge about himself to know his answer on the topic. But Owen knows that he’s not right, not normal; the experience he does know of himself lives inside a line of dialogue: “I feel like someone took a shovel and hollowed me out.” For those who have worked on finding themselves in an identity and/or a body that matches what they feel inside, constantly navigating through the minefield of dysphoria, Owen’s assessment is no less crushing for us at our furthest point of progress than we were at journey’s origin. Just because the outer shell can be fixed, mended, and maintained doesn’t mean harsh exposure to the storm of dysphoria is over.

There isn’t any intent to induce regression in so closely following Owen’s sad developments of the film. As he moves through life in the same town he grew up in, he and Maddy ebb and flow in a concerning dance of reality that raises real concern for Maddy and eventually Owen himself. They become a pair of equal opposites. Where Owen finds himself in an oppressive dysphoric landscape of what he thinks of as home, Maddy mysteriously disappears with no clues as to her whereabouts but turns up in short bursts of her own euphoria and transformation (set to King Woman’s Psychic Wound, in a soundtrack Schoenbrun commissioned themselves specifically for the film).

Throughout the story of Owen’s life, he shows us through the stages of his life, narrating in voiceover and speaking to the audience that further blends the line of what is true reality, what is within Owen, and what is beyond comprehension just behind the curtain. The concept of reality becomes a through-line for how it’s supposed to provide grounding in Owen’s life but is constantly challenged by what he experiences.

As he learns more about what has transpired with Maddy in snippets, he begins to map that boundary around him that shows how limited he’s become, has grown into. However, being surrounded by these boundaries hardly means the end for someone like Owen. Various messages pop up here and there by some ethereal and otherworldly presence that is meant to reach out to him through the same familiar lights & colors the cathode rays cast upon his face, coming to him in incongruent moments of confusion, trauma, and horror. Owen’s attempts to parse these bizarre moments turn up empty or incomplete, perhaps because of the commitment he’s made to buying into the life expected of him. Owen’s life becomes synonymous with our understanding of The Pink Opaque, mercilessly canceled at a cliffhanger that leaves the character of Isabel buried alive.

During the film’s entire runtime, I found myself absolutely transfixed, unable to really move or pry my eyes away. I found myself in Owen, as he found himself in Isabel and Maddy in Tara. Maddy transforms into something that resembles her favorite show’s counterpart yet Owen remains the same…out of fear, perhaps? I myself have been facing that fear for too long and have started to create my own new self, the self that was sitting in the auditorium seat in this theater. I didn’t live a life exactly like Owen’s but the broad strokes of his emotional abuse and traumatically dysphoric experiences were eerily similar. It was then that I knew I couldn’t possibly review this film in any objective sense. It moved me so emotionally that when the final shot flashed across the screen I was stunned. I felt hollowed out the entire rest of the evening, as Owen had been for most of his life. Time takes on new meaning as someone who starts working on themselves in hormone replacement therapy, sometimes the fear that there simply isn’t enough of it to become the person you want to be until it’s too late. We only have so much time on this earth, after all.

The biggest impact of Schoenbrun’s film comes in the form of memories through time. What we learn of Owen’s sometimes spills out as triggered responses to events in the present moment, but is otherwise freely shared through his correspondence with the audience. Time becomes more of a complex construct, vacillating much like Owen and Maddy’s push and pull with each other. And by the time the credits start everything that has happened, in its own skewed sense of time, starts to feel like a collection of memories swirling in the mind of someone who now knows that it’s never too late. The spectrum of time becomes a thematic match cut with the visuals of Eric Yue’s sweeping camera underneath the wheel of colors undoubtedly denoting identity & sexuality. To quote a friend, “transition not as a defined end state but as the continuous application of first principles. [T]o love ourselves and each other and to let that move us wherever it moves us” (thank you, stel). This becomes the crux of the push and pull, ebb and flow, equal opposites.

I Saw The TV Glow grows into a brutal gut punch. Peppered with an eagle-eyed analysis of TV media and a message to those who struggle with dysphoria that even though it doesn’t really end, it can be made to reside elsewhere within our reality we create like elastic dead channels, broadcast static flowing through us until we flip away from it to clear ourselves, keep the darkness back until it snaps to a different direction. But until then we keep ourselves ready and armed, bathing in the light of the TV’s rays to catch our favorite late-night show.

I Saw The TV Glow is currently playing in theaters courtesy of A24.