Teens find a TV world where they fit in better
Nostalgia and horror combine in an imaginative trans allegory
On its staticky, colorwashed surface, “I Saw the TV Glow” plays like a dark comedy — or a darker, cautionary horror story — about getting too into a cult television series. It’s imaginative media criticism, but there’s more going on in this never-quite-coming-ofage tale: Questions about gender, memory and time lurk behind the film’s alluring shimmer.
The movie’s protagonists — Owen (played as a boy by Ian Foreman and by Justice Smith as an older teen and adult) and Maddy (Alameda-raised Brigette Lundy-Paine, best known for “Atypical”) — are emotionally ill-equipped to be their true selves and too addled by pop culture to connect with reality. Both are obsessive fans of a scary young adult show called “The Pink Opaque.” At least one of them believes the Midnight Realm, the program’s fictional purgatory, is a real place. Both definitely feel stuck in their own ungratifying limbo.
It’s heartbreaking, and lots of weird fun.
This second film feature from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is a big leap forward from their 2021 “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” Unlike that tale of disturbing internet video interactions, “TV Glow” was shot on rich 35mm film stock, with its “Pink Opaque” scenes transferred to VHS to lend them a 1990s broadcast look. The suburban world Owen and Maddy feel so out of sync with, seen mostly at night, flickers with blue, magenta and sickly green light. It’s unnerving, yet mesmerizing, like a small-screen nightmare that won’t let your psyche go.
Owen is two years younger than Maddy, a goth loner he meets at Void High School in 1996. An asthmatic introvert who’s not allowed to stay up late, Owen soon deceives his parents (Danielle Deadwyler from “Till,” Fred Durst from the ’90s nu metal band Limp Bizkit) in order to watch “Pink Opaque” with the girl he looks up to, in Maddy’s basement on Saturday nights.
As they grow older, Maddy makes sure that Owen understands she likes only women. Asked about his preferences, Owen answers “TV shows,” then adds that he thinks there’s something wrong inside him. That’s a key revelation; while there are a few shots of Maddy getting him to wear a dress, whatever Owen is deep down will be repressed for the rest of his life. Smith’s Owen (the “Jurassic World” sequels), who also acts as an unreliable narrator, often sounds like he’s about to sob.
Close relationships disappear, television sets burn and videotapes become holy relics. A head is devoured by a sparking cathode ray tube in the film’s most emblematic scene. The town’s safe space — where
Maddy and Owen discuss mad, forbidden adventures — is a dive bar with sultry, sinister music acts (Phoebe Bridgers, Caroline Polachek and San Francisco band King Woman are among them).
For cineasts, it all evokes David Lynch and ’90s Todd Haynes. That decade’s TV kids will get the “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” references.
Nonbinary Schoenbrun was hardly the only trans youth who found solace in outsider characters on the tube. Yet, as deeply and
personally nostalgic as “TV Glow” is, it’s hugely skeptical of how we remember our disposable amusements. The film’s most astute, if playful, point may be how faulty recall can warp both individual lives and the wider, ever-mutating culture.
There’s a point where Owen explains that he outgrew “The Pink Opaque” and started a family that he loves more than anything. We never see any of those people, but we do notice that he replaced his old, boxy TV set with a flat screen that one could virtually crawl into.