At the premiere of “I Saw the TV Glow,” director Jane Schoenbrun (“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”) prefaced the film with, “If you don’t relate to this movie, you probably had a better childhood than me.” Their lighthearted joke did little to prepare the audience for how visceral that childhood experience would become. Like any great artist, they make this experience so insulating that every viewer can find some part of themselves reaching out to pull them into the screen.
Through the vehicle of Owen (Justice Smith, “All the Bright Places”), a lonely young TV lover, and the bond he forms with eccentric classmate Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, “Atypical”), Schoenbrun constructs a chaotic descent into the suffocating experience of gender dysphoria. With both unable to feel at home in their bodies or their small town, they retreat into themselves before finding a small grace in their connection. Owen and Maddy’s shared love of a campy, fictionalized, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-esque TV show called “The Pink Opaque” may border on obsession, but it binds them together through its offer of a vicarious existence free from the lonely pretense of their realities.
“The Pink Opaque” is every escapist’s obvious fantasy: a magical world where you and your best friend fight an evil moon monster through the power of friendship. It’s an homage to fandom-obsessed kids everywhere. For Owen and Maddy, it goes beyond that. The show’s Queer subtext provides a safe space for them to explore their Queer identity without the judgment of their suffocating town. In their adolescence, this exploration lives through their secret videotape exchanges of weekly episodes, dress-up fashion shows and secret sleepovers. Moments like these are where they connect authentically, and through that, learn to connect with themselves in a way that their external environment will not allow.
Sequences of that connection are lit with a neon hue, a nod to the technicolor majesty of kitschy ’90s television. As a bright spot against the drab, gray colors of the real world, the glow of the TV on Owen and Maddy’s faces practically projects a vision of who they could be like a divine revelation of identity. Of course, Maddy and Owen are exactly like Amanda and Isabel from “The Pink Opaque,” tied irrevocably through their unbreakable bond. There’s a romantic subtext to both these relationships, of a struggle against a world that will not accept them. It’s no wonder they love it so much: It tells them they aren’t as alone as they feel.
Owen’s dad doesn’t want him watching the show because, well, “Isn’t that for girls?” Small lines like this play a huge role in shaping the futures of young Queer people, and Owen is no different. Hearing these words makes Owen shove his self-expression down, choosing to fade into the lifeless, gray background rather than take up technicolor space. Maddy, however, refuses to let her small town suffocate her into ignoring her identity. Before she runs away, she invites Owen to join her and form their own little Pink Opaque. Owen, more terrified of the unknown than the vice-like grip of their lonely, unaccepting town, stays stagnant in the same house at the same job with the same show.
Years go by in seconds, seconds extend for long minutes. The film loses all sense of time by the second act. It’s an uncertainty that pulls the viewer out of the story, which, up until the third act, is largely taken up by stretched empty stares and monotone melancholic dialogue. Schoenbrun describes this choice to play with the pacing as a nod to the perception of “trans girl time,” the incongruent journey through which gender identity is discovered and solidified. When Maddy returns, now in her 20s with a mysterious aloofness painting her long monologues, the film takes a sharp turn. Until now, most of its horror has been in slow, ominous moments hinting toward something bigger. We have now gotten to something bigger. The explosion of heavy metal music (which I was delightedly surprised to see Phoebe Bridgers and Sloppy Jane performing diegetically) tells us that there will be no return to the silence of before. Music serves as the only real expression of Owen’s rage and despair throughout the film. It externalizes the energy he suppresses, creating an atmosphere of misaligned action and the emotions driving them.
The film begins to blend fantasy and reality to a mind-boggling degree. Maddy returns, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. She pleads with him to join her, to accept himself, in a long, neon technicolor monologue that toes the line between a haunting descent into madness and the ramblings of a specter haunting their shell. Lundy-Paine’s performance carries the entire sequence solidly, turning a moment that could easily have been an exposition dump into the solidly nuanced climax of the film. Maddy convinces Owen for a moment and even makes the audience wonder if she might be telling the truth, to root for her to get them back to who they’re supposed to be, even while never being sure those people really existed.
For Owen to go with her would mean mustering the courage to stop hiding. To leave behind the only world he’s ever known, despite how long he’s languished there. His father’s words echo louder in his head than the heavy metal. But, he knows it’s not right. He bashes his head into the TV before being dragged out of the broken screen as his visceral screams of “I don’t belong here!” ring through over and over again. The film’s body horror proclaims his anguish, turning the internal pain of dysphoria into a physical reality when he literally pries his chest open to reveal technicolor neon lights shining out. It’s gory and terrifying, but cathartic and freeing all the same. It’s always been in there, and now it can finally find its way out.
“I Saw the TV Glow” uses the staples of its genre to translate the feeling of discomfort and insecurity onto screen. By the end of the film, I was sobbing and gasping for breath through my tears, which I imagine was Schoenbrun’s goal all along, transplanting the characters’ emotions into the audience with expert precision. Their understanding of fan culture and the importance of visual media in the culmination of identity blends beautifully with the themes they disseminate through them. It’s stylistically stunning with a killer soundtrack to boot, and I’ll be running headfirst back into that screen the first chance I get.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.