Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on massive television.
There are times when I watch something, and I realize I am not the target audience. I felt this significantly with a number of Blaxploitation films from the 1970s. I felt it culturally when I watched Celine and Julie Go Boating. In a lot of cases, these are movies that I liked, but I felt like there was something there that was preventing me from fully getting the sense that the filmmaker intends. That’s definitely the case with I Saw the TV Glow.
What is the deal here? This is very clearly and very obviously a movie about someone coming to term with (allegorically in the sense of the movies) with being transgender. The film is very much about living a lie and living your own personal truth regardless of the consequences and despite the risks. I certainly have felt this way in some respects, like the world that we live in is broken and that I was supposed to be something other than what I am, but at least I feel at home in my own body. Because of this, while I can appreciate and understand I Saw the TV Glow, I don’t know that I can fully understand it at its deepest level.
Owen (Ian Foreman initially and then Justice Smith) is an isolated and lonely teen who encounters Maddy (Jack Haven, but under their former name Brigette Lundy-Paine). Maddy is also relatively isolated. She tells Owen about a television show called The Pink Opaque. We get a few details of the show. From what we get (and this is verified by director Jane Schoenbrun), it’s a great deal like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with elements of The X-Files and The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and perhaps a touch of Power Rangers.
Owen’s life is fairly rigid and his parents keep a tight leash on him, not allowing him to watch the show, which airs at 10:30 PM on Saturdays. Maddy creates tapes of the show for him to watch, though, and the two continue to bond over it, and over what feels like the disaster that is their everyday lives. Maddy’s step-father is abusive and Owen’s mother dies of cancer, leaving him with a father who is unattached and distant, and who seems to be slipping into a sort of depression. Maddy is desperate to leave their town and demands that Owen come with her, but he decides to stay. Maddy vanishes, and almost at the exact same time, The Pink Opaque is cancelled.
Owen’s life falls into a holding pattern, with him working at a local movie theater, when suddenly Maddy shows up again, telling him that for almost the last decade, she has been living inside the show that they used to watch. She is one of the main characters of the show and Owen is the other, and they need to find a way to escape the world they are in now and get back to their own reality, the one depicted on the television show that they used to watch.
The set up of >I Saw the TV Glow is a good one. It’s just upsetting enough, and Maddy’s obsession is just unhinged enough that it feels like Own might be either on the verge of a true epiphany or at the precipice of something very dangerous. This is a horror movie in the sense Owen and Maddy are living through something cosmically existential that threatens their lives and sanity. There are no monsters here, at least not really. What there is for these two characters is an existence that feels wrong, a world that feels broken, and a desire to leave without having the necessary power to do so.
It's a great metaphor for what the film is trying to depict. Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun identifies as non-binary and as using they/them pronouns, which certainly makes this feel like a personal film. This is something that star Jack Haven almost certainly feels as well.
The film has a lovely surreality to it that I tend to like a great deal. This is a film that feels not quite like loss, but like being unable to have something that you have always wanted, to be missing a piece of yourself through no fault of your own. That’s certainly intentional—Maddy to some extent and especially Owen are unsure where they fit or how they fit in the world. Owen may be asexual to some extent in the film. But both of these character are likeable in the sense that we want them to be able to break away from the world they are living in, and we’re just as frustrated by the fear that is holding them back.
It seems natural that right now, in the world we live in, that people would be making art that tells the world they refuse to hide. I support that, even if I can only really deeply understand this film just as far as my experiences will allow me to.
Why to watch I Saw the TV Glow: It taps into a sense of something that almost everyone has felt, at least a little.
Why not to watch: There is an audience this is made for, and if it’s not you, you may like this movie but you won’t fully understand it.
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