I Saw the TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun’s second narrative feature is a gnawing search for belonging in the static spaces between analog pixels. They stir dreamlike logic into scavenged memories, especially in a scene early in the film that grasps at how the medium of television’s celestial radiance can grant wide-eyed salvation in even the darkest room. A young Owen (Ian Foreman) gains permission from his mother Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler) to ostensibly sleepover at a classmate’s house. Instead, he ventures across manicured suburban lawns at night to visit Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a cynical older girl he only just met at school, and Maddy’s friend, who are watching the teen show “The Pink Opaque” on the Young Adult Network. Twist curls and a beaming smile mark Owen’s innocence, as well as his obvious desire for friendship and community. As surreal images of the show’s grotesque monsters and slippery mythology wisp pass him, he isn’t afraid. He is enthralled. That dopamine surge of recognition haunts Owen, and it’s one of the film’s many telling moments that has persistently beckoned me to return. 

“I Saw the TV Glow” mostly takes place during Owen’s older teenage years, when arresting questions of identity, sexuality, and personhood often occur with urgency. A transformative Justice Smith takes the reins of Owen, playing this outcast with the wounded rawness of a permanent scar. Owen’s young adult years are stained by personal loss and his on-again, off-again friendship with Maddy, which takes shape through and around their shared love of “The Pink Opaque,” a show that feels like a throwback to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The show provides a window into the crushing angst Owen feels but cannot name, while his direct addresses offer intermittent grounding for his self-sabotaging. The push-pull manages to lull the viewer into a quiet trance before unmooring them into a state of unbridled panic.     

Whether he knows it or not, from the moment he first catches sight of Maddy reading an episode guide to “The Pink Opaque,” Owen is searching for himself. Though his late-night visit to Maddy’s house is initially a one-off, his fascination with the show hasn’t diminished when he reconnects with her two years later. Rather than sneaking out to Maddy’s place, she leaves him VHS recordings of the episodes, with titles like “Homecoming to Get You” and “The Trouble with Tara Part 1” scribbled in pink ink, in their school’s dark room for Owen to find. Owen passionately watches these installments to the point of barely breathing, digging deeper and deeper into himself and the series’ mythology. 

As a story within the story, “The Pink Opaque” is equally unshakable: Its premise involves two telepathically linked girls (played by Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) fighting villains dispatched by the big bad, a malformed monster in the shape of a moon named Mr. Melancholy, on a weekly basis. Schoenbrun films these episodes with a winking playfulness that initially suggests a kind of silly pastiche before softly revealing deeper, abstract truths about Owen and Maddy. In the show, Owen and Maddy see their mundane suburb, whose assimilative conventionality of gender norms and atrophied dreams is itself suffocating, reflected back at them through a queer lens. “What about you? Do you like girls?” Maddy asks Owen on the school bleachers. “I don’t know,” a shy Owen replies. “Boys?” presses Maddy. “I think I like TV shows,” delivers an unvarnished Smith. “When I think about that stuff, I feel like someone took a shovel and dug out my insides. I know there’s nothing there, but I’m still too nervous to open myself up to check.”