When I was around preschool age, the TV show Might Morphin Power Rangers— which ran from 1993 to 1996— was huge in the circle of other kids I knew. My mom wouldn’t let me watch it, believing it was too scary. I was allowed, however, to watch Batman: The Animated Series, and that specific iteration of the Caped Crusader was my imaginary friend for a time— although in my brain, he might as well have been real. That line between reality and fiction is especially blurry when you are a young child, and confusing to revisit when you’re an adult. Nostalgia is a funny thing: when I see clips from that Power Rangers series now (I never fully got into it anyway, to be honest), it’s almost laughably cheesy, while when I rewatch Batman: TAS, I’m surprised by its frequently mature and dark themes, and that I was both permitted to watch it and that I loved it so much. And yet, both are irrevocably tied to my childhood, and, by extension, my identity. I recall sleepovers later, in elementary school, with my best friend at the time. Curled up on sleeping bags on the floor of her bedroom (she had a small TV in her room, which I thought was pretty darn cool), her younger brothers joined us to watch some sort of funky space alien TV show, which I remember next to nothing about beyond the flickering glow of the television screen illuminating the otherwise totally dark room, and her leaning over and whispering to me at some point how she just pretended to like this show for her brothers. There was a forbidden feeling to the activity, knowing that I was watching something without my parents’ approval in a place where they weren’t present to exercise their judgment over what media I could and couldn’t consume. I haven’t seen that friend since my family moved to another state after I finished fourth grade, but I’m connected with her on social media, and thought about reaching out to ask her if she remembers that show and what it was. I don’t speak with her frequently enough to feel comfortable doing that out of the blue, however, and I’m afraid she both won’t know the answer and will believe I’m, at best, mildly insane.
I’ve never seen capture these feelings about media nostalgia, how we process art, and how it shapes our identity, quite so acutely as Jane Schoenbrun does in I Saw the TV Glow. Maybe that’s at least partly because Schoenbrun, born three years before me, likely grew up engaging with the same or similar media that I did. Their film faithfully recreates the aesthetic of late 90s-early 2000s young adult television, from commercials centering around hot young stars that possess a distinct The WB (before it became the CW) vibe, to footage of a fictional supernatural TV show titled The Pink Opaque. The film quality is blurry and poor, the DIY creature effects endearingly corny (those, as well as the episode titles and plot lines that we catch glimpses of throughout the film, recalled the real-life spooky kids shows of my childhood, like Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark?). Of course, as anyone who has seen Schoenbrun’s 2021 debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair— which pulled from found footage films and creepypasta internet legends— will know, this is more than mere aping on a particular time and type of media, and while both films are widely labeled as psychological horror dramas, they’re more concerned with coming out and coming to terms with your identity in a world where you’re made to feel like you’re being shoved in a box, forced to conform with a system you don’t belong to.
The Pink Opaque is the catalyst for Owen (Justice Smith) to begin to reckon with these pieces of himself, even if he doesn’t know it. As an awkward and lonely seventh grader (played by Ian Foreman), he becomes enraptured by ads for the series, which is about two teenage girls who communicate with each other on a psychic plane and use their combined powers to fight evil— both the monster of the week, but also the series’ big bad, a man in the moon named Mr. Melancholy. However, the show airs at 10:30 on Saturday nights— past his bedtime, strictly enforced by his caring mother (Danielle Deadwyler) and much colder father (Fred Durst). So when he glimpses Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a ninth grader, at school reading an episode guide for the series, he’s immediately drawn to her. Maddy, similarly an outcast— her home life is fraught, her queerness isolates her from her one-time friends— begins making tapes of each episode for Owen, who finds a refuge from the real world in what he later calls his favorite show. But that’s just the beginning of their journey, which ultimately spans decades.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is the definition of a low budget, high concept movie: essentially two cast members, who we never see outside their respective rooms, accentuated by the occasional internet video. In comparison, the budget for Schoenbrun’s second, A24-distributed feature, is discernibly higher, from the big names in the cast and on the sad girl indie soundtrack (Phoebe Bridgers is both heard and seen in the film) to the time and location-spanning narrative. Their meticulous attention to detail is present in every inch every frame, crafting an atmosphere that is as gorgeous as it is unsettling. Neon lighting— often naturally stemming from the film’s locations, which include an arcade/fun center, movie theater, and of course, the television— casts stunning pink and green hues over its characters, and Eric K. Yue’s cinematography adeptly uses these locations to accentuate the characters’ isolation. So often, we view Owen from in a long shot, from a distance, as he travels through a carnival, or the hallways at school, or cleans up the movie theater he works at, these bustling locales that are typically places of joy serving as a further indicator of how out of place he feels.
Even more so than World’s Fair, there’s an unmistakable trans reading to I Saw the TV Glow. Some of this is literal (in the film’s opening minutes, young Owen wanders beneath a parachute at school that bears the colors of the transgender flag), but for the most part the movie’s themes manifest themselves in ways that are much— to borrow from the meaning of the word in the title of Owen’s favorite show— murkier and more difficult to parse through. At one point, sitting on the bleachers at school, Owen gets up the courage to ask Maddy if he can come to her house to watch The Pink Opaque. Maddy makes sure that Owen knows she likes girls, before asking him if he likes girls. He doesn’t know. Boys? He doesn’t know. “I think I like TV shows,” Owen ultimately responds. Television is not only a sanctuary, but an awakening; Sofi Marshall’s dreamy editing makes the question of whether or not Owen and Maddy are actually in the TV show— aligning Maddy with one of the lead characters, Tara, and Owen with another, Isabel— or if the show has crossed over into their reality, or something in between, that much more hazy. Lundy-Paine is wonderfully intense as Maddy; after one specific time jump, we’re left unsure of whether we should trust her, or how lucid her mind is. And Smith has never given a better performance as Owen, from his awkward, gangly posture and mannerisms and his penchant for avoiding eye contact to his soft tone of voice and the way he mumbles over words in a manner indicative of someone who has little confidence in what they are saying— or themself. The journey that Tara and Isabel venture on in the series finale of The Pink Opaque is one of transformation, one that Maddy urges Owen to embark on as well, but he’s hesitant— you could say even resistant— to take that step, to fully step into his true identity. It’s a choice that dictates the rest of his life, which by all appearances seems to be one of loneliness and despair. In one scene, Owen says that he has a family of his own, and that he loves them more than anything. But we never see or hear this family, and as he utters those words, he’s in the process of tossing out his old TV set and replacing it with a large, new LG flatscreen.
Admittedly, I wasn’t sure I liked Schoenbrun’s first film on first viewing; it took some time to unpack it and rewatch to fully wrap my head around its craft and its themes. While in contrast I immediately connected with I Saw the TV Glow (as a mediation on media nostalgia, but particularly the type of media I’m nostalgic for, it’s nearly impossible for me not to) it’s an even richer text that similarly demands more time and more rewatches, especially the film’s second half, which delves deeper into increasingly surreal imagery that is often downright Lynchian. But it’s from within these weird nooks and crannies— burning television sets, sinister ice-cream trucks, and moon-faced monsters— that I Saw the TV Glow excavates its most brutal and tender truths.
I Saw the TV Glow is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 100 minutes. Rated PG-13.
Katie at the Movies 