Review: I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

The horror of the suburbs for queer young people defeats the beauty you can find there

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in “I Saw the TV Glow”

CW: The film contains references to and depictions of self-harm and attempts at suicide.

---

“I Saw the TV Glow” is a horror-adjacent teen angst movie about a friendship between the protagonist, Owen, and their¹ two-years-older lesbian neighbor. The two attend the same public suburban school, starting when Owen is in 7th grade (played at this age by Ian Foreman) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) is in 9th. They meet when Owen notices Maddy sitting alone on the dark floor of the cafeteria reading — they recognize a fellow loner. What Maddy is reading is the offcial episode guide for a TV show called “The Pink Opaque,” in which two girls meet at summer camp and then “on the astral plane” where they battle absurd monsters-of-the-week under the control of archenemy Mister Melancholy.

Maddy identifies with one of the show’s main characters to the point of obsession. Just to become friends — and more importantly to venture, seemingly for the first time, into the mind and passions of another person — the desperately lonely Owen allows Maddie to initiate them into the show’s mysteries.

Like any such show that has the capacity to fascinate adolescents, “The Pink Opaque” suggests much more than it actually contains, using its viewers’ malleable minds and fertile imaginations to imbue its characters, stories, and struggles with power, meaning, and world-changing implications. In the pre-internet times of the early 90s, when the film is set, such involvement is a spiritual experience that binds its fans together, without exploiting them into buying merch or subscribing to anything. This emotional investment enables viewers to identify with the show’s cosmology to the point where it can become an alternative to that of the real world and/or the religious cosmology that children were raised with. “Didn’t you feel,” Maddy asks Owen when they’re in their twenties, “that it was more than a TV show?” — that it was the true depiction of the world and the hidden battles between good and evil that animate it?

In order to answer the question, Owen demands that Maddy — who has suddenly reappeared a decade after the night “The Pink Opaque” broadcast its last episode and she burned the family TV in her backyard and vanished — explain where she’s been for the last ten years. In the meantime, Owen has left behind the world of “The Pink Opaque” and its characters’ supernatural struggles, though they still miss Maddy. They are patching together the life of a grown person, though they still live in the same suburban house (their parents having died) and work in the Fun Center where they spent their teenage years playing arcade games. They’ve never made another friend, much less a romantic relationship,² and, without Maddy, are desperately lonely.

To describe how Maddy answers Owen’s question, I would have to jump far ahead to the film’s last sequence. Before I do that, I should make clear that the film spends its whole middle section following events in Owen’s life as they enter high school (played from this point onward by an older actor, Justice Smith), as Maddy mysteriously vanishes from the scene, and as they enter into life as a young adult. These scenes do much to illuminate the pain and loneliness of a queer person who has no one to turn to, who must endure the maddening discomfort of living like a stranger from a strange land, whose relationship with one’s parents disintegrates in their lack of interest and understanding, with actual understanding less believable as a fantasy than a TV show that offers even a fantastic alternate explanation for why life sucks.

In the middle of the film comes a scene in a small rock club where a band — Sloppy Jane feat. Phoebe Bridgers³ — performs a gorgeous synth-folk-rock number, “Claw Machine,” its first lyrics echoing the film’s title. I think we glimpse Owen during this scene, but it doesn’t seem key to the plot; it’s more an emotional anchor for a film that has the soundtrack of the year. Every single number on the soundtrack — check YouTube for a playlist — perfectly captures the weirdness of suburban teenage life. And in a way that highlights its beauty as well.

(Plot spoilers follow.)

So at the end of the movie when Maddy, still utterly in thrall to the fan obsession she inhabited when last seen, narrates a terrifying story of entering the world of “The Pink Opaque” and, in an insane effort to somehow save the show’s heroines — who in the last episode of the show are defeated by their archenemy — has herself literally buried alive, Owen is, along with us, horrified. It’s not real, Owen tells her. It was just a TV show for teenagers.

Maddy, though, has gone around the bend. She insists that the only way forward is for both of them to be buried alive, together. So the difference between the two finally emerges. While Owen is deeply maladjusted and doesn’t show any ability to emerge from their utterly alienated place in society, Maddy is simply insane.

As much as we’re relieved that Owen has enough sense to break from Maddy at this point, this is where the script breaks down. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has clearly devoted years to this allegory of queer alienation. The film is sharp and unflinching in its depiction of queer young people marooned in a heteronormal suburban purgatory, where the only thing that keeps you going is fantasy. But there is, however, obscured to its denizens, an escape route that leads to San Francisco or Portland or New York or any damn city worth the name. You wait until you can find this escape, and you take it. It might be called college or the military or a hopped freight train or a thumbed ride or a sugar daddy or a Greyhound bus. Even the most dangerous or abusive of these alternatives lands you in a city where you can find other people like yourself, an alternative culture, or even, if you’re fortunate, social services to help you survive your arrival.

“I Saw the TV Glow” offers no outs, but leaves Owen, after they abandon Maddy to her insanity, in the same hell as they ever were. Getting free from Maddy doesn’t allow Owen to leave the suburb as well. Instead, friendless and alone in a heterosexual nightmare, singing an inane “Happy Birthday” to some child at the arcade until they have a breakdown right there in the black-lit snack room, Owen is unsaved. I admire the unswerving dedication by the filmmakers to this nightmarish vision, but it isn’t necessary or, in this day, realistic.

Compare this ending to that of “The People’s Joker” (2023), another horror-adjacent, debut film by a transperson about transpeople. In that film, the protagonist goes through their own breakup with their jekyll-hyde lover, but it leads to liberation. I mentioned the movie’s gorgeous musical soundtrack; that’s the closest the movie comes to delivering freedom. I know not every movie can have a happy ending, and that the horror genre has its own requirements to leave its viewers in hell — they wouldn’t have bought a ticket if they didn’t want to go there — but there is so much beauty in this movie accompanying the horror that I thought Owen deserved one, and I think the viewers do too.

1. I’m using they/their pronouns because the character seems asexual; this impression is strengthened when Maddy asks Owen whether they like girls or boys and they answer: “. . . I think I like TV shows.” Owen’s ambivalance or asexuality seems like a deliberate choice on the part of writer-director Schoenbrun, who is trans.

2. I say this despite Owen saying, in narration, that they “have a family,” which in context suggests nothing less than a primary family with whom they live and foster primary relationships. Perhaps I misunderstood, but we are never shown or told who the members of this family are. It’s possible that Owen is referring, in queer terms, to a family of choice, but again there is no evidence of any close relationship, even to a community.

3. “I Saw The TV Glow Director Talks Getting Its Phoebe Bridgers Cameo, And Who They Approached First For Banger ‘Teen Angst’ Soundtrack,” by Cinema Blend’s Sara Al-Mahmoud, republished on MSN (https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/other/i-saw-the-tv-glow-director-talks-getting-its-phoebe-bridgers-cameo-and-who-they-approached-first-for-banger-teen-angst-soundtrack)