They can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them.
Jane Schoenbrun is interested in the power of screens. Their debut featureWe’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a coming-of-age narrative where isolated teen Casey (Anna Cobb) connects with a bizarre viral website purporting to change her physical and mental state through an arcane ritual. Their sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow is more unravelling-of-age for Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy Wilson (Brigitte Lundy-Payne) as the two create a shared language around a supernatural teen network show named The Pink Opaque.
It’s 1996 and a young Owen (Ian Foreman) goes to Void High School in ‘nowhere special’ suburban America. He’s in seventh grade when he first meets Maddy. She’s forbidding, dressed in black, and reading the episode guide for The Pink Opaque. In a move that probably surprises himself, Owen speaks to her. “That looks like the best book ever.” In ninth grade Maddy calls Owen a baby – but softens when she sees how easily hurt he is.
She asks if Owen has seen the show. “Only the advertisements. It’s a show for kids, yeah?”, he replies. “It’s way too scary, and the mythology is way too complicated for most kids,” Maddy insists. It’s on the Young Adult Network but late at night. 10.30pm, the last show before the channel goes into black and white re-runs for old people. Owen laments he’s not allowed to stay up that late, but Maddy has an idea.
Owen asks his mother Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler) if he can have a sleepover at Johnny Quick’s house. Brenda is surprised as she doesn’t think Owen is friends with him any longer. Brenda suggests Owen asks his father, Frank (Fred Durst) but he demurs. Frank will only speak one sentence in the film, a sentence telling all about why Owen doesn’t communicate with his father.
The ruse is set. Owen takes his pink (then purple, then blue) sleeping bag to Maddy’s house where he watches his first episode of The Pink Opaque, where an ice cream cone is the monster of the week. Two teens, willowy Isabel (Helena Howard) and kick-ass Tara (Lindsey Jordan), connected by their psychic powers, fight monsters sent by Mr. Melancholy who wants to trap them in the Midnight Realm. Owen doesn’t get it, but he gets what it means to Maddy, especially when she expresses that “Sometimes The Pink Opaque feels more real than my own life, you know?” Maddy is also the first person who has looked him in the eyes and told him to stop apologising.
Two years pass and Owen hasn’t had the courage to speak with Maddy since he stayed over that first night, but they’ve been communicating via The Pink Opaque which Maddy leaves taped copies of in the school’s darkroom for him. With those tapes are notes where Maddy talks about each episode and draws pictures, all beautifully animated on screen as Owen walks through the most horrifically generic school corridors imaginable.
“Tara + Isabel”
“We have to stop Mr. Melancholy.”
“It’s like the Drain Eaters; they can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them.”
Their shared obsession for the show provides comfort and a distraction from the burdens of the real world; Owen’s mother has cancer, Maddy’s mother is absent, and her stepfather is violent. The Pink Opaque is a clear riff on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with its dark fantasy acting as metaphors for adolescence, monsters-of-the-week, and teen hangout “Double Lunch” substituting “The Bronze”. The connection is apt, as Buffy had many young queer people realising their identities and power through the fandom. Schoenbrun adds to the connection by casting Amber Benson (Tara Maclay from Buffy) in a small cameo.
Owen is stiff, his voice caught in his chest, as if he is being squeezed from the inside. When he finally reconnects with Maddy in person, she is more isolated than ever, thanks to malicious rumours spread by friend former friend Amanda (Emma Portner).
Owen asks if they can watch The Pink Opaque together at her house again. Maddy tells him she does actually like girls and asks him who he prefers. Owen replies with “I think I like TV shows,” saying that thinking about anything along those lines makes him feel like something is wrong with him, and that he knows his parents think so too. “Maybe you’re like Isabel. Afraid of what’s inside you,” Maddy replies.
Once again, Maddy and Owen are lit by the screen of The Pink Opaque. Their connection frightens Owen when Maddie draws the show’s signature ghost tattoo on his neck and tells him she’s leaving town before it kills her. Without her, there’ll be no one to watch the show with. She wants him to come with her, but he panics – he wants to stay at home and scrubs the ink off his skin. Within the next few weeks, Owen’s mother dies, Maddy disappears leaving only a burning television, and The Pink Opaque is cancelled.
Owen’s life fast forwards but he stays still. Eight years later he’s working in the local cinema. He comes home to his father sitting silently on the couch watching television. Owen refuses to look people in the eyes, and even when the streets are covered in the ghost symbols from The Pink Opaque, he doesn’t see it. When a downed powerline stops his car (his mother’s car) and pages from The Pink Opaque episode guide are scattered on the road in front of him, he doesn’t see.
Maddy’s sudden reappearance pushes Owen into a new panic as she explains (at the real “Double Lunch”) how everything he has refused to look at and remember is real. He’s dying and he doesn’t know it. He’s in the Midnight Realm. She offers him another escape, but it requires a death to find life. Owen once again refuses, and she leaves. Yet he wonders,
What if I was someone else? Someone beautiful and powerful. Someone buried alive and suffocating to death, very far away on the other side of the television screen. But I know that’s not true. That’s fantasy.
Jane Schoenbrun pours the disorientation of gender dysphoria into an unstable reality where the suburbs are static voids. Pushing through the homogeneity is something terrifying, fantastic, and true – but to find it requires breaking free of all the repression of self. Survival is escaping into media that seems not only made for you but also of you; from a part of yourself you can’t express beyond a yearning familiarity. The evil of Mr. Melancholy is he makes wishes come true, but those wishes are twisted nightmares never vanquished.
Owen grows old like the DVD skipping chapters which Maddy described. He hollows, he wheezes, he never breathes, and he is surrounded by the febrile symbols of unrealised self. What is inside him are transmitted signals of a supernatural fiction that he idealised and later despised. Schoenbrun creates layers of The Pink Opaque – the teen television show he was too young to encounter and understand until given the key by Maddy. A show that Maddy was perhaps too old for but clung to anyway – plunging herself into its mythos because she needed to escape the droning pull of queer pain.
Neither Owen nor Maddy grew up. He never left the house he grew up in and his job was to facilitate entertainment for others. A cinema where he never looks at the screen, and a Fun Center where the games are avatars of that cursed and beloved show’s world.
Maddy changed her name and got as far as a larger city but ended up working in a mall constructing toys. She died in the real world and found herself in the ‘real’ of the show where, as Tara, she had to rescue her Isabel (Owen). When Owen watches the show again after deciding he will ‘grow up’, it is cheap and embarrassing.
The layers of The Pink Opaque stretch into the suburbs, to the bleachers of Void High School, and to the outskirts of the town where the show is real. The Double Lunch club exists, “THERE IS STILL TIME” is written on the street, the community awaits the return of Owen and Maddy, but Owen still can’t see it.
The television glow shapes Owen’s face into Isabel’s as he watches her being crushed, emptied, and buried alive by Mr. Melancholy – the moon-faced creature with Owen’s strangled voice. Time and reality are altered. Somewhere an ice cream van emits a sickening aura. Owen dressed in Isabel’s pink dress smiles at Maddy as they walk across the empty football field at night – Isabel walks the same field. Schoenbrun fills the frame with unrelenting unease in a suburbia only lit by wan neon at night – but where the colours of the trans flag envelop Owen for brief moments of unnoticed respite.
I Saw the TV Glow is both intimate and distant. Schoenbrun’s Owen is an unreliable narrator for their own life as well as the narrator of the film, staring into the camera telling his story, as was prophesised by Maddy. His story is a confused and desperate fiction that somehow he can be Owen and still resist the slow and too-fast death as the years pass. Maddy’s story is one of transition, where they gain themselves by transcending the person they were, returning only once to gather up their found family.
Jane Schoenbrun’s film resists easy categorisation. There are elements of horror and depending on the viewer they may exist at different moments in the film. Schoenbrun isn’t judging their protagonists for the choices made and not made. Rather they are speaking to dysphoria and atomisation, where a person can be so afraid to be that they rewind every moment of becoming and undo it. Owen felt tied to ‘home’ – the house a metonymy for biological family. Could Owen have made different choices, even there in the small suburb? That is something someone outside of Owen’s experience cannot judge.
I Saw the TV Glow is a visual farrago where Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue merge their polished but lo-fi ‘real world’ weird suburbia with the grainy VHS and network television aesthetic of the mid and late 1990s, weaving in references to long forgotten shows. Like Owen and Maddy, the audience experiences an off-kilter merging of scrambled signals and static, where Tara, Isabel, Maddy, and Owen exist and do not exist.
I Saw the TV Glow shortens and extends time; it circles back on itself as it moves forward creating a loop of always and never. Jane Schoenbrun’s art is singular and strange, seducing the eye and the mind to hone in on their frequency. I Saw the TV Glow crackles on a wavelength of originality and purpose.
Writer and director: Jane Schoenbrun
Starring: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Payne, Danielle Deadwyler, and Fred Durst
I Saw the TV Glow screened as part of the 2024 Melbourne International Film Festival, and is now playing in Australian cinemas.
