I watch a lot of movies and TV. Most of it is not something I think about much afterwards, even if it’s something great. But I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbraum’s second feature, is a movie that haunted me for at least a week. Maybe it’s because I was a little sleep-deprived, but it cut me deep, and I would find myself remembering random scenes at some part of the day.
To briefly summarize (and I would recommend watching the movie if you’re at all interested), I Saw the TV Glow is told from the perspective of Owen, a socially awkward teenager who becomes obsessed with a young-adult fantasy show called The Pink Opaque, about two girls with psychic powers who fight evil. Owen bonds with an older girl, Maddy, over their mutual love of the show, until Maddy runs away from home. Years later, Maddy returns, claiming that the TV show is actual reality, and that they are the two girls, drugged and put into a banal, life-sapping “nightmare realm.” To awaken, they must bury themselves alive in this world. Owen flees, and never sees Maddy again, instead living an unfulfilled life working at a nightmarish “funplex.”
First and foremost, I Saw the TV Glow is a transgender allegory. Schoenbaum is a trans woman, and the text is not particularly subtle, showing a young Owen up against a parachute with the colours of the trans flag, and an older one wearing a dress as part of envisioning himself as one of The Pink Opaque’s female characters – the one that, according to Maddy, he secretly is. There are other fairly obviously allegorical references, such as the “moon juice” the girls are fed as a symbol of testosterone. By showcasing Owen’s sad life after rejecting Maddy’s vision, TV Glow is a polemic in favour of coming out of the closet, of embracing the life you want no matter how terrifying it may seem.
Of course, as a polemic TV Glow necessarily communicates in exaggerations. To transition is to become not just a woman but a magical teenage girl, the type of person TV shows are made about, while to stay in the closet is to live one of the most depressing lives ever put to film. (Justice Smith does a fantastic job portraying Owen as a person fundamentally terrified of being in their own body.) The final sequence, with an Owen in his 50s still working at the nightmarish Funplex, is devastating but at times feels as if it’s more expressing the horror of working retail than gender dysphoria. Would the film be more politically coherent if it showed Owen living a conventionally successful life but still feeling miserable? At one point Owen mentions having a family of his own – would his life still seem so pointless and wasted if we saw, say, his daughter’s college graduation?
It’s precisely the imprecision and messiness of this metaphor that makes TV Glow such a deeply affecting film instead of a merely didactic one. At some point, the idea of feeling that TV and media are more real than your real life is something that a lot of people can relate to. I’m especially interested in the character of Maddy, who is textually gay but doesn’t change gender when transferring to the world of The Pink Opaque. Is she a female to female transsexual? Or is there more than one kind of transition or transformation that can be signified here?
It is here, perhaps, that I should start spilling my guts on the table, as this film compels you to do. I was a weird, autistic kid, and I was obsessed with fantasy books and TV shows. My Pink Opaque was a bunch of different shows over the years, mostly anime, but my #1 was probably the first three seasons of Digimon, the first show in which I ventured into “fandom” at an entirely too young age. In Digimon, unlike its frequent point of comparison Pokemon, kids are dragged through a portal into a parallel digital world, where they are paired with transforming monsters and eventually tasked with saving the world.
I was obsessed with stories like this, where seemingly mundane children are either transported to a magical world or live an exciting double life. A huge number of children’s books and media draw on exactly this fantasy, with Harry Potter being the most successful. Even though I could always tell fact from fiction, part of me was still waiting to spot that magic portal or mysterious stranger so that my true destiny would begin. When I was thirteen, I realized that I had sort of aged out of the magic portal demographic, and promptly began a lifelong battle with depression.
As you get older, you develop slightly more realistic fantasies, but one in which you’re still a very important person, known to many. In my mind I have a full head of hair, am a successful writer whose opinions matter to people, still in my 20s and with an active sex life. I often see myself in the mirror and experience a sense of shock that this person has been trapped in the body of a pudgy, bald man in his mid-30s. I don’t think I’m trans, but I can strongly relate to the feeling of wanting to be someone else.
Ultimately, the apotheosis promised by Maddy, of awakening to discover that you are as beautiful and important as the TV characters you obsessed over, is indeed a kind of fantasy. There’s a reason why the film has Owen refuse to go through with the transformation, and never shows us what becomes of Maddy afterwards. An idyllic resolution would completely set off the balance of the film. In your life you can become a man or a woman or any number of other things, but one thing you will never become is a fictional character. Most of your life will still be mundane and tedious.
However, I Saw The TV Glow is also not a movie about “the dangers of nostalgia”, as many early reviews phrased it. If it was just about resisting the allure of the past, then Owen’s refusal would be presented as a happy ending instead of devastating. Rather, the film suggests that our nostalgia is in some sense a link to our true selves, our memory of a more vulnerable and idealistic persona buried under layers of realism and bitterness. You might not end up as part of the Pink Opaque, but everyone needs to do a little digging sometimes.