I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Let’s start with the palette: purple, pink, red, black. Eerie, beautiful, uncanny arcade ambience. Aglow. It’s clear we are in a realm of magical possibility. Those of us who have lived through a serial TV show or band or movie franchise will feel at home with the budding friendship between Owen and Maddy, based as it is on The Pink Opaque, an elusive half-hour series that airs Saturday nights at 10:30¹. But that sense of home is always deferred. Owen’s bedtime is always before the show comes on—which happens when your dad is Fred Durst—even as a couple years go by and he’s allowed to stay up a few minutes later. The show runs for 5 seasons, but it’s always sort of out of reach, half there even in its weekly run time. Maddy is guarded, keeping her distance despite the companionship of the show, which they share via twee-adorned VHS tapes of the program, and the occasional covert Saturday sleepover watch party—monumental events for Owen that feel as sweet and tortured as everything else we see about his life.² Everything the film gives us is shrouded in unmet need. There is real respect and understanding between Owen and Maddy, but they live in different worlds that intersect only in a basement, in the eerie glow of a TV or aquarium, on an empty football field or in an abandoned gymnasium or a bar half in the other world. Those of us who have lived through serial media know what it’s like to want so badly to go there, and to get closer to that impossible transport with someone else who has the same desire affixed to the same cultural object. It’s an unstable alliance. Cultural objects are volatile in the world’s marketplace, and in the context of our experiences. And people change or disappear. Owen, though, stays. Not in the The Pink Opaque, but in the suburbs, in the uncanny arcade, in the shifting tides of mediated time. There is a deep trans melancholy to this film, and other commentators are speaking eloquently to that. My own gender dysphoria is certainly touched by this film, particularly in the scene on the bleachers. I’ll linger in that conversation for years, probably, caught in the furtive glances Maddy and Owen give each other as they discuss the ways they feel strange in the world. In particular, the swerve from Maddy apparently rebuffing Owen—I like girls, do you like girls, or do you like boys?—to Owen’s response that he likes TV shows strikes a deep chord with me, and I’ll be working that out for a while. Owen appears to be asexual, but it’s telling that his sexual preference is replaced by TV.³ When, after watching the show together, Maddy disrobes Owen from behind to draw a ghost on the back of his neck, it’s a moment of intimacy that feels on the verge of becoming something else, and we are fortunate that this director lets it be what it is, while Owen catches his breath. He likes TV. It’s a funny, charming, exquisitely awkward moment, and we feel for Owen, who is suffering through the conversation—There’s something wrong with me and my parents know it. (Forgive my paraphrased dialogue.) And for those of us who are queer in other ways, Owen and Maddy’s conversation says and does other things. There are so many ways to reply to Maddy’s question, and so few if any of them might fit the moment. Ultimately this is a tragic story about one person who can’t or won’t leave their life or received form of embodiment, and another who can’t seem to be anywhere. Or maybe we can imagine Maddy has found some comfort and fulfillment—or just someplace else—and the tragedy is Maddy can’t take Owen along. Which would be another hard truth of this film: the infinite array of difference in the world might mean we are all headed to different places, only falling temporarily into orbit with others. But I can’t say Maddy seems to have found much peace. I don’t need a happy ending, and am grateful one isn’t forced on this film. But that was kind of a bummer, my friends. 4 out of 5 sacs of blood.

¹ The identification is heightened when we watch with them, the film going to full-screen credits as the show starts. We’ve been watching Maddy and Owen stare at the screen in anticipation, so the switch to their all-encompassing viewpoint—not just POV, but the screen becoming their reality, overlaid as it is by titles, and filtered by the haze of TV resolution—puts us in their subject position. If we’re watching in the theater, the movie-screen frame adds another uncanny layer to the total-television effect. They are in that world, as are we, and if we recognize Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail as a character in the show, that hyperreality is underscored.

² There is much more to say about how The Pink Opaque changes from format to format—broadcast, tape recording, streaming—and what that has to do with its changing forms, and what that says about gender flux. Owen tries to rewatch the show on a streaming service a few years later and discovers that it’s nothing like he remembers—different actors, kid actors, corny monsters, generic TV show vibe. How else has he misperceived the world, and how else is he estranged from himself? This is the film at its most effective mix of registers—uncanny cosmic horror, comedy, nostalgia, melodrama—distilling the key ingredients of its primary reference points in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks. Elsewhere in the film, melodrama is amplified and comedy is dampened, while the horror component can get lost in the sauce. Which is not to say the affects are not highly deliberate and coordinated—but we’re here, always here, for the horror, which is of course just as well suited to exploring gender flux. And yet, you have to watch the movie you’re watching, even as you long for the one it helps you imagine.

³ When, after watching the show together, Maddy disrobes Owen from behind to draw a ghost on the back of his neck, it’s a moment of intimacy that feels on the verge of becoming something else, and we are fortunate that this director lets it be what it is, while Owen catches his breath. He likes TV.

—J †Johnson