The Neon Youth of I Saw the TV Glow
You can’t go back. But just how are you supposed to move forward?
Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a tragedy of adolescence wrapped in cotton candy. It’s an oddity that evinces something near and personal. It’s a testament that potent filmmaking doesn’t have to fit neatly into boxes.
Justice Smith stars as Owen, a boy trying to find his path through adolescence. He’s a bit awkward, rarely shown connecting with friends or anyone other than his mom. But he meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a girl two years his senior, and they bond warily over the television show The Pink Opaque, a dark children’s show that sees heroes Tara and Isabel fighting supernatural monsters. The big bad of The Pink Opaque is Mr. Melancholy, an evil moon winkingly modeled on Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon.
The show is cheesy and intentionally silly, but it becomes a point of fixation for Maddy and Owen. But one can hardly blame them: there’s not all that much else to be excited about in their late 90s Midwest cul-de-sacs. I Saw the TV Glow, among many things, is about the ways that media makes paths for identity when there are so few options elsewhere. Sometimes, an escape is necessary.
Eventually Maddy disappears and, when she reappears years later, does everything she can to convince Owen that The Pink Opaque is real, and that they are the main characters, lost to their true selves. As the lines between reality and fiction grow hazy, Owen’s sense of self begins to transform.
Schoenbrun melds a film that follows the dream logic of late night media to deeply personal ends. The film is more horror-adjacent than outright scary, but Schoenbrun slips in echoes of genre auteurs. As with David Cronenberg, the intersection of technology and the body is a central theme (and given memorable imagery). There’s also a Lynchian live performance in a dive bar at the edge of town. Most impressively, Schoenbrun manages to encode the idea of “reading” media—the distinct lenses of interpretation—into the text of the movie. That’s no simple feat, and it makes the film a stronger, if messier, vision than their previous We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Schoenbrun’s ideas are strengthened by Justice Smith’s performance, engaging in its expression to Owen’s pain. Throughout its recursive tale, I Saw the TV Glow maintains its alien sensibilities, even as it opens its chest to let you look at the neon screen of its inner being.
