I Saw The TV Glow
Let's talk about one of my early favorites of 2024
Very mild spoilers for plot points from the film I SAW THE TV GLOW
When I was in middle school two things were true:
1. My parents were relatively chill about most things, but were strangely old school about bedtime. 9pm on school nights, 10:30 on the weekends. This, to me, was outrageous. My friends had 10:30pm school night bedtimes if they had them at all.
2. We did not have cable television.
Going to a friend’s house on a weekend was an exercise in gluttony. Not only was I going to stay up past my normally allotted bedtime, I would also have access to the highly sought after SNICK programming block that was achingly absent from my living room set at home. There was a certain thrill that came with that 2 and half hour run of shows because you just might see something you hadn’t seen before. The Secret World of Alex Mack, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and, most importantly, Are You Afraid of The Dark were all more than willing to give me a glimpse into the wild world of YA horror and weirdness when the lights went down. They weren’t necessarily made for me, but I was going to watch them all regardless.
Things are a little different now. I can chose my own bedtime (still roughly 9pm on a school night). I have cable television or some weird amalgamation of it. Movies are starting to show me things that I grew up with because the people making movies also grew up with those things.
I am a young white man so, in a certain sense, movies have always been made for me and reflecting things that I grew up with back at me. The last 15 years of Hollywood moviemaking have literally been shaped by the comics and characters that I spent most of my middle and high school time with. I always wanted to see comics on the big screen and for my sins, they let me.
When it comes to art, particularly movies and television, it is a frustratingly one way street. It’s easy to fall into a movie or a television show; to watch them obsessively, to form friendships around them, to potentially even discover something about yourself through them. It is sometimes heartbreaking, then, to realize that these things are not as obsessed with you. They are not discovering things about themselves by watching the audience that is so devoted to them. There is no grand revelation for a TV show at the hands of someone paying rapt attention. As a guy who writes a newsletter about these sorts of things and who collects Blu-Rays, old comics, and other cultural ephemera, that idea hits devastatingly close to home.
What I like so much about I SAW THE TV GLOW is that it asks, “but what if that’s not true?” What if the things we’re watching ARE real? What if they see us in return? What if we can get within touching distance of the untouchable?
I think it’s important to say up front that this movie is very clearly a trans allegory. It’s director, Jane Schoenbrun, is trans & non-binary and the movie is telling the story through that lens in a lot of ways. That is not something that is going to resonate with me, a cis man. If you are a trans person, I think you will find a lot to like in this movie, but I also think you will find a lot to chew on and wrestle with if you were person who grew up obsessed with TV, movies, video games, or any other form of media that leads down that frustratingly one way street mentioned above. The movie does a great job of filtering it’s specific viewpoints through universal experiences like finding a show that feels like it's own secret language and then wondering if that show is something you need to keep to yourself since other people might not understand it the way you do or worse yet, not even at all. And if they don’t understand the show, how can they possibly be expected to understand you?
I knew this movie and I were going to be on the same page when there was a Frutopia vending machine (RIP to the my sweet baby boy Strawberry Passion Awareness) in the first 5 minutes. There are so many things that will speak to you if you are a child of the 90s but there was specific moment early on in the film that really raised my antenna. One of the main characters Owen (Ian Foreman and later Justice Smith) is going to a sleepover at his new friend Maddy’s (Brigette Lundy-Paine) house. He has lied to his mom about where he’s really going, but that’s not really all that important. That’s just something teenagers do. What struck me was that Owen was going over to this sleepover SPECIFICALLY to watch something, in this case the queer-coded “Are You Afraid of the Dark” substitute “The Pink Opaque.” Watching him trudge across the lawn to Maddy’s basement door, I got the same excitement in my stomach that I did in middle school when I was the one trudging up lawns to houses that were bigger than mine with more channels on their TVs. Owen was going to see something he hadn’t seen before, that he didn’t have access to. Maybe he would learn something about himself because of it.
I SAW THE TV GLOW’s play at nostalgia is one of it’s strengths, but one that is wielded with an acid tip. These shows, these obsessions, can be just as much a prison as they are a force for freeing those things about yourself that you didn’t know were there. As much as they can help you soar, they can just as quickly pin you to the ground. There are former 90s stars sprinkled throughout this movie for those of us who care to recognize them. Maybe a nod to our obsession or maybe a well deserved swirly in the proverbial toilet suggesting that we might need to get a life and move on. Both are probably right. There is a wonderful scene in this movie in the final third when Owen revisits The Pink Opaque in the same way you or I would revisit Goosebumps: The TV Show. It’s not like he remembered it when he was a teenager. He is not like he was when he was a teenager. I am not like I was when I am a teenager.
I don’t want to give away too much of this movie (especially it’s ending moments) because the joy is always in the watching. It’s not a “horror movie” in maybe the way you’d expect from A24. There are no jump scares, no big splatters of blood, although there is some incredible creature work and design when it comes to The Pink Opaque. The final 20 minute are still some of the most upsetting I’ve seen in a movie this year. There is no bigger scare than suffocating under a life you have created for yourself to bury the life you could have had and person you could have been.
The performances of both Smith and Lundy-Paine are really something here. They carry the movie and I immensely enjoyed both for a multitude of reasons. There are some really wonderful cameos outside of the 90s teen show ones I mentioned above (I gave an audible “hell yeah” to one in the theater) and while some may view a few roles as “stunt casting” I would call them inspired.
It’s also a vibes movie, which I really dig. There is a sense of style that’s very apparent and I think that’s part of what makes it so effective to me. There are stretches where there isn’t much in the way of plot, but there are spades of mood and lighting and atmosphere. In a recent interview I listened to with director Jane Schoenbrun, they said they tried to visualize what a “shoegaze movie” would look like when making this.
One of the driving forces of I SAW THE TV GLOW’s mood and structure is it’s music, highlighted by a cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old” by the canadian artist yeule. This feels like another choice specifically made to dig out my soul through my throat as “Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl” is from Broken Social Scene’s 2003 record “You Forget It In People” which came out when I was a 13 year-old just discovering that music could be good and contain things other than loud guitars. If you’ve never heard “Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl” congrats on never being broken up with as a teenager, I guess? I highly recommend checking out both versions of the song linked above. The version used in the film sounds like it’s being sung through a dial-up modem which is a nice touch. My foot started tapping involuntarily when it began to play. Surely, I thought, nobody is feeling the way I feel about this song being played.
Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that
Now you're all gone, got your makeup on, and you're not coming back
It is, of course, absurd to think that nobody is reacting to an “Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl” needle drop in the same way I am, just as it is absurd to think that nobody appreciates the television shows Community or The X-Files like I do or that movies like THE VAST OF NIGHT or THE LIGHTHOUSE were made just for me. They ARE being appreciated and they WEREN’T made just for me.
These things do not feel the same connection to me as I do to them. It’s a one way street. It always has been.
But what if it not.
I SAW THE TV GLOW goes wide in theaters this weekend. I think you should see it.
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