“The Pink Opaque,” the fictional mid-1990s television series at the center of “I Saw the TV Glow,“ will feel instantly recognizable on a visceral level. If you’re the target demographic for this film, you have had some parasocial connection to a piece of popular culture echoed in this effective pastiche. With the visual scanlines calling to mind VHS tapes of Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark?“ and an opening credits font mirroring that of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,“ the show feels like a hazy memory of one’s youth. The outline of an immediately familiar shape, even if the details aren’t quite so clear.
The film centers around teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and the friendship they form over their mutual obsession with “The Pink Opaque.“ The show follows Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan), two friends who share a psychic connection they use to fight monsters, both in baddie-of-the-week stories and more profound mythology episodes surrounding the show’s big villain, Mr. Melancholy. For Owen, an isolated boy uncomfortable in his skin, and Maddy, a young lesbian with a toxic family life, the show’s protagonists represent strength and resolve neither can find within themselves in daily life.
As the two friends share VHS tapes and printed episode guides, the inner life of the show becomes inextricably bound with their real lives, to the point that Maddy’s eventual disappearance begins to feel as supernatural as the fiction emanating from the bright, striking pre-flat-screen-era televisions that feature in the film so prominently. How much TV is too much?
But there is a crucial moment in the film’s final act some folks seem to be placing too much emphasis on, causing them to miss the deeper portrait being painted. Late in the movie, an adult Owen finds himself revisiting the “The Pink Opaque” as a streaming show which is presented as looking sillier and more childish than it is through the rest of the picture. If earlier, to us, it mirrored “Buffy” and other more “mature” YA bait, here it feels decidedly “Sesame Street”-adjacent.
Out of context, it reads like a pointed, damning critique of the perpetually stunted millennial generation and our borderline concerning addiction to fictional media as a form of medicinal escapism. While this scene, within the context of the larger picture, is gesturing at the truth that there is a hard limit to the efficacy of media consumption as self-care, it is not the fulcrum on which the film’s story rests. For that, one must look much earlier in the film for a more nebulous but no less impactful sequence.
When we first meet a younger Owen (Ian Foreman) in 7th-grade gym class, he is wandering under the umbrage of one of those giant parachutes teachers would use for easy group activities. While Yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” plays on the soundtrack, it’s difficult to overlook the parachute’s pattern, which is coded to match the colors of the transgender flag.
Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun is nonbinary (as is Lundy-Paine), but the film’s depiction of gender dysphoria seems to be going over some cis viewers’ heads mainly because the film artfully refrains from making its exploration of trans epiphany within the more explicit language viewers might expect from modern, queer cinema. Owen never comes out and claims any gender identity. The tells are sporadic, from the brief image of a repressed memory involving Owen presenting femme, to his stepfather (Fred Durst), refusing to let him stay up late to watch “The Pink Opaque,“ by asking if it’s for girls. But there’s no broadly telegraphed scene where he tearfully pours his guts out to a friend or loved one and spells it out.
Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun is nonbinary (as is Lundy-Paine), but the film’s depiction of gender dysphoria seems to be going over some cis viewers’ heads mainly because the film artfully refrains from making its exploration of trans epiphany within the more explicit language viewers might expect from modern, queer cinema.
“I Saw the TV Glow” is a heavy rumination on an element of being trans that ought to speak to plenty of cis folks, too: having the sense that something about your life is very wrong, but being trapped at the precipice of doing anything about it.
Few films in recent memory house visuals that express this specific a sense of unsettling wrongness to the world it captures. Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric K. Yue name-check “Batman Forever” as an aesthetic inspiration to present a haunted, neon-inflected mid-’90s, something that calls that era to mind, but diffused through disquieting layers of fog and implied malice. Coupled with a powerfully curated soundtrack full of original songs inspired by the film,
everything about this picture captures a unique vibe that feels entirely unto itself, despite the influences it shows freely on its sleeve. (The stars of Nickelodeon’s “The Adventures of Pete & Pete” both make cameos, as does Amber Benson from “Buffy.”)
The film’s emotional climax is one of the most startling and transgressive developments. After Maddy has reappeared into an adult Owen’s life, her explanation of where she has been is terrifying from a horror movie perspective but strangely comforting within the confines of this narrative and Owen’s predicament. Without spoiling the particulars, it poses a quandary that tickles the hero’s journey, which viewers will cry for throughout such an experimental and challengingly paced picture. In the moment, it collapses a film’s worth of difficult thematic ideas into a straightforward solution. But the “easy out” the film offers is anything but. In the film, as in life, real change has a cost, and the choices it requires can be too much for some. The final act trudges on as Owen and the audience have to wrestle with these revelations. At this point, a happy ending seems so unlikely that they’re left to ponder whether one is even possible.
Though the film ends on a down note, there is a lingering image that cuts through the dirge. It’s not coincidentally the first image in the film’s official trailer. It’s the chalk graffiti outside of Owen’s house, big and bold in bright pastel lettering: “there is still time.”
Though the film ends on a down note, there is a lingering image that cuts through the dirge. It’s not coincidentally the first image in the film’s official trailer. It’s the chalk graffiti outside of Owen’s house, big and bold in bright pastel lettering: “there is still time.“
“I Saw the TV Glow” plays exclusively in theaters but will be available onVOD next month.
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