I Saw the TV Glow
Deeply imaginative and deeply weird for weirdness' sake, this meditation on a bonkers television show and the elusiveness of self is a surrealistic trip that's not for everyone.
I was an admirer of writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature film, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” a horror-adjacent flick in which a teen girl gets trapped inside an online game and her sense of self unravels. The filmmaker presses these themes even further in her follow-up, “I Saw the TV Glow,” in which the object of obsession is a bonkers TV show.
Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine play Owen and Maddy, two people connected by their love of the show, “The Pink Opaque.” (Say it out loud a few times; it’s a lovely bounce of vowels and hard consonants.) The story begins with them in their mid-teens and is interrupted by several time-shifts that take them out to their 20s — and then even further.
Neither Smith or Lundy-Paine, both in their late 20s, are particularly convincing as characters who are about 14 or 15 in the initial, and longest, section. But maybe that just feeds the film’s deliberate sense of disjointedness, the feeling that nothing we see or hear is exactly what it seems.
It’s an incredibly imaginative movie, and deeply strange. Unlike with “Fair,” this time I felt Schoenbrun was chasing weirdness for weirdness’ sake. I found some things to like about the film, or that can at least be described as engaging, but I sense many will view it as a surrealistic trip that’s not for them.
“The Pink Opaque” ostensibly plays on a young adult TV channel during the 1990s, a very low-budget affair with two young women battling a mysterious villain known as Mr. Melancholy, represented as the man on the moon. The heroines do not actually exist alongside each other, but meet up in ‘the midnight realm’ as they travel across the ‘psychic plane.’ There’s a vaguely lesbian shading to their alliance.
Maddy, a very moody and withdrawn girl a couple years older than Owen, studies the show with cult-like devotion, reading episode summaries and instructing Owen on the hidden meanings behind “The Pink Opaque.” (As interpreted by her.) He’s a single child living with strict parents who won’t let him stay up to watch when it airs at 10:30 p.m. on Fridays, so Owen fakes sleepovers to see it with Maddy or catches up with bootleg video tapes she makes for him.
They’re two outcast kids with no real friendships, except for the one between them that is more focused on the show than their own lives. Maddy, worried about Owen becoming emotionally evolved, warns him early on that she prefers girls. For his part, Owen confesses that he’s sexually inert, feeling like someone scooped those parts out of him with a shovel.
Events transpire that separate the pair for a long period, and when Maddy finally makes her portentous return she makes a shocking assertion: she has actually spent the last part of her life living inside “The Pink Opaque,” doing battle with Mr. Melancholy. She sees herself as the Tara of their relationship, after the more assertive character on that show (Lindsey Jordan), and Owen is Isabel (Helena Howard), the meek wallflower whose life is stirred up by the turbulence of Tara’s wake.
Things go on from there, which I’ll leave you to discover on your own. Some of it is quite gripping, more just plain puzzling, a bit off-putting for no good reason. There’s even some very grim humor that I appreciated.
Schoenbrun seems fascinated with trans bodies and people who do not fit neatly into any conventional category. There’s a scene that takes place inside a glum punk bar, and the camera keeps cutting back to the bands to revel in the singers’ odd demonic looks and primitive caterwauling. It doesn’t add anything, other than “Hey, lookit these strange strangers acting strangely.”
That’s the thing about freakshows: the way the participants are presented can ostensibly be celebratory, but it’s still exploiting their differences for attention.
“I Saw the TV Glow” is a head-scratcher of a film. It doesn’t invite the audience in, at least not in any kind of empathetic way, and resembles the goth adolescent who writes intentionally indecipherable poetry just to maintain a veil of inscrutability. They think this faux mystery makes them more interesting than they really are, but tends to have the opposite effect. I feel the same way about this movie.