Thoughts On Reviewing I SAW THE TV GLOW

And A Review of I SAW THE TV GLOW

Straight up: I did not go see I Saw the TV Glow in theaters because I was nervous I would not like it. The movie, the second from filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, was a festival hit and is an arthouse/genre trans awakening allegory. And that was why I was nervous to see it - if I did not like this movie would I be a bad person? I like to think of myself as a progressive, with it person, and would a progressive, with it person dislike a movie that was already having a big impact on people who watched it? Including anecdotal stories of people realizing they themselves were trans after a viewing?

It’s important to note that this was all self-inflicted. Nobody told me I couldn’t dislike the movie, I had internalized this idea that to be a proper trans ally I needed to like important art made by trans artists, and if I didn’t like it I needed to keep it to myself. Keeping things to myself has never been my strong suit, and so I just didn’t go see the movie. Easier that way, less dangerous. 

But that’s not what being an ally is about. It isn’t about holding a different set of standards for one identity group or another. It’s about engaging with the work honestly and openly, and approaching it the way you would approach work from a filmmaker who shares your identity characteristics. To do otherwise is to be condescending, to think that an artist’s identity means you have to handle them differently. It’s another kind of bigotry, the kind too often practiced by left wing folks. To show respect for any particular identity group one must approach their art as art, first and foremost. 

The other concern I had about I Saw the TV Glow was that I wouldn’t get it. That’s been a consistent part of the larger cultural discourse, an assumption that art from a certain identity group was intended for that group, and that members of other groups would not understand it or appreciate it enough. Again, this feels condescending to me. I can watch movies from any culture on Earth and find shared humanity and emotion in those films, whatever their language, whatever the nationality of the cast, whatever the differences in culture between them and myself might be. Film in particular is already a universal language, and paradoxically the more specific a film is the more universal it becomes. In fact a good film should be able to transcend cultural or identity barriers and make me better understand or feel closer to people who are not me. 

So this week I watched I Saw the TV Glow, and I liked it. I didn’t love it, but it’s a well-made film from a young talent that obviously has a lot going for them and has the ability to make something great one day. There are elements of greatness in this movie - the final shot is one of the most devastating ever put to film, and if you were to just watch that 45 seconds on its own you wouldn’t understand why it broke my heart so fully - and I think it’s tantalizingly close to being next level, but doesn’t quite get there. 

Beginning in 1996 and stretching across a decade, I Saw the TV Glow is about two high school misfits who bond over a TV show, The Pink Opaque. It’s a sort of Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque program about two girls who met at summer camp and who are mystically connected and who battle the minions of a demon-thing called Mr. Melancholy. Schoenbrun does something delightful with The Pink Opaque in that they really make it feel like a thing that existed. Obviously they have a background in fandom, and the way they capture the excitement of reading an episode guide book, or the way that you would tape episodes because you never knew when they would play again brought me back to a simpler time when the Internet wasn’t what it is now and the idea of meeting someone who shared your obsessions was kind of like a dream. 

Justice Smith plays Owen, a shy mama’s boy who knows there’s something wrong with him but can’t articulate it. He meets the slightly older Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who ushers him into the world of The Pink Opaque. Owen’s parents are strict, and he has to sneak out to Maddy’s house to watch the show, and she begins stashing tapes of the show at school for him to pick up. 

Then one day Maddy disappears. And she remains disappeared for eight years, until one day she shows up and tells Owen that she’s been inside the TV show The Pink Opaque, that she’s no longer Maddy but one of the characters from the show, and that Owen belongs in there with her. 

I wasn’t sure whether to tell you that second paragraph of plot because it happens so late in the film that it almost feels like a spoiler. But it’s the premise of the movie, so I don’t know how to talk about the film or its central allegory without bringing that up. The fact that this happens so late in the film is one of the things that keep I Saw the TV Glow from greatness for me - it feels like the first act is an hour long, and the movie is an hour forty five. Part of the way it feels long is that Schoenbrun (who wrote as well as directed the movie) goes with that indie/arthouse thing where everybody kind of talks in a monotone and does so in halting, awkward sentences. Lotta meaningful silences in the first half of this movie.

At the same time they so perfectly capture what it feels like to be an outsider in a normal world that I can see past the pacing of some of this stuff. The production design is exquisite - there’s a Fruitopia machine in this movie! - and so real that it creates an exciting space for the more surreal aspects of the movie to flourish. Schoenbrun understands that evoking a period doesn’t mean putting stuff from that period in every shot, it means including stuff from the decade or decades before, couches that are from the 70s and TVs from the 80s, because that’s how real life is. That’s what it actually looked like in 1996.

One thing I like about this first act of the film is that Maddy and Owen aren’t relentlessly bullied. Yeah, the weird kids get bullied in real life, but often not to the extent that we see in film. The truth is that the weird kids kind of get ignored, pushed aside, become invisible. You simply are not seen, you barely exist. And in a movie about people who have an aspect of themselves that longs to be seen, and who connect with that aspect by seeing reflections of themselves on a TV screen, that decision goes a long way. Maddy and Owen live in a world that hardly has anyone else in it. No one else perceives them as they are, and for a long time neither do they. 

When Maddy returns after eight years away a lot about her has changed. For one thing, she isn’t Maddy anymore. She’s Tara from The Pink Opaque, which was canceled after five seasons but she has made her way into season six. There’s a continuation forward from what had seemed like a dead end. But it wasn’t easy, and what she did to enter The Pink Opaque seems extreme, and she wants Owen to go through with it as well. 

The scene where Maddy/Tara is explaining this to Owen is the most pivotal scene in the movie, and I am not really sure it works. Maddy/Tara has come back and does not seem any happier or more together than she was when the two were watching the show every week; if anything, she seems a bit more unhinged. The metaphor here is that Maddy has come out as trans, and is returning home to tell her friend - who she knows is also trans - that there is freedom on the other side of an ordeal. The problem is that she’s not embodying that freedom. She’s bad at selling it, and I think that weakens the movie a bit. 

But this is where I wonder if my second concern about watching this movie is coming true. Is it possible that this is actually a relatable experience for trans people? That the person who has gone before them seems a bit out of their mind when they tell the egg (slang for someone who is trans but doesn’t know it yet) about transitioning? I’ve certainly seen this trope elsewhere, where someone has an epiphany and seems utterly mad to those who didn’t have one, but traditionally that person seems mad in a kind of upbeat way. Maddy/Tara is intense. But again, maybe that’s a common experience. But if I put myself in Owen’s shoes I would definitely not want to go through the ordeal that Maddy/Tara is telling him he has to undergo. I do not feel torn about it. 

Even without that scene quite working as well as I wished it would have, I Saw the TV Glow has a third act that is so extraordinary in its observations of a life unfulfilled that I imagine this is where the IMDB classification of Drama/Horror comes into play. There’s an annual film festival here in LA run by the American Cinematheque called Bleak Week: The Cinema of Despair, and goddamn if I Saw the TV Glow doesn’t qualify. What’s incredible is how ordinary so much of this movie is, especially the third act. Schoenbrun does bring in weirdness and gets artsy with sequences, but these things are always in contrast to the plainness of everyday life. I Saw the TV Glow is in some ways a feature length version of the scene where Dorothy steps out of her house and sepia tone into the explosive color of Oz. 

Justice Smith is pretty terrific as Owen; I’ve been a fan of this guy since The Get Down, and he plays a very different kind of guy here, and he plays him over the course of a lifetime. Owen is a meek, squeaky man who just goes along, who has no agency. He’s the everyman who feels like there’s something more in life for him but he doesn’t quite know how to access it. Smith plays him with a great physicality, all hunched over shrinking himself in every scene, and manages to keep him from being pathetic. 

Brigette Lundy-Paine captures a kind of 90s slacker vibe that instantly transported me back three decades. They have an intensity about them that is magnetic, and you understand why young Owen seeing Maddy across the room for the first time felt the need to approach her (by the way, Owen seems to be asexual, and the movie is remarkably chaste for a film about teen mixed-gender best friends). Lundy-Paine also brings a strong physicality to the role, playing Maddy as someone who has an external “doesn’t give a shit” toughness but actually has an internal void of sensitivity. 

In the end the person who would have lost out if I had kept on my little guilty progressive path of avoiding I Saw the TV Glow would have been me. I like this movie, and I slowly fell in love with Owen over the course of it. Yes, it’s about being trans but it’s also about being a unique person who isn’t sure they have the nerve to embody that, to step out of line and be different and true to who they really are on the inside. That’s the universal human element, the thing that transcends all identity or cultural barriers and that, for almost two hours, gave me a feel for the soul of Jane Schoenbrun and for their experiences, and how they are both similar to and quite different from mine. That’s the magic of what movies can be.