I SAW THE TV GLOW Embraces Queer Obscurity
Jane Schoenbrun’s odd, difficult, and wonderful film.
Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is niche media about niche media. It’s a film which deliberately alienates (segments of) its (potential) audience through its awkward hyper focus on a television show which deliberately alienates (segments of) its (potential) audience.
The movie is also, not coincidentally, a queer metaphor about what it means to lose an imagined self. Strange, slow, downbeat, and (unlike, say, Love Lies Bleeding) adamantly unempowering, it’s not going to be for everyone. Which, again, is, I think, part of the point.
The film’s plot is fairly abstract, but I’ll try to summarize.
Two suburban high school kids, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Owen (Justice Smith) are obsessed with an odd YA fantasy called The Pink Opaque—a show somewhere on the continuum between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks. In The Pink Opaque, psychic teens Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan) fight the evil wizardish figure Mr. Melancholy.
Maddy starts out in 9th grade and Owen in 7th, but time quickly starts passing in great jumps. Maddy runs away from home, then returns years later claiming she is Tara and Owen is Isabel. She begs Owen/Isabel to return with her to the world of the Pink Opaque.
If you were hoping for a big exciting fantasy adventure resolution…well, you’ve come to the wrong film.
The movie is heavy on exposition interspersed with long pauses. Owen narrates often, but not in a way that clears up much of anything. Schoenburn’s color palette is gaudy, decadent and smeared; the camera lingers on a burning television set, an ice-cream monster melting, arcade games and amusement parks.
Maddy’s father is physically abusive; Owen’s is possibly emotionally abusive, possibly emotionally neglectful. Maddy is a lesbian; Owen is probably queer, but is never able to articulate an identity to himself, let alone to anyone else. “It feels like someone... took a shovel and dug out all my insides,” he says. “And I know there's nothing in there, but I'm still too nervous to open myself up and check.”
What Owen is describing could well be dysphoria; he finds the idea of being Isabel appealing and exciting, too good to be true. “What if she was right?,” he wonders after Maddy tells him he’s really a character from a tv show. “What if I was someone else? Someone beautiful and powerful? Buried alive and suffocating to death on the other side of a television screen?”
The way time seems to fracture and speed up and slow down for him and Maddy also suggests Judith Halberstam’s idea of queer time—the way that queer people’s experience of adolescence, growth, and developmental milestones are out of sync with heterosexual expectations and norms.
If time is out of sync, so are viewing habits. The Pink Opaque is queer in the sense that it’s in part about a closeted, half acknowledged lesbian relationship between Isabel and Tara, who met once at sleepaway camp, and are thereafter mentally connected as they battle threats across the county, together and apart. It’s also queer, though, in the no entendre sense that it’s just strange—a window onto a world of magic with tinges of horror and myth that barely makes sense. Much like I Saw the TV Glow.
The wrongness—the way angst and horror and narrative and time float free of anything actually happening on screen; the way that the surreal feels comforting, and the normal terrifying—is the appeal. Maddy and Owen feel cut off from their families, their peers, and from the people they are supposed to be. The Pink Opaque—a title suggesting both queerness and obscurity—fascinates them both because it’s queer and because it’s obscure.
It's easy to sneer at media which is intentionally pretentious, off-putting, and unpleasurable. And I’m sure for many people I Saw the TV Glow is going to feel like a slog. But life, for Owen and Maddy, genuinely feels like a slog—a long, slow crawl towards a heterosexual suburban existence which lacks love, color, life, pleasure. The Pink Opaque offers an alternative, uninterpretable, impossible life, in which self-alienation is not torture but revelation.
Sometimes the catharsis is in the acknowledgement that catharsis, for some, comes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, at oblique angles. I Saw the TV Glow is meant to be a “bad” movie by conventional standards because it’s by and for people who have been told they’re bad by conventional standards too. That’s one definition of camp, perhaps. It’s also why The Pink Opaque, and the movie it’s part of, glow.
So appreciate your capacity to decipher and add context to otherwise obscure, and perhaps estranging films.
Even if I wouldn’t watch one, I feel grateful for a map of how I might cognitively circumvent some cultural or subcultural walls to understanding it.