I Saw the TV Glow
7th grader Owen (Ian Foreman, TV's 'Let the Right One In') looks uncomfortably out of place in a school hallway when he spies an older Goth looking girl sitting on the floor reading an episode guide to a television show. ‘Hey,’ he announces. ‘Hey,’ she returns. After learning Owen is two years behind her, 9th grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, "Bill and Ted Face the Music") laughs, calling him a baby, then immediately regrets her words when she sees his crestfallen expression, befriending the boy with her rapturous description of the show she’s obsessed with in “I Saw the TV Glow.”
Laura's Review: B+
The first image we see is glo-in-the-dark chalk markings indicating ‘There is still time’ on a suburban street lined with split levels as day descends into darkness. It is both familiar and unsettling, a mood writer/director Jane Schoenbrun ("We're All Going to the World's Fair") allows to slide further and further towards the latter as her tale progresses over decades, Maddy recognizing her true self in while Owen is ground down denying his. The filmmaker has remarked on the influence of ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ on this work and it is readily apparent in the slip/slide from reality to alternate planes like the Midnight Realm and the other side of the TV screen, its 90’s inspired soundtrack performed in a nightclub, its somewhat somnambulant acting style and its distressing climax.
Schoenbrun has also called this an ‘egg crack film,’ one in which that feeling of something being off is finally recognized as being transgender. Maddy’s reverence for ‘The Pink Opaque,’ the ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ like ‘monster of the week’ show named after a Cocteau Twins album, revolves around her connection to Isabel (Helena Howard, "Madeline's Madeline"), one of the two cosmically connected heroines (the other is Tara (singer/songwriter Lindsey Jordan)) and when she tells Owen two years later (now Justice Smith, "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom") that sometimes The Pink Opaque feels more real than the real world, it is because not only does she recognize herself there, but is intimating that she has a similar connection with Owen.
Owen’s parents Frank (Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst) and Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler, "Till") have seemingly cottoned on to what he has not, something we can glean from their over protectiveness. Not only is the Owen of 7th grade not allowed to stay up until 10:30 p.m. to watch Maddy’s show, but neither is the 9th grade Owen, and so, after lying about a sleepover at an old friend’s house to be initiated into The Pink Opaque in Maddy’s basement, he keeps up with videotaped copies Maddy makes for him, labeled in pink with personal flourishes like a mix tape. But when Maddy asks Owen to get out of town with her, he is too fearful and we watch him sleepwalk through life with a job at Fun City and a family hinted at but never seen. He’s ceased to belong, Maddy having been his one lifeline, until 8 years later when a downed power line presages her return. Maddy looks different, her hair short, her makeup mostly gone, and what she has to say is deeply disturbing to Owen, something we recognize as an allegory for Maddy’s dead name.
Schoenbrun has created three different worlds here. There is the reality of a 1996 suburb, The Pink Opaque television show and a merging of the two like staticky snow between them. The Pink Opaque’s ‘big bad’ is the Smashing Pumpkins’ inspired villainous Mr. Melancholy, a Georges Méliès’ man in the moon. He’s assisted by Marco and Polo, two clownish characters with horn-shaped goatees on both the top and bottom of their heads who feature in a Fun City arcade game in the film’s last act twenty years after Maddy’s final appearance. The Ice Cream Man is Owen’s first experience of a Pink Opaque monster, ridiculous yet intimidating, at least until he plays that tape all those years later and sees something entirely different with no scares at all. But the scariest thing has already happened to Owen, all of it apparent in his demeanor.
“I Saw the TV Glow” may be a little too indebted to Lynch, but it is also one of the most distinctive films inspired by his work. One can hardly imagine where Schoenbrun will go next, but with only two feature films, they are turning into one heck of a challenging filmmaker.
A24 opens "I Saw the TV Glow" in NY and LA theaters on 5/3/24, expanding on 5/10/24.
