I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Jane Schoenbrun | 1hr 40min

The television shows of our childhoods hold a special place in our memories. Quality is entirely irrelevant – to innocent minds, these flickering images are tactile, complex worlds inhabited by vibrant characters we subconsciously mould ourselves after. This is a common experience shared by millennials, and from within it I Saw the TV Glow extracts an unsettling horror, casting a Lynchian surrealism over the lives of two teenagers bonding over the same 90s young adult show.

The Pink Opaque is not for kids, Maddy defiantly claims, and Owen quietly bristles against his father’s passing insult that it is for girls. It feels “more real than real life,” allowing an escape from the insecurities of adolescence and the resulting malaise. They can see themselves vividly within the show’s telepathic characters and glimpse representations of their nightmares in its monsters, each manifesting as grotesque, Eraserhead-style abominations trapped behind a thin mask of lo-fi video grain. It is not the malformed Ice Cream Man or the bearded, lumpy-faced creep that poses the greatest threat though, but rather the largely unseen Mr. Melancholy, who warps time and reality with his mystical powers.

Beyond the titular glow of the screen that softly casts fluorescent magentas, greens, and teals across Maddy and Owen’s faces, Jane Schoenbrun weaves a psychedelic luminescence through their home and school, colouring in this world with shades of their favourite show. Along with the dissolve transitions and elliptical pacing that skip through years at a time, this lighting palette infuses I Saw the TV Glow with an eerie, dreamy quality, whimsically obscuring the boundaries between reality and fiction. Like our two leads, the source of our discomfort remains difficult to pinpoint for some time, until Schoenbrun gradually turns our focus to the truth of their identities.

For Maddy, this is first touched on when she explicitly states she likes girls and reveals her intention to run away from home. When she probes Owen on the matter of his own sexuality, he can’t quite pinpoint the word to describe his specific brand of dysphoria – nor does he seem to want to. Admitting that he feels out of place in his body and the world at large would be to accept that his entire life thus far has been a lie. While Maddy seeks to expose the mind-bending conspiracy behind The Pink Opaque, he shies away in fear of what its implications might be, despite understanding on a deep, intuitive level the exact feeling of imprisonment and disorientation that she is describing.

From there, Schoenbrun’s allegory for the trans experience flourishes, teasing out the horrifying effects of self-denial which keeps Owen from embracing the confidence and spirit of his actual self. His suffering is figuratively akin to being buried alive, forcing wheezing breaths from his chest that might easily be dismissed as asthma, and eroding his physical being into a pale, emaciated shell of his younger self. It is a poignantly clever use of voiceover that appears here too, granting Owen some subconscious awareness that he exists in a fictional world as he speaks to us through the fourth wall, even as he resists fully crossing that barrier.

Where the Wachowskis once called this simulated reality the Matrix, Schoenbrun labels it the Midnight Realm, both essentially representing the same false construct of identity within their respective genres. It is clear that I Saw the TV Glow prioritises its otherworldly atmosphere above all else, though perhaps Schoenbrun could have taken a few more lessons from Lynch in this respect, developing their overarching metaphor to completion while lingering in its ambiguous, wearying anxiety. Nevertheless, the psychological horror that is crafted here from distorted 90s nostalgia makes for an intoxicating examination of those artificial personas thrust upon society’s most vulnerable, and the insidious illusions of self-autonomy that maintain them.

I Saw the TV Glow is currently playing in theatres.