Review by Tim Robins
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
I Saw the TV Glow is a coming of age story of two young Americans, drawn together by shared feelings of isolation and a mutual fascination with a TV fantasy series titled ‘The Pink Opaque’. The film is a journey through time and space as its protagonists explore the mystery of their own identities, their relationship to one another and the meaning the TV series has for their lives.
I Saw the TV Glow is a must for fans of TV shows such as Doctor Who. Scenes of Owen and Maddy intently watching an episode of ‘The Pink Opaque’ in open mouthed silence will speak to many fans’ experience of their favourite shows. Owen and Maddy exemplify viewing as a ‘silent production’ – not passive consumption but an active process of personal meaning making. The characters’ sexuality is part of this process of becoming.
Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun deftly delineates where the characters are in relation to their own life courses. When Owen turns up to watch “The Pink Opaque’, Maddy sets the record straight: “I like girls, you know that right? I’m not into boys… Do you like girls?… Boys?” Owen, who is two years younger than Maddy, replies “I think that I like TV shows.” It’s an adorably authentic answer but one that holds his transition to recognising his sexual and gendered self at bay. For Owen, that recognition may never come.
The central cast really sells the story. Maddy is played with intense conviction by Brigette Lundy-Paine and Owen, as a wide eyed, inquisitive boy of 13, is played by Ian Foreman, with Justice Smith playing Owen as a tormented, asthmatic, adult. Maddy has to come to terms with the fact that she can’t run away from herself. Owen isn’t sure he even wants to try that. When Maddy invites him to run away with her, he instead flees to a neighbour, begging the woman to save him from being absorbed in Maddy’s world.
The significance of ‘The Pink Opaque’ changes over time. We see it first as a spin on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The series features two young women, Isabelle and Tara, who use their psychic connection across time to battle various monsters of the week such as ‘The Drain Lords’ and ‘Marco and Polo’, all under the command of Mr Melancholy, ruler of Midnight Realm.
The look of ‘The Pink Opaque’ derives in part from the grotesque exaggerations of silent cinema. Mr Melancholy bears a strong resemblance to the pie-faced moon in Georges Méliès’ 1902 short A Trip to The Moon. Here, when the TV glows, it glows purple, pink , blue and green – more generally known as ”bi-sexual” lighting and used by YouTubers to indicate their channel is gender inclusive. There’s more purple here than The Colour Out Of Space (2019).
‘The Pink Opaque’ renders the mundane world fantastic and gender fluid, its colours pouring from the screen and decorating the roads and pavements with fluorescent graffiti. When Maddy first meets Owen in their school’s hall, she draws attention to the way ordinary spaces can be transformed. The hall is being used as an election polling station, on other occasions it hosts a billowing, all-enveloping tent. We are told, ‘The Pink Opaque’ feels more real than real life, a prospect that is exciting and threatening depending on your point of view.
The soundtrack plays a key role in thematising Maddy and Owen’s world. It uses ‘glitch’ rock, its ambient tones recalling the 1980s and 1990s. Women and gender fluid vocalists create a mournful, miasmic atmosphere. Director Shcoenburn curated an original soundtrack and encouraged the bands to capture the feel of MTV and Sixteen Candles (1984). Drab Majesty’s ‘Photograph’ exemplifies inspiration that has been drawn from the melange of decades.
The script calls attention to changes in the role of media technology over its character’s lifetime. As a programme first broadcast on television, the ability to watch ‘The Pink Opaque’ is restricted for Owen by its young adult time slot and by his step-father, who forbids him to watch the series, saying that he’d heard it was for girls. In this way, watching the series becomes a right of passage, a crossing that also involves transgressing the step-father’s rigid gender norms and forcing Owen to escape from his family home – if only for a night.
In the end, it is Maddy who flees town and only returns later in Owen’s life. The director has described the film as an allegory about the trauma of transitioning from one self to another. Maddy learns that she has to be dead and buried to come to terms with herself and that there’s no running away from her true self even if she runs as far away as Phoenix. For Owen, it’s a different story.
We finally meet Owen as an adult, doing a variety of jobs in a cinema complex. Back in the day, he had the chance to run away with Maddy but panicked and stayed at home. His character is marked by indecision (in the election booth his mother asks him to pick a candidate – he can’t. This indecision becomes symptomatic of his own relationship to himself.
As an adult, Owen comforts himself with a job stuffing teddy bears at ‘Build-a-bear’. But when he cuts open his own chest, in a scene that reminded me of Videodrome (1983), he finds he is stuffed with the innards of a television set that explode from his body. I Saw the TV Glow dramatises transgender experiences as body horror but with a welcome, if dark, sense of humour. (I chuckled at the school sports emblem “Go Vultures!”, a la South Park Elementary’s “Go Cows!”).
I Saw the TV Glow was released in January this year and is only now in UK cinemas before heading for streaming. Catch it if you can. It is a welcome change from the obnoxious stereotypes of Twisters and lacks the hit-you-over-the-head bombast of smart-alecky Deadpool & Wolverine.
The film’s blurring of fantasy and the everyday world stayed with me after leaving the cinema. when I left the cinema. Somewhere out of my sight, a young woman was busking on an electric guitar. Looking around, I saw a large, pink, studded snail clinging to a wall – in reality the street sign for Punktured, Brighton’s landmark body piercing studios. Even if just for a moment, the boundary between fiction and reality seemed terribly opaque.
Tim Robins
• I Saw The TV Glow is in UK cinemas now | Official Site at A24
A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
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