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They stop attacking if you don't think about them / The longer you wait, the closer you get to suffocating.
Since watching I Saw the TV Glow, I’ve been thinking about being fourteen and watching an episode of Star Trek: Voyager (she seemed to have a similar devotion to Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine that I had to Terry Farrell’s Jadzia Dax, which is still a fact that tickles a part of my brain – no idea who she is now, but I hope life turned out okay for her) with someone who wasn’t quite a friend – if we had hung out more, or if we had made a habit of watching TV together, we might have been friends, but at that time, staying in contact with people who no longer went to the same school every day was difficult. I think I memorised this one-off occasion because I was normally a lone watcher of television – it wasn’t a shared experience until later in my life, and I spent my teenage years obsessed with TV on my own. Whatever discoveries I made about myself through the medium, and there were many, remained utterly unshared until much later.
There are many layers to I Saw the TV Glow, and it is obviously a story about a character who buries the truth about themselves deeply, which causes a horrible suffering that reverberates through the whole film. I’m hesitant to apply this trans allegory to myself, because it feels specific to that experience, but it’s undeniable that the profound connection that I felt to the film is connected to being queer in the suburbs and existing vicariously through the same television show that I Saw the TV Glow is inspired by. The Pink Opaque, a mystery show on the fictional Young Adult Network, is such a loving reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a mythology that Brigette Lundy-Paine’s Maddy claims is too complex for “most kids”, featuring Monsters of the Week and a Big Bad (Mr Melancholy). There’s a bar that features live musical acts called Double Lunch (a name that reminds me of the Doublemeat Palace) that feels like Buffy’s The Bronze (there’s a whole journey here from the 90s/2000s Cibo Matto, The Breeders and Aimee Mann to Phoebe Bridgers, Sloppy Jane and King Woman). The first episode Owen (Ian Foreman and Justice Smith) every gets to watch in person features the ice-cream man as a monster of the week, and it has all the vibes of a small-time Buffy villain (plus remember the time when Xander drove an ice cream truck?). Henchmen Marco and Polo perform an almost interpretative dance routine that resembles the eeriness of the Gentlemen in Hush, one of Buffy’s most ambitious episodes. Then there’s the eighteen second appearance of Amber Benson as the mum of the kid who Owen has used as an alibi for his secretive viewings of the Pink Opaque – he appeals to her to keep him stuck in the town that Maddy is leaving, desperately pleading with her to the point of breakdown – a moment that feels even more significant considering that Benson’s Tara, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, may have survived had she gotten out of Sunnydale before Warren hit her with a stray shot. Benson has mostly retired from acting and is now a very good narrator of audio books, so her presence, if very brief, in this film feels kind of inherently magical.
There are also more personal parallels between Owen’s accessibility problems with the show and my own. Owen isn’t allowed to watch – at the beginning of the film, he’s in seventh grade and his bed-time is before the show starts on Saturday nights (the real reason might be that his dad, who remains stubbornly out of view for the most part but is still a terrifying presence that he is obviously scared of, thinks it’s a show for “girls”, an early hint at what confines Owen is working in). He knows of the show because he’s seen trailers, and he has a deep knowledge that he wants to watch it before ever seeing it, but it isn’t until he meets Maddy, who is two years older, that the opportunity arises. Their first meeting happens on election night in 1996 (Owen's mum will vote for "the saxophone man" again) – and the school not quite functioning as a school in the scene, with people existing there at a time when they wouldn’t normally, creates a really interesting atmosphere of possibility (it reminded me of a sleep-over that we had, for some reason, in 11th or 12th grade, and how the halls felt completely different during night time – like Maddy says, “It's like the school gets transformed into something else.”) Maddy is reading a book-form episode guide of the show and Owen comes up with the plan to tell his parents that he is having a sleep-over with a friend (who he doesn’t actually still seem to be friends with – in fact, it feels like maybe Owen doesn’t have any friends anymore), when he is in fact watching The Pink Opaque with Maddy and one of her friends (who is way less into the show than her). It’s a one-time only occasion, but after that, Maddy records the show on VHS tapes for him.
Back when I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I had to rely on the awful time delay (and dubbed version) of international syndication. I started somewhere at the beginning of season four, and didn’t even see the three high school seasons of the show until a bit later. The internet of the 2000s couldn’t provide me the episodes yet, but some dedicated fans kept a database of all the scripts as they were released (or typed them up, maybe), and that’s how I found out that my favourite character, Tara, was going to die – maybe six months or a year before I ever saw Seeing Red. There is a certain added preciousness to how I feel about Buffy now because of how it took actual work and dedication to follow along, and I think that the context of Owen’s viewing is just as relevant to how important The Pink Opaque becomes to him: he is isolated, but shares this with Maddy, even if it’s just through her delivery of tapes (until later, when they begin watching together again – at that point, Maddy is also cut off from her previous friends through what feels like homophobia and the horrors of high school bullying). One of the saddest moments of the film – and there are so many – is when Owen, now an adult, goes back to watch the show (now available to stream, without the previous inherent magic of video tapes) and finds it radically changed: it looks nothing like the genuinely scary scenes that we’ve previously been shown of The Pink Opaque, and the characters are now children, or very early teens, instead of the Tara and Isabel we’ve previously seen, who seemed to be of a similar age as Owen and Maddy. There’s more than one way to interpret this: Owen is an adult now, and maybe the show just felt a lot more grown-up when he was a kid than it does now (although I’d argue that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if not its creator, has aged pretty well). Or it’s that Owen didn’t go through the process of self-discovery that the show engendered in Maddy, and stayed in the suburbs – he got trapped in the place he was meant to leave, even though the chalk writing on the pavement still says that it’s not too late – and now whatever magic the show could have provided, whatever salve being represented on screen could have brought, has worn off and is no longer accessible to him. Owen’s initial experience of the show is so intense that he (literally, at one point) gets swallowed up by the screen as if it were a portal, but only Maddy leaves. When Maddy returns later in an attempt to save Owen, she talks about how the limit between reality and the show are unclear – she has so fully identified with the character of Tara (played by musician Lindsey Jordan aka Snail Mail) that she’s shed her old name, and she believes that Mr Melancholy is real, that the only way to escape the fake world of the suburbs is through the same ritual that happens on the show (being buried alive – which is already the sensation that Owen has with regards to his whole life). The film never judges Maddy’s ideas: and the meeting occurs, after all, at Double Lunch, where two bands play just like they do on the show, like it’s some kind of liminal place between the two realities.
Maddy: What about you, do you like girls?
Owen: I don't know.
Maddy: Boys?
Owen: I think that I like TV shows. When I think about that stuff it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides and I know there's nothing in there, but I'm still too nervous to open myself up and check. I know there's something wrong with me.
Maddy identifies with Tara, who embraces her powers. She thinks of Owen as Isabel (Helena Howard), who is unsure and uncertain. She opens the proverbial box, while Owen never does – the closest he comes, maybe, is when he wears a dress, when Maddy paints the tattoo on his neck that connects Isabel and Tara, that he is so desperate to erase later. He won’t leave with Maddy – he’ll stay in the same house, after the death of his mother and his terrifying dad (I wonder how Schoenbrun got Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit to randomly play this character!), he’ll work in the movie theatre and then in the entertainment centre, he’ll buy a new TV and maybe have a family that we never see (his only interactions with other people are awkward, always teetering on the edge of some kind of violence), that he claims he cares about. It’s suffocating, desperate. These highly artificial spaces feel like they negate the existence of an outside world, like nothing else exists – just the way that sets on a television show would.
2024, directed by Jane Schoenbrun, starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan.
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