THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
THIS ARTICLE IS NOT WORTH ROBBING YOURSELF OF THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXPERIENCE THIS FILM FIRST-HAND.
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The first time I cried was during the middle of the film. Then I cried again at the end. Then again in the lobby of the theater all the way to the parking lot. Then as soon as I got into my car. Then again that night while we were in bed. Then that morning.
The last time I cried was during the second time I saw it — today, June 3rd, 2024. During the end. Again.
I am not a person who cries over works of fiction, but I Saw The T.V. Glow had an effect on me unlike any other film I have ever seen before. All of my favorite childhood comfort films (like Juno and But I’m a Cheerleader — you didn’t ask, though) fell down my rankings to make room for I Saw The T.V. Glow at the very top. Not even my rose-colored nostalgia glasses could save them. How strangely relevant.
Perhaps it helped that Sloppy Jane took me by complete surprise with their appearance. I remember watching Haley Dahl’s music videos release live on YouTube with only a couple of other people watching alongside me, wanting to buy some of the “genu-iiine” blue slime she was selling on her Bandcamp back in the day, listening to her music all the way back to when she had about 30 or 40 monthly listeners. Back when her take on “They’re Coming to Take Me Away” was her most popular song and some no-name called Phoebe Bridgers was her bassist (Kidding, of course — I love Bridgers, too.) Back when Dahl stripped naked and choked out guttural barks, conducting lordly with one hand and white-knuckling her mic with the other. How I loved her and how I envied her stage presence when I was a brand-new music-producing teenager. It may sound strange and parasocial, but seeing her on screen felt like seeing an old friend in a very unexpected place.
Speaking of parasocial teenagers, let’s talk plot. It takes place in the 90s. Owen is a mild-mannered seventh grader who is infatuated with the previews of a Buffy-like television show called The Pink Opaque. It plays right before the channel airs black and white reruns for the night, and it is about two young girls named Isabel and Tara who meet at sleep-away camp and learn that they both have supernatural powers. Unfortunately, he is never allowed to stay up late enough to watch it during its 10:30 time block. Cue Maddy, a ninth grader attending the oddly-named Void High with an obsession with the show. They awkwardly introduce themselves to one another, as teenagers do, and she invites him over to watch an episode with her. When Owen pretends to attend a sleepover with a friend to watch the show with Maddy, their bond is set in stone. A couple of years later, Maddy begins slipping him VHS tapes of the series so he can keep up.
One day, Owen confides in Maddy that there is something “wrong with him.” Like “all of his insides are ripped out of him, but he’s too afraid to check.” Like everything’s shook up.
That is the horror of suburbia that the film presents, and that is what Maddy escapes when she runs away from a broken home with a mother who “doesn’t give a crap what she does” and a father who is physically abusive to her. She tries to take Owen with her, but he is too timid to go through with it. When she leaves, all the police find is a television set in her backyard engulfed in flames. Coincidentally, The Pink Opaque is canceled later that same month.
The film makes excellent use of liminal space to sell the special kind of hell that is produced from the mundanity and thinly disguised underbelly of suburban America. Abandoned fun centers. Dimly lit grocery stores with dull decal. Empty movie theaters. They are places we have all been before. It is never contemptuous of suburbia overall, though — the film crafts a perfectly beautiful all-encompassing standard American childhood when we feel the strangeness of Owen’s school at night, when Owen sits beneath a puffed-up parachute with his classmates, and when Owen lays down in the back seat of his parents’ car and stares at the backs of their heads. When an older Owen apathetically strolls through hallways with cork boards plastered with milquetoast motivational quotes. With this suburban nightmare comes insistence on falling in line, something that Owen tries but just can’t seem to do.
Pink lighting follows him everywhere he goes — when Owen first flicks through the T.V. and finds a preview for The Pink Opaque, various shades of blue bathing his face are replaced with hot pink. Something sparks in him when he first sees the show. Something sparks in him when pink breaks through the boring dull blue that dominates his family’s color scheme, seen through all of their clothes, furnishings, etc. — especially when his father is present, an eerie force in the film with little dialogue. Despite that, he has the highest impact on Owen as the enforcer of his masculinity. His father is most often seen sitting in front of a neon blue television set erupting with sitcom laughter. Almost like the universe is laughing at Owen’s plight.
When Owen’s sick mother confronts him at a fair about how he acts “different” from everyone else, a ride’s hot pink light flashes behind them, demands their (and the audience’s) attention, and is ultimately ignored. Both of their backs are turned to it. Owen wordlessly stares down at the blue cotton candy he bought earlier but has not taken a single bite of. He spits into it. Watches the blue — the masculinity prescribed to him — dissolve away. Owen knows that there is something wrong and ill-fitting about the masculinity he is forced to wear, but he is nowhere close to considering what might be right.
So he’s just wrong.
The obvious remains nameless throughout the film. None of the characters recognize Owen’s potential transgender identity as something that is even an option. Owen is “different.” Owen “likes shows for girls.” Maddy even seems to think that Owen might just “not like girls” after she confides in him that she, in fact, only likes girls — but she still doesn’t consider that he could be one. Not until she returns from her disappearance eight years later.
When Maddy returns, she tells Owen that she has been inside of The Pink Opaque the entire time she has been gone. What’s more, Maddy and Owen are actually Tara and Isabel, respectively. In its last episode before cancelation, Mr. Melancholy, The Pink Opaque’s big bad, traps Isabel and Tara in the nightmare realm by cutting their still-beating hearts out of their chests, feeding them “Luna Juice”, and burying them alive. They are in the nightmare realm as they speak, Maddy tells him. She had to bury herself alive in their world to return to The Pink Opaque. She came back just to retrieve him.
As much as Owen wants to believe he could be someone as powerful and beautiful as Isabel, he is too scared to go through with it. So he turns away from Maddy, runs, and never sees her again.
Decades pass by. Owen’s wheezing fits get worse as the hellish suburbia surrounding him suffocates him to death, metaphorically and literally. Stifles him. Stifles Isabel as she lays there dying without even realizing that the entire life she is living is fueled by pure delirium, is mere seconds long in The Pink Opaque’s world.
The environment even sends messages to a now elderly Owen, who is still working a mundane job at a Family Fun Center. “You are dying”, a ticket machine reads. In the midst of a child’s birthday party, Owen has a moment of clarity and subsequently has a breakdown. Begs for everyone around to ignore him. Falls to his knees. Screams and cries for his long-dead mother. Runs to the bathroom. Cuts his own chest open and looks inside. Laughs through the tears as he stares at the glow emanating from it.
Puts his shirt back on, apologizes to his apathetic coworkers for his “outburst” and blames it on a “new medication”, and that’s it.
The film ends.
He never becomes the woman he’s meant to be.
Owen never becomes Isabel.
It’s painful. If you’ve repressed your identity, if you’ve failed to even put a name to what you are, you probably relate. As someone who is still consistently misgendered and forces themself back into the closet all too often for the comfort of others, the pain was red-hot.
The film is most obviously a coming-of-age horror. It is about wanting to be a part of something bigger than yourself and feeling the true expanse of the world as a child only to lose grasp of it as you get older. When Owen attempts to rewatch The Pink Opaque as an adult, it is different from how he remembers. Cheesy and silly and nowhere near as scary. As if it really was just a kid’s show all along.
Adulthood, according to Owen’s world — OUR world — is about losing all of the magic and secret knowledge that was inside of you as a teen. Missing opportunities in exchange for the life that is prescribed to you. You should want a house and a nuclear family and to stay whatever gender you’re assigned at birth, so that’s what you will do. But as Maddy/Tara said, it is all an illusion to keep us distracted. Why are we supposed to want that? And is it not terrifying? Their high school’s name is Void High, their mascots the Vultures — where are the students to go in life from something so superficial and bleak? It does not help that all of the adults in Maddy and Owen’s lives have failed them or otherwise given out on them somehow. All they can aspire to be are sad, close-minded people.
The film, a tad more discreetly, is trans horror done in a way I have never seen done before. Owen/Isabel never once realizes his “true identity” as a woman. It is the horror of repression, perhaps even a cautionary tale.
“You won’t even realize that you’re dying.” That is what Mr. Melancholy said to Isabel before sending her into the nightmare realm as Owen.
We are killing ourselves by stifling our desires.
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