I Saw The TV Glow begs you to let it be more than a movie
some thoughts and feelings
Sometimes a movie starts and you start crying. The kids are in the gym, flapping the parachute up and sitting inside the fluttering dome. You see Owen. He’s so small. But he looks safe there in that small delicate space, like he feels safe, like maybe this is where he feels safest, like safe is a wonder for him.
And you go, oh, god, I know what you are. Maya’s sitting next to you, and she knows it, too. He’s like us. And we’re crying because we know what happens between there and here. Outside that parachute is the haunted house and you are helpless, waiting for the cut that thrusts him out there, in there. Don’t go in. Stay here.
But it’s a horror movie, and the horror is time and inevitability. The horror is the cut and the title card, two years later, eight years, twenty years later. The time that’s just gone or forgotten, the inevitability of the next cut. Cut and you’re a new actor with the same name, the same mannerisms in a man’s body. Cut and possibility is annihilated. And all you want to do is reach through the screen and pull Owen loose from the fabric of the film, rescue this child from the cruel physics of his world. And all you can do is watch.
The movie is I Saw The TV Glow, directed by Jane Schoenbrun. It’s about Owen and Maddy, young and too delicate, stranded in the suburbs. They love a show called The Pink Opaque, about two girls battling the supernatural, apart but together, linked by their psychic connection and the matching marks on their necks.
Owen watches the tapes Maddy makes him. He’s drawn to the show and he’s drawn to Maddy, who’s drawn to the show. Sometimes you’re drawn to things, to people. Older girls, confident and standoffish girls. Maddy cries watching the show, watching Tara on the screen, dykey and confident. Sometimes you cry watching something without knowing why. It’s a muscle, that not-knowing. It gets stronger every time.
Owen’s drawn to the other girl on screen, Isabel. You can tell. They have the same face structure. She’s scared like him, but she’s brave, too. There is one kind cut in the movie. Owen is walking down the street, and there’s a cut to Isabel walking in the woods, beautiful, at ease, free from the grainy VHS interlacing that walls her off from Owen’s reality, free from the haunted house. The cut back to Owen is so, so cruel. Every time I call Owen “he” I flinch a little bit. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to do.
Maddy disappears. The show is canceled. Season five ends on a cliffhanger. Tara and Isabel are ambushed, force fed Luna Juice to blank their minds. Their hearts are cut out, still beating, and the girls are buried alive, vomiting baby blue ooze in an endless torrent. And that’s it. That’s the end. Cut to black, roll credits. But outside of it, the movie continues.
Sometimes you watch things, too, as a kid. Read books, like Marvin Redpost: Is He A Girl? On the cover a boy stares at his reflection, an astonished feminized version of himself. In the book he gets tangled up in his bedsheets and, impossibly, kisses his elbow, which he’s been told will turn him into a girl. The book plays coy about whether it’s magic or misunderstanding, but maybe he’s a girl, for a while, before he manages to get in a second elbow kiss and switch back.
You try it. It can’t be impossible. You do stretches, cultivated flexibility. You tried to tangle yourself up in your bedsheets, too. It’s funny, silly, as long as you didn’t think about how badly you wanted it. Like the birthday candle wishes every year, which are silly. And then, eventually, you forgot. That’s really the horror of it, in retrospect, that that want went back on the shelf folded and tucked inside the book, disappeared with the deleted torrents and scrubbed browser histories, that something you felt so intensely, something you knew with crystal certainty, could be swallowed by your body, boxed, buried, gone. Cut, title card: ___ years later.
Maddy reappears, eight years later. Owen lives in the same town, in the same house, in the same body, in the same silence, watching the same Pink Opaque tapes when he can’t sleep. His life is small, thin. Maddy has been somewhere else, as someone else. She’s always been someone else; that’s the point.
She tells Owen she’s been in the show, as Tara, as herself. Continuing from the finale, climbing up past the cliffhanger, remembering what she’d forgotten: that it was never just a show. That’s the point. She had to be buried alive to get there. She had to literally, physically die. She’s recovered what Isabel’s forgotten in the cuts – been made to forget – and returned to share it. She knows where her heart is. It’s still beating. You’re crying because her heart’s still beating. Maya’s crying because he looks just like she did at that age.
We’re back inside the parachute as Maddy explains, where projected constellations arc across her face and body – overhead myths, gestures with meanings, distant possibilities. Repositories for the stories and idealized selves we understand ourselves through, ancient guidance, but also vast distant unreachable unattainable, collapsing so easily back into incoherent pricks of glow in a sea of darkness. Access points to a world beyond, or just static in the sky.
(Have they even actually seen constellations with all that suburban light pollution? Or just these cartoonish doodles of them?)
She’s dug a grave for Owen on the football field. That’s how it feels, isn’t it, when it’s too loud to ignore anymore, when everything you’ve forgotten comes back in a rush, swelling like a hematoma in your chest. The horror of inevitability, the black hole of the thing you’ve built your small, thin life around escaping, finally pulling you in. Marching this body, this self, to an open grave, to be buried, trusting that this death will be transformative. But there are a lot of ways to be buried alive.
Sometimes you have a kink. A transformation kink – you like when boys become girls. You like in particular when it’s forced on them, by magic or pseudoscience or a glitch in reality. They had no choice. Sometimes you tell people about it, taking pains to let them know that it’s strictly fantasy, unrealistic, not something that can really be acted out or incorporated into real world sex, or anything like that. Sometimes someone asks what you’d want to be called, as a girl, and you have an answer too close at hand. It’s scary to say it and scarier to hear it. Sometimes you ghost them, and hope the forgetting will happen like it always has, burying them in archived texts. A kink is a neat container. It’s easier to bury than a self.
Owen doesn’t go. It was just a show. He has a life. Cut, title card, twenty years later. He looks and sounds like he’s dying on his feet. The haunted house is taking its time killing him. You notice his hairline, receding like yours was. He is screaming, crying, begging, desperately alone, and you’re crying too, because he can still be saved if someone could just reach him, if you could just reach him. He is taking a box cutter and dragging it down his chest - suicide by DIY vaginoplasty - and there it is inside him, still, brighter than ever, louder than ever, more painful than ever to access. Thank god, thank god. And then it’s gone again, sealed back up. That’s the end. Cut to black, roll credits. But outside of it, you continue.
A show is a window into something else until it’s the thing that traps you inside it. A body is potential and possibility until it’s the thing that traps you inside it. A kink is a window into someone else until it’s the thing that traps you inside it. Windows close, fog over, become wall. You forget there was ever a window there at all. There are a lot of ways to be buried alive.
The movie ends where the show ends. A vivisection, a burial, a cliffhanger. But the show never ended, really, because it was never just a show. That’s the point. The movie ended but maybe it wasn’t, shouldn’t be, just a movie. Girls can save each other, over and over, across time and space, across screens, across the cuts. You and Maya can hold each other through the credits. You can be buried alive and come back, recovered, covered in constellations, with your name on your lips.