I Saw the TV Glow

There was something that captured my attention when I saw the trailer for this film. It reminded me of a time back before everything was commoditized and market tested and even professionally weird like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. It felt DIY and indie and just plain odd. In the best Dannie Darko kind of way. Something uniquely un-Hollywood, but with no aspirations to become. Cool. But, also, not at all made for me. Even though a good chunk of it was filmed mere miles from Casa de Hipster. Because, as Hipster Jr. Jr. told me before the thing even started, it’s an allegory for the transgender experience. A theme that, honestly, I probably wouldn’t have figured out in my feebled mind because I’m just not moded that way. In a young person way. In a way whose mind grew up on Schwarzenegger movies and Top Secret! Who kind of sees allegory — especially allegory about topics that are way outside my own experience — as too involved. I appreciate it, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t always pick up on it.

What I did pick up is that this is an incredibly strange film. One that felt more like a dream than a viewing experience. Especially when we start off in 1996 in a time that feels both familiar and ancient (but is a year in which filmmaker, Jane Schoenbrun, was only 9). It’s so squarely in my own timeline, yet the experience of these characters is so foreign to my own experience that it might as well have happened on Mars. Which is how the entirety of the film kind of feels. Similar to this universe, yet slightly off. Shifted, I guess. Which, I imagine, is exactly how Schoenbrun wants it to manifest. Mission accomplished. The perspective of the film is through the eyes of our main character, Owen (Justice Smith), an isolated teen with very little in the way of outside influence and experience. Because everything kind of happens from his point of view, we’re boxed into his weird world. Smith is a 30-year-old man, mind you, so playing a high school freshman is a little disconcerting, but it kind of works with him. Mainly because his flat affect, young-ish face and just the surreal nature of the entire endeavor makes you question everything, so why not just accept a grown-ass dude playing a fourteen year old? After all, the guy was in Pokémon Detective Pikachu.

The filmmaking itself puts us in a state. Filmed mostly in the dark only lit by screens and ambient lights. Lots of languid shots of faces. Moments of lingering, uncomfortable silences. Followed by blaring. And homemade horror — if that’s a thing. I know somewhere mixed in here are Buffy the Vampire Slayer references — a series I had no connection to, nor an affinity for (though I did see the original 1992 Buffy film in the theater). There are also some nods to Twin Peaks, a show I did actually watch, but was always a little too too for my taste. I’m a simple man. But if you put that media in a blender and turn it on high you get the mysterious show at the center of this film: The Pink Opaque. A fictional show within the movie that binds our two characters, Owen and Maddy (Jack Haven). A show that feels like the Mac Tonight McDonald’s commercial on acid. Or like a high school production of The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight Tonight” video. A show into which these two characters pour their identities. The elder Maddy acting as Owen’s shaman into the world of the show and how and why it means so much to her and should mean so much to him. All while his strict parents (his mother dying of cancer and his father played by a shadowy Fred Durst) forbid him from staying up late enough to watch the show or hang out with Maddy to watch it. Again, weird to see a 30-year-old man be told he has to go to bed at 9 p.m. But eventually Maddy runs away, Owen’s mom dies and he’s left adrift.

Eight years or so later Maddy resurfaces, seems dysregulated and, frankly, a little out of her mind. She explains to Owen that she’s essentially been inside the show this whole time and despite it being canceled is somehow still going as a pocket universe or something? Weirdly not the only mention of a pocket universe I’ve heard in the last couple months, the other being in an almost opposite piece of media in DC property, Peacemaker. She tries to convince him to do some crazy shit and he refuses — a common theme with Owen throughout — and she vanishes once again. He goes on to live a truly dreary life. Smith playing the character in a halting monotone and passive, hang-dog way that is pretty hard to watch. His clear divorce from the world and his own emotional state reads more neurodivergent than depressed, but the dude’s refusal to go along with Maddy’s plan (first to run away when he was a kid and then to literally bury himself alive as an adult) has led to a life where his true self has been denied and he is miserable for it. He and the film devolve into full-blown depression and suddenly we have an old-ass Justice Smith stuck working at the world’s darkest and most depressing fun center having never moved on and seemingly never going to. There was some disagreement or confusion in our house when Owen, in his same detached way, mentions having a family (while wrapping his arms around a big screen TV) as to if he’s either lying to the audience, actually has a family but doesn’t care, or if his “family” is, in fact, just an imaginary family on the other side of the screen. Like a lot of the film, I think this is intentionally ambiguous. The denouement is either meant to be cathartic or a too-little-too-late cry into the void. I’m honestly not sure. It’s a bit haunting. But also confounding. Whatever the case, it’s a thinker. It’s art, which is cool. And I’m sure if I were a millennial rather than who I am, I’d be more plugged into the zeitgeist and would vibe with more of the references that just flew over my head. If you are in that pocket, though, it’s certainly worth a watch.