I Saw I Saw the TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow is the second movie in American filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s 'Screen Trilogy'. Released in 2024, it is preceded by 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and will be followed by a currently unreleased trilogy of novels. These novels were initially pitched as a TV series before taking their current form, titled Public Access Afterworld.
Schoenbrun describes I Saw the TV Glow as “quite a personal film,” acting as an allegory for their experience growing up in the American suburbs. Opening the film is a black screen and TV chatter, mixed with static, quickly cutting to chalk drawings on a suburban road. Schoenbrun wastes no time spotlighting the central themes of I Saw the TV Glow: escapism through television and the excruciating monotony of suburban life.
We meet Owen as he flicks through TV channels until finally, he lands on an advertisement. Showcasing a late-night TV show The Pink Opaque, the advert bathes the room in its warm pink glow... entrancing Owen immediately. The program follows two psychic best friends Tara and Isabel fighting the monster of the week. Fun fact: Tara is played by Lindsey Jordan AKA indie music sensation Snail Mail.
The film’s opening act is set in 1996. Introducing the viewer to ninth-grade Maddy and seventh-grade Owen. Both connect through The Pink Opaque. The rest of the film spans across many years, presenting Owen during 1998, and 2006, then finally closing with Owen twenty years in the future. One thing remains consistent across this timeline - Maddy and Owen’s obsession with their favourite TV show.
Maddy and Owen find a version of themselves reflected on their screens in the form of Tara and Isabel. These are more than characters. They adopt a life outside of the screen within the lives of Owen and Maddy. As Maddy writes to Owen, ‘isabel and tara are like family to me.’
Spoilers from this point forward!
During the summer before her final year of high school, Maddy goes missing. Leaving no traces except for a burning TV in her garden. Shortly after, The Pink Opaque ends. Owen hears nothing from her for eight years, until she appears back in his life, with no explanation. When he pushes her on where she has been for almost a decade, she confides that she has been in the world of The Pink Opaque.
After escaping their hometown Maddy changed her name and lived in Phoenix, where she discovered she was in the same mundane cage she had been attempting to run away from. Despite changing location, her feelings of restlessness persisted. Attempting to mirror the season finale of The Pink Opaque where, defeated by the nemesis Tara and Isabel are buried alive, she paid a coworker to cover her in dirt. Here, she stayed buried for days, until clawing her way out of the ground as Tara, finding that only seconds had passed since the events of the TV show’s finale. Maddy explains her theory to Owen - that they are Tara and Isabel, imprisoned in the Midnight Realm, cursed to believe that their prison is their real reality. Maddy then implores Owen to join her, to bury himself in the ground so that he can save his true identity (Isabel) from suffocating.
The film acts as a metaphor for transitioning - the struggle of finding one's identity and how people struggling to find an identity often build one based on the media they consume. Although Schoenbrun stated in an interview with Zsombor Bobák they do not view this movie as strictly about transition, it is a film written in the aftermath of their coming out:
"I was dealing with the fallout from coming out and this idea of holding myself in my entire life until this breaking point, and this really is, I think, the arc of the film."
Schoenbrun themselves is nonbinary, although they did not understand this aspect of their identity until adulthood. Failing to recognise one’s true self until adulthood plagues Owen within the movie’s events, and he shies away from Maddy’s orders. He refuses to accept that he is Isabel, suffocating beneath a shell, masquerading as Owen. So... when Maddy disappears again, Owen remains as Owen. Living in the same house he grew up in, starting a family, and remaining in the same town for twenty years until he reaches his breaking point. Finally, Owen sees himself through different eyes. His body is not what he thought it once was, cutting himself open he finds glowing television wiring.
Recently modern cinema has been cursed by a blight. A blight that is sucking the colour out of our screens, overlaying cinema with a washed-out filter. Take a look at the trailer for the new Wicked movie if you don’t believe me.
It's not the worst thing in the world, but it is certainly... lacking.
Thankfully, I Saw the TV Glow refuses to conform to this aesthetic of lifeless colour grading. Schoenbrun turned to films like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Steven Spielberg’s A.I for inspiration when crafting the film’s vibrancy, contrasting dark scene locations with the glowing sources of light within them. Shot on 35mm film, Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric K. Yue aimed to push the colour on screen as far as it could go, mirroring the events of the narratives through the array of colours on screen.
Many scenes during the initial act are lit with pure pinks, purples and blues. Gloomy basements illuminated by a fish tank; Maddy and Owen sat between radiant vending machines in a dark hallway. The beginning of their friendship is pure, like the vibrant colours emulated in the film. Owen does recognise aspects of himself inside of Isabel on the screen. Watching The Pink Opaque is the catalyst for moments of self-discovery during Owen’s high school years. But as Owen refuses to act on his revelations the colours transition into the loud and confused setting of Owen’s adult jobs - at the cinema and then a children’s fun centre.
Owen has been awakened to his true self, yet chooses to continue living in a life that is killing him.
As a teenager I did not consume media, I was consumed by it. I felt so deeply about the films and the shows I was watching, about the books I read. It took me months to finish reading the second instalment in the Beautiful Creatures series, Beautiful Darkness. So infuriated by the events of the book, I closed it in a fit of rage. Refusing to pick it up again until I had calmed down over the course of several weeks.
In 2017, I watched Dunkirk at my local cinema. After leaving I decided I simply had to spend what little money my 14-year-old self had on the DVD, to rewatch as soon as it arrived. This then sparked a long obsession with the cast so intense it made my stomach hurt. I have no personal experience with transitioning nor have I had any personal experience feeling gender dysphoria. However, I Saw the TV Glow’s themes of finding an identity to relate to behind a screen hit home for me. I cried more than once during its runtime and the soundtrack had been in my playlist for months before I watched it. I Saw the TV Glow is a movie crafted by screen fans for screen fans... For those who find themselves fitting in better with a cast of fictional characters than in their reality. For those who love media until it becomes something more than just a program, a movie, a book, or a video game.
You can feel the time, love and energy invested into every scene. Watching I Saw the TV Glow felt like those nights when I managed to stay up past my bedtime. Sitting in the darkness of the living room, illuminated only by the artificial glow of a screen. Knowing someone will find me soon and send me to bed, but for now, it’s just me and the television. Maddy discovers the version of herself that she is meant to be through her investment in The Pink Opaque, while Owen slowly decays, refuting Maddy’s claims as insanity. But she isn’t insane. Sometimes we can find ourselves on a screen - an image of who we could be, what we could strive towards. Or even if a program cannot provide the viewer with an identity they can use to help shape their own, it could still provide a safe space for them to escape into. A distraction from the suffocating reality of day-to-day life.
I strongly recommend that you watch this film if you haven’t already seen it. Yes, some of the dialogue is very angsty and dramatic, but aren’t all teenagers? I Saw the TV Glow handles the complex theme of finding one’s identity with immense care. Inviting you to route for Owen, on his journey of discovering who he is deep down. I am glad that this film can exist as a potential lighthouse to help others on their journey of realisation. Because oftentimes, a movie is more than just a movie. It is a place of comfort you can return to after a bad day. A song can be more than just audio but can act as a gateway to a specific memory or feeling from your past. The TV shows we watch don't stop existing when they get cancelled... but can offer friendship and solace in our times of loneliness. I Saw the TV Glow illustrates all these sentiments and more. It is 1000% worth the hour and forty minutes it spans.
