Spoilers ahead, but I will try to make it understandable to those who have not watched the film.
I am recounting as much as I can from memory: errare humanum est.
I saw I Saw the TV Glow, directed by Jane Schoenbrun, last night, and I have been thinking about it all day. The film had to it a remarkable, profound feeling of discomfort, hard to isolate but unambiguously there. It is a movie based on vibes, and the vibes are bad. Richard Brody in The New Yorker described the film’s “distinctively trans aesthetic”, suggesting that:
“Schoenbrun’s young characters are experiencing dysphoria—not, explicitly, gender dysphoria but a general sense of deep-rooted unease with their lives, with themselves, and with their identities—and it gets expressed in ways that, for the most part, involve gender implicitly.”
I certainly agree with this assessment, but I think the film’s pervasive unease extends to more than gender. Rather, it is a sort of a disgust at the trappings of modern middle-class entertainment.
The film centers on two characters: its protagonist Owen, and a girl he encounters named Maddy, who introduces him to a TV show called “The Pink Opaque”. The movie follows their aging through high school (Maddy is two years older) with occasional time-skips, and their friendship centered around the show. The keystone of the film’s unease, and of the film as a whole, is Maddy’s obsession with “The Pink Opaque”, leading her to feel that the show’s world is more real than her own, and that the characters are her real friends. In her junior year of high school, she begs Owen to run away with her, but, fearful of his father, he stays. Maddy disappears, leaving only a burning TV set in her backyard.
Ten years later, she reappears, encountering Owen in the grocery store. He is working at a movie theater, living with his father. Now, Maddy is the Morpheus to Owen’s Neo: she tells him, in a haunting and passionate monologue, that his world is not real, and that he needs to bury himself alive with her to wake up as his true self (Isabel, the character from the show). But Owen takes the blue pill. He pushes Maddy over outside the graves she has dug for them and runs away, never, as he tells the audience directly, to see her again. And his life goes on.
But it is here that the film becomes its most horrifying. The movie theater closes, and Owen comes to work in an arcade or “Fun Center”. The sites of the most horror in the film are such places of entertainment: ice cream trucks, movie theaters, the arcade. Replete with flashing, multicolored lights and sounds, they unnerve the viewer and the characters with just how sickeningly off they are.
They are so terrifying, I think, because they confirm Maddy’s thesis: that this world is not real, that there is something wrong. This is not specific to I Saw the TV Glow—scary clowns, Five Nights at Freddy’s, etc. all show the horror that this sort of entertainment can have.
It is a fear that lies in falsehood.
In the film’s climax, the simian arcade employees howl a “Happy Birthday” song to a child with increasing fervor, while a now-aged and ailing Owen looks on in revulsion, until he eventually cries out. The camera pans around the room: everyone, employees and customers has their heads down, like androids that have been shut off. Perhaps they have been.
No one actually thinks the arcade employees singing “Happy Birthday” to you mean it. But we force ourselves to pretend anyway, to play along in the social game that is paid-for entertainment. We pretend that the people we have paid to serve us—the clowns, mall Santas, Disneyland characters, and TV actors—actually care about us. But they don’t. The juxtaposition between this saccharine, corporate positivity and the troubles of real life is nauseating. It is more so because this kind of entertainment typically pertains to children—and there is a deep unease with the idea that the smiling faces we entrust our children to may have sinister intentions.
Near the end of the film, an adult Owen returns to watch “The Pink Opaque” (now on a streaming service, not VHS), and realizes that it is cheesy, made-for-kids drivel. Could the show that captivated him and Maddy all of those years ago, the show that felt more real than real life, truly have been so stupid? Were the characters they felt to be their friends really just child actors—and bad ones, at that?
At one phantasmagoric scene in the “Fun Center”, Owen looks on at a smiling child inside a sealed clear capsule that is scattering money around him. The top of the capsule reads, in neon lights, YOU ARE DYING. In I Saw the TV Glow, death is not an event but a process, a period of slow, inevitable consumption. It is the slow realization that our world is a false one, but with an even more terrifying knowledge that there is not a more real alternative. We fear the things meant to make us smile because we know that they are hollow, that they were never really meant for us.
