31 Days of Halloween, Day 3- I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Directed by: Jane Schoenbrun

Top 8 Cast: Justice Smith, Jack Haven, Ian Foremen, Danielle Deadwyler, Helena Howard, Connor O’Malley, Lindsey Jordan, Fred Durst

Plot: Owen and Maddy are troubled teens growing up in the late 90’s. They bond over their mutual love of a spooky kids show The Pink Opaque. Eventually Maddy runs away from home and isn’t seen again for 8 years. When she returns at last it’s with some daring claims, The Pink Opaque is real, and she’s been there.

Response: When you’re trans then the gay girl in the broken home is like the psychic, demon-battling sister you met at sleep away camp. Will you join me in the pink opaque? Glowing sheet ghosts on the back of our necks. We’ll dog-ear our episode guides. Travel through electrical currents and live coffin burial to other dimensions. Let the serial fantasy inform us of the possible. I will rescue you, will you rescue me too? Do you want to be rescued? Are you able to want to be rescued?

Background and Analysis: Jane Schoenbrun began writing this film three months into hormone replacement therapy after coming out as a trans woman. I’ve seen some folks write that they missed the trans allegory but once you see it you see it with crystal clarity. To interpret the film’s events and meanings as other than the story of a closeted trans woman who never acknowledges her truth (which in the context of this film means burying herself alive in order to awaken in her parallel TV life where some blue baddies have her heart on ice) is to give a bad faith reading to the film. Sure, it is possible that The Pink Opaque was only ever a television show and that Maddie is crazy but to give the film that reading would be to rob it of its hope. And hope is one thing this movie has. The hearts are still beating. “There is still time.”

All movies are already fantasies. Even documentaries are edited. There are no witches that we know about in Kramer vs. Kramers but the story of the Kramers is still a fiction. The only reason there are no witches is not because Kramer vs. Kramer is a “real” story but because the film-makers decided not to put any witches in.

One of the most brilliant portions of this stylish and life-saving PG-13 thriller happens near the end. [SPOILERS] Owen has not re-awakened as his true demon-hunting girl self in The Pink Opaque. Instead he has grown older and continued working for the same shitty boss (played by the always brilliant Connor O’Malley) but now in an arcade. He tells the veiwer that he has a happy loved-filled family but we never see them. We see him binging TV, cutting himself in the bathroom and having panic attacks. What makes this brilliant is in the movie’s decision to go fully expressionistic for this segment. Owen is older and made so with some very light make-up but none of his co-workers are aged. By the movie’s timeline we should be somewhere in the 2030’s or 2040’s but there’s no attempt to show a future. When Owen screams everyone stands still and ignores him. They do so theatrically. The movie goes full weird here and it does so I think to point out how the closeted life is the true fantasy, it is the true weird thing. Owen had a shot at burying himself alive but he blew it and yet “there’s still time”.

The cutting scene itself plays out like a perfect inverse of the chest vagina scene in that other horror about TV, Videodrome. When Max Renn goes sick with images a vagina sprouts on his chest and it feeds him a gun and tells him to become a male shooter. When Owen goes sick from hiding he cuts a wound that’s shaped like a vagina and from within the TV static reminds him that the Pink Opaque still exists.

Without the allegory the movie is a bit of a head-scratcher. It sets up a scary adventure that never happens and transitions instead into a tragicomic absurdist nightmare. With a bad faith reading the movie is hopeless. But there is hope here. Maddy got out and so did Jane Schoenbrun. This turns the bummer into an exultant purge.

Scores:

Autumn Vibes: 1/5

Scares & Chills: 1/5

Cultural & Cinematic Importance: 5/5

Monster Action: 3/5

Second Opinions:

“I Saw the TV Glow is an earnest personal statement wrapped in a surreal art-horror movie, a labor of love whose originality and astonishing beauty establish writer-director Jane Schoenbrun as a major cinematic talent.”- Katie Rife, IGN

“It’s the toughest balancing act of all to heap a story with nostalgia while you stitch it to something fledgling and painful that fights to stay alive.”- Emmet Asher-Perrin, Reactor

“watching I Saw the TV Glow tonight, i saw myself up there on the screen in a way i never thought i’d see in a film. my exact experience with dysphoria had been perfectly, devastatingly articulated. transness and gender dysphoria are never directly mentioned in the film, but it’s unmistakably there in the text.” - Julie on Letterboxed