He Likes To Watch

Beneath neon nostalgia and Tim and Eric-style comedy asides, I Saw The TV Glow is stealthily one of the most genuinely depressing pictures to come along in a long time. Director Jane Schoenbrun follows up the most zeitgeist-attuned, empathetic and overall best picture of the decade so far, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, with a tale of spiritual futility, lost media, and childhood repression.

Owen (Justice Smith) “likes TV shows”, per his comical response to a question about his sexuality. A specific TV Show in question, “The Pink Opaque”, a late night mid 90s Are You Afraid of the Dark?-esque cheesefest with Sailor Moon femme energy, seems to be all he likes. He latches onto it he sulks fearfully through adolescence as many do. Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) also likes the show. Soon it becomes clear that, just a show (or not!), it represents in their young minds the only avenue through which they can get outside of their miserable selves. 

Like World’s Fair, the veracity of supernatural elements is in question throughout, playable alternatively as schizophrenic hallucinations. Characters apparate in and out of The Pink Opaque, its “midnight realm” and each other’s lives, to the extent those three things are distinct. It’s fully a surrealist film, or perhaps rather, neo-surrealist; Schoenberg has talked David Lynch to death in interviews, and since Lynch himself isn’t a classical Bunuelian surrealist means we’d be in new territory by now.

It would seem that the distinction is thus: while classical surrealism was often more subtle, preferring to suggest the bizarre, Schoenbrun is borderline gonzo, instead opting to leave the mundane to suggestion and the weird as the most obvious interpretation. It’s like a traditional metaphorical fantasy approach but the metaphor is not only backwards, it’s hypothetical. Maddie’s reemergence in Owen’s life is as a sad, delusional person trying to claw her way back to at least an emotional truth rather than as a messenger of The Pink Opaque itself. 

But as anyone who’s watched any of the neon neo gonzo A24 post-genre pseudo-horror films that aesthetically presage I Saw The TV Glow should be able to tell you, that stuff is not new. In fact, it’s unbelievably played out. But what separates the distributor’s new offering isn’t just prettier colors than usual, nor is it even that its “weirdness” has a real purpose again. It’s Schoenberg’s painful understanding of childhood’s emotional turmoil.

It all translates as a feeling of emptiness, but as adulthood approaches, Owen begins to realize that his fear of being empty was the most meaningful thing he’ll ever feel; it’s a cyclical proof of life. By then, of course, it’s too late, and as many a burnt-out adult will tell you, it’s far worse than the pain ever was. Schoenberg has really crafted some of the most romantic work of our least romantic age. If the outcast torment at the heart of this film, at the heart of the self, still resonates with you in the moment, count yourself lucky because soon, maybe nothing will, and you’ll be empty after all.