In the Flesh: I Saw the TV Glow

“I’m sorry,” wheezes Owen (Justice Smith), limping through the dingy innards of the Chuck E. Cheese-like purgatory where he’s worked for twenty years. “I’m sorry about earlier. This new medication I’m on.” The business’s patrons ignore him, lost in their cheap diversions, not caring that this human being is suffocating in front of them. Many of these diversions are licensed games inspired by The Pink Opaque (I can hear Niles Crane saying “the dreaded double glottal stop” every time a character says the name of the show out loud), a show which once served as a young Owen’s only real outlet for understanding himself and connecting with his peers, namely his high school friend, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). As he ages, the nourishment Owen derives from watching and re-watching The Pink Opaque begins to wane. The show isn’t what he remembered. Cheesy merchandising dilutes its once-powerful characters and atmosphere, sure, but it’s Owen’s fear of growing up, of moving on from his childhood fixations and phobias, that truly destroys the show’s unique beauty.

This slow curdling of nostalgic attachment runs through the heart of I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s heartbreaking sophomore feature. Maddy undertakes a terrifying process of transformation to assume the identity with which she and Owen played as children, to become an adult on her own terms. “That’s not my name,” she tells Owen again and again as he tries to recreate their childhood dynamic, disturbed by her intensity and by her willingness to forsake the joyless obligations which define his life. Again and again he tries to steer her toward conformity, insisting she go to the police, that she tell her neglectful mother and physically abusive stepfather she’s alive, that she subject herself to the same oppressively square and conformist half-life he has allowed to define his own existence. Schoenbrun doesn’t stop at allegory, though. Beneath the film’s analogy for closeted life we catch glimpses of Owen’s repressed transgender identity, embodied by the Pink Opaque character Isabel (Helena Howard) and occasionally seen in muddled flashbacks. The lie he’s forced himself to live is the real fiction.

The whole thing comes to us in the language of such ‘90s institutions as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Clarissa Explains It All, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and other teen and tween TV landmarks, and as its subject matter grows more alienating and complex, that language begins, very much by design, to fail. Owen’s constricted affect in his monologues to the camera becomes more and more lost in the desolate landscape of his straight, empty life. The visual language of The Pink Opaque goes from disturbing and psychosexually loaded (Mr. Melancholy’s (Emma Portner) sole appearance in the flesh is so genuinely unsettling I found it difficult to watch) to trite and commercial. The signs and symbols of our childhoods can’t survive the pressures of the adult world. They can’t survive the self-inflicted agony of living in fear of yourself, of relying on childish things as your sole comfort and connection. It’s not enough, but as the chalk message we see several times throughout the film proclaims, there is still time. Beautifully shot and invested with real power and strong, heartfelt performances, I Saw the TV Glow is an intimately devastating triumph.