Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ on VOD, a Surreal Horror-Drama About Teens, TV and Tormented Identity

Some advice for anyone who’s considering watching I Saw the TV Glow (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video): Don’t hot-take it. Let it psychically marinate overnight before passing judgment. It will not make “sense” and it’s not supposed to make “sense” and it will challenge your notion of what “sense” truly is. One revelation that helped me better understand this singular, mesmerizing film was this quote from Jane Schoenbrun, who wrote and directed the film to at least partly reflect their trans experience: “ I don’t think my relationship to gender is something that I completely understand. It’s actually quite comforting to embrace incoherence,” they recently told Vanity Fair. Translation: This is not an ordinary film, and any resemblance to the works of David Lynch is perhaps coincidental, but also possibly (and appropriately) subconscious. 

I SAW THE TV GLOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The predecessor to the current compulsive short-attention-span activity of scrolling and/or doomscrolling social media was something known as channel surfing, where one zapped through dozens of cable-TV channels questing to find something good to watch. This is how Owen (Ian Foreman) discovers The Pink Opaque. It’s 1996. At first, Owen only sees a commercial for the show; it doesn’t air until after his bedtime and his parents are strict about that shit. It takes very awkwardly almost-mostly befriending Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) while basking in the eerie aura of the Fruitopia machine at Void High – yes, Void High – before he sees an episode. He lies about sleeping over at a friend’s house and hoofs it to Maddie’s so he can finally see the show, which is a bit like Buffy the Vampire Slayer – teen protagonists, supernatural whatnot, “mythology” episodes mixed in with “monster of the week” episodes – if it skewed younger but was also terrifyingly surreal at times; the show’s “big bad” is Mr. Melancholy, whose moon face is so distorted and upsetting, it makes Crungus look like Lil Bub. 

Two years go by. Owen is played by Justice Smith now, who’s been narrating some of this story from an as-yet-undetermined point in the future, several years past his time at Void High; we see him sitting alone next to a bonfire, and he occasionally speaks directly at the camera. Anyway, it’s hard to tell how much legit face-to-face interaction Owen and Maddie actually share, because they’ve transcended the tropes of ’90s Sullen Teenz into a realm of social inelegance suggesting profound psychic discomfort. It’s far beyond off-the-rack teen angst, is what I’m saying. Owen strolls wordlessly past Maddie and all the ridiculously ironic rah-rah-PMA sloganeering signs in the Void High hallway to the photo darkroom, where she leaves videocassettes of Pink Opaque episodes so he can watch them. Yes, he’s in high school, and his parents still won’t let him stay up past 10 p.m. He also has to watch the episodes on the down-low because his father Frank (of all people, Fred Durst) thinks “that’s a show for girls.” Here I’d like to note that Owen’s mother Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler) seems to be his loving sanctuary, but she wears a do-rag and mentions her “health scare,” and we fear further isolation for this boy.

Maddie and Owen eventually get together in her basement again to watch The Pink Opaque. They converse in the kind of halting, flat, uncertain, tentative speech that makes you want to hug them in the hopes that it’ll make them feel at least a little bit better about themselves even if just for a moment. Maddie goes upstairs and Owen lies on the floor in his sleeping bag and listens to muted commotion from above. We never see him, but Maddie’s stepfather is clearly a shitheel. She decides to run away and tries unsuccessfully to get Owen to join her. Soon thereafter, she’s gone without a word or a trace, leaving her TV in flames in the yard. Then Owen’s mother dies. Then The Pink Opaque is canceled. Everything Owen loves, everything that kept Owen moored, is gone. Gone. Just – gone.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I don’t know. It’s very much doing its own thing. It did make me want to rewatch Mulholland Drive, It Follows and Bottoms, though.

Performance Worth Watching: A nod of respect to Smith and Lundy-Paine, who manage to inspire significant empathy despite being tightly tuned to Schoenbrun’s surreal tone. But a key sequence in I Saw the TV Glow features individual live performances by singers Haley Dahl (fronting the band Sloppy Jane and featuring Phoebe Bridgers) and Kristina Esfandiari (fronting King Woman), and the moments transcend simple tone-setting to reflect mood and theme, the former tapping into well of sadness at the film’s core, and the latter offering primal howls reflecting its inexplicable madness.

Memorable Dialogue: A crucial Maddie’s-basement conversation that sure seems like it’ll go down in history as a great moment of the current era of indie film:

Maddie: I like girls, you know that? I’m not into boys.

Owen: That’s totally fine.

Maddie: Just making sure. What about you? Do you like girls?

Owen: I don’t know.

Maddie: Boys?

Owen, stuttering: I- I think that I like TV shows.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I dislike the indulgence of oversharing, but my experience of I Saw the TV Glow seems to demand context: I saw the film on a strange day after a near-sleepless night caused by out-of-character alcoholic overindulgence. I gutted out a trip to the theater. I was mired in a haze created by exhaustion. I felt muted but vulnerable. The film baffled and fascinated me, and defied any expectations of traditional narrative. It was difficult, prickly, stubborn, obtuse, challenging and wide open for interpretation. It felt big, as if I was experiencing the work of someone deeply connected to the material and channeling some familiar influences – Lynch, some breakout filmmakers from the recent “elevated horror” movement, e.g., Jennifer Kent, Rose Glass, David Robert Mitchell – into something fresh and original. I woke up the next morning remembering Smith’s widened eyes and the neon colors and the musical performances, and felt the film in my protoplasm, haunting my mitochondria. It had seeped in.

Most refreshing is Schoenbrun’s funneling of a story-of-identity through their inspired vision. We’ve seen many films address gender or sexuality in enlightened and sympathetic ways, but never like this. Drenched in horror-film atmospherics and trafficking in disturbing, nightmarish imagery, I Saw the TV Glow is a bizarre mutation of a coming-of-age drama in which teens suffer abuse that’s quiet (a single line of dialogue from Owen’s father defines the family dynamic) and loud (the sounds of tumult in Maddy’s home), and spurs them to rebel or withdraw dramatically. 

And here, I cease trying to conventionally explain I Saw the TV Glow. It’s better to simply feel it deeply and ponder those feelings, it seems. There’s a strange, arch sensibility to it, with purposely flattened performances reflecting the characters’ desire to burst from their bodies and discover themselves and their identities and their truth, but are inexplicably unable to do so. Why? I’ll repeat Schoenbrun’s words: “embrace incoherence.” This is reality for some. Is this strange, frequently hallucinatory, pretty much inexplicable movie a metaphor for gender dysphoria? Seems to be. It can also be bigger than that, about cruelties that hinder and shape identity, about how depression can emotionally mute and cripple a person, about forming identity through extreme fandom and willful submersion in pop-cultural stories, about the potency and danger of nostalgia, about the distortion of memory. It’s “about” what you bring with you into the theater. It’s also “about” how you leave it – bedeviled, saddened and, perhaps, awakened.

Our Call: Extraordinary film. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.