"I Saw the TV Glow"

 ☆☆½ 

Maybe this is what a generation gap looks like? When I Saw the TV Glow ended and I left the theater, I heard a group of people next to me raving about their experience. "It was so creepy!" one of them said. Giggling, another confirmed, "That was the most disturbing movie I've ever seen." Everyone marveling about what they had just witnessed was a teenager.

Whatever it was they saw in the movie, I missed it. There is nothing in this film that qualifies as "most disturbing," unless you haven't seen many movies. I'll give them "creepy," but "so creepy"? Not by a long shot. There are, apparently, also lots of coded references to the trans experience in the movie, or so I read once I got home, desperate to understand the significance of what I just watched. Even the most generous film writer acknowledges that these references must be gleaned, that they require a particular "reading" of the film. All right. I'll give it that. I guess I read it wrong.

While I Saw the TV Glow contains some interesting images and an intriguing setup, the movie moves forward at such a sluggish pace that the best way to describe the experience of watching it is being overcome with an unshakeable sense of ennui. Its characters seem to sleepwalk through the world, and even the things they claim are exciting don't seem to excite them much.

The most important of those is an imaginary TV series called "The Pink Opaque," whose name I guess qualifies as one of those coded references. In the mid-1990s, it plays late on Saturday nights on a TV channel called The Young Adult Network, which is too late for Owen (mostly played by Justice Smith) to watch it. An older girl named Maddy (Bridgette Lundy-Paine) invites him over to her house to secretly watch the show in the basement; to get there, he has to lie to his overprotective mother. That's another one of those references to the queer experience. Ultimately, Maddy records the show and hides videotapes for him to find. They both become obsessed with the show, which is a fan-driven fantasy series—a teen "X Files" crossed with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Maddy disappears. Owen is left to wonder what happened, and to try to piece his life together after their shared obsession ends. Then, as suddenly as she vanished, Maddy returns, and tells Owen the story of what happened, and how her fandom has crossed all bounds of normalcy.

Mixed in to I Saw the TV Glow are clips from "The Pink Opaque," and seemingly real-life appearances by some of its strange monsters. The idea, I guess, is that Owen and Maddy have taken their love of the show to extreme levels. They can't distinguish what's on screen from reality. They descend further and further into a shared madness.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of I Saw the TV Glow, or even with its near-catatonic state. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has a real talent for creating a mood; whether that mood is one that makes for great storytelling is the question. Yet while I Saw the TV Glow creates a distinctive look, it's a pastiche. There's a lot of Donnie Darko, bits of Heavenly Creatures, touches of Poltergeist and even big swaths of Being There. Many of the ideas and a couple of key moments of body horror are deeply influenced by David Cronenberg, whose Videodrome preceded this film by 40 years. To those of us who aren't teenagers, it all feels like things we've seen done before, and better.

The curious inertness of I Saw the TV Glow extends to its characters. They are all able to talk about their feelings of alienation and otherness, but not define them. They lack any insight, or even curiosity about the world around them. It's not even TV that matters to them—it's that one TV show. Why? How? To what end? The movie doesn't much care. Just when it should be trying to explain its feelings, it heaves a sigh, rolls its eyes and says, "You'll never get me." Maybe that's true.

Coincidentally, I saw I Saw the TV Glow on May 4, which has become the manufactured "holiday" of "Star Wars Day," a day on which obsessive fans celebrate their obsession. Scrolling through social media, I read about grown-ups who are still angry with George Lucas for "changing" the film they loved, as if it has no right; I saw polls asking people what Star Wars characters they'd most like to invite to dinner; I read posts in which people contemplated minor plot points from these films with more zeal than they discuss the election or the geopolitical condition of the world or the climate crisis. Obsessions run deep. They're real. People construct their entire lives around fictional creations.

There is something fascinating about that. There's something that could make a captivating, entertaining and thought-provoking film. Unfortunately, queer-coded or not, I Saw the TV Glow isn't it. 

Viewed May 4, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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