Our relationships to our favourite pieces of media often come from very personal places –much as we might claim some higher objective rationale. Sometimes a work of art just gets us. And that’s a great thing about art -no matter what form, it has that potential to connect deeply with a person’s values, feelings, even their sense of self –to a degree they may not even fully comprehend.
Jane Schoenbrun vividly understands this, honing in on this theme and its particular queer connotations in their masterful new film I Saw the TV Glow, which examines with such raw potency as has never been seen before how art intertwines with identity, its power over memory, and more critically its capacity to connect and even awaken things in a person both scary and liberating. Schoenbrun identifies I think rather acutely that the deep relationship between individual and art often plays a big part in a lot of queer people’s journeys of self-discovery. Certain kinds of TV shows especially had a way of tapping into that latent aspect of self for a lot of kids of a former generation. And Schoenbrun of course takes that in a completely radical direction.
The Pink Opaque definitely fits the bill for that kind of a show. Airing from 1992 to 1998 on the Young Adult Network (the last show of the night before it switched to classic TV reruns), it follows a pair of teenage friends, Tara (Lindsey Jordan) and Isabel (Helena Howard) who use the powers of their psychic connection to fight supernatural monsters intruding on their dimension. Though it airs on a kids network it’s got an edge that most other shows for teens at the time lacks, as well as a lot of heavy lore and an overarching continuity.
By the start of the movie in 1996, The Pink Opaque has already captured the heart of Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) a ninth-grader who is approached at a school fair by lonely seventh-grader Owen (Ian Foreman, later Justice Smith), intrigued by the cover of the episode guide she’s reading. She introduces him to the show proper and over the next couple years it becomes his secret passion as she discreetly provides him videotapes of the episodes that he can’t watch due to their late airtime and his insecurity over what his strict father (of all people, Fred Durst) dismisses as “a show for girls”.
Schoenbrun projects pretty broadly what the movie is not so subtly about, drenching several scenes in so-called bisexual lighting (there’s also a contemplative beat of Owen framed under the bisexual colours of a gym parachute) and utilizing various queer punk aesthetics in their stylistic choices, such as the pink marker doodles that figure over a captivating single shot through Owen’s school or against roads and buildings as he narrates from years into the future. There's a cool, hypnotic aura to the pacing through sequences like this, but their other function is to create an uneasy atmosphere of distortion. The school is a labyrinth, Owen's parents often distant and indistinct, and his and Maddy's environments are constantly empty -as though the world is only half-realized.
It's not some oversight on Schoenbrun's part -they deliberately construct this reality as structurally volatile, so that you like the characters begin to question it. Maddy disappears the night The Pink Opaque is cancelled, not to turn up again until many years later convinced that the world of the show is the real one and that theirs is merely a construct. She was never Maddy, she was Tara. And Owen has always been Isabel.
As metaphors for the transgender experience go, this one is, well, opaque. But it is also incredibly thrilling and provocative, resonating profoundly whether you are trans or cisgender. It's no accident that Maddy's talk of a fabricated world and awakening Owen from it evokes The Matrix -the most iconic trans allegory of modern cinema. But what makes this film so fascinating is how it takes a more anxious approach in terms of tone and stakes. Owen's hollow and miserable life very much seems to stem outwards as the movie reveals itself more and more as his subjective perception. He craves his security and safety, encapsulated in his caring mother (Danielle Deadwyler), whose death of illness alongside Maddy's absence stunts him through his early adulthood. Maddy's revelation threatens what he thinks is his contentment.
Schoenbrun does not shy away from the horror of the situation for Owen; in fact they lean into it -as Owen discovers traumatizing signs through the last episode of The Pink Opaque supporting Maddy's assertion, interspersed with his memory equating scenes from the show and his own experiences. It's a mesmerizing Twin Peaks kind of sequence, with its bizarre intangible figures (one of whom is modelled off of Georges Méliès' Man in the Moon) and unusual disturbing details. There's a particular moment at the end of this where Owen appears to try entering that world and is "rescued" by his father. And afterwards, he can only deny Maddy's reality.
Smith is excellent through all of this, carrying himself with an extreme guardedness that betrays his desperate self-repression. His soft-spoken cadence, even through the narration device (which itself even becomes wrapped up in the ambiguous realities) seems frail and always on the point of breaking. It is a master-stroke of body language, radiating a sadness that dominates his life, but for the one escape of his beloved show. Lundy-Paine meanwhile eschews a bolder if similarly controlled confidence and a pitch-perfect jaded teenager energy; and their monologue wherein Maddy explains her story and process of being reborn in the Pink Opaque is played and delivered magnificently.
All of it, the anxiety through the self-discovery, still stems from a TV show these characters watched as kids. And it's another theme that Schoenbrun interrogates closely -the power of nostalgia to influence or potentially warp our perception. We see this most starkly in one scene that contrasts The Pink Opaque as Owen remembers it and what it apparently actually was. Finding it years later on a streamer, it is much more campy and child-oriented (like an even more juvenile Power Rangers) than he believed it to be. Memory and association made it more interesting, more meaningful. Schoenbrun acknowledges the spark by seeing the TV glow, but gives credence also to imagination and the subconscious filter of validation. It's also noteworthy that while Maddy acts on what the show brought out of her, Owen entraps himself in its bubble of comfort, never seeking to apply anything he got out of it in his material life.
The misery that hangs over him for so long is illustrated with such eeriness by Schoenbrun's conception of space, their musical choices, their enigmatic touches of unreality -things like how uncannily big the parachute is during Maddy's big reveal, she herself dwarfed as constellations are manifested above her to emphasize the mystifying transcendence of her journey. Schoenbrun is a director driven by mood, whether chaotic or lush -both of which come out in this film. There is a point in the midst of Owen and Maddy's reunion where the film just simmers for a Phoebe Bridgers performance at a local bar -it's pointed but soothing. As are some of the other musical choices from this cool if very niche soundtrack, supplemented by an impeccably atmospheric score by Alex G. Schoenbrun is meticulous with their detail as well -the obvious model for The Pink Opaque is Buffy the Vampire Slayer (that show's Amber Benson even makes a cameo appearance), and they recreate an approximation of it's signature credits font in addition to the general fuzziness, aspect ratio, and colour themes of 90s television. Much as they might criticize it, their own nostalgic indulgences can't help but rear their head.
I Saw the TV Glow is a unique, thematically provocative, emotionally cogent movie; and genuinely very important in how specifically and intelligently it speaks to the fears and emotional complexities around reckoning with aspects of gender or sexual identity, in a way that all audiences can understand and connect to. It can resonate to any part of ourselves that seems ready to burst and yet is kept down by apprehensions both internal and external. And I think the role of media in helping cope through confusion and hardship, and even forming our sense of self is eminently relatable and worth engaging with. Sometimes a TV show is more than a TV show; sometimes it is a gateway to the Pink Opaque.
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