If we could crawl inside at that age, we would have
dir: June Schoenbrun
2024
I saw it glow, too. Many times.
This is a complicated and awkward film to talk about. It doesn’t really follow conventional cinematic storytelling structures, and it doesn’t really look like or is set up to be like what we might expect from a movie, any movie. It looks like a low-key, small-scale story about two teens obsessed with a tv show from the 90s, but it’s really about…
I dunno, I don’t really know. This looks like it’s a lot of things, but it always takes us somewhere different.
In its most simplistic rendering, we could say this flick is about two desperately sad and lonely teenagers, who grow up to be two desperately sad and lonely adults. If we were feeling unkind, we could say it’s about two people with severe mental health issues who fixate on a tv show meant to be reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and who start confusing reality with fantasy because of trauma and loss, and because they never get the love or support they needed, they never get to be well-rounded people with integrated personalities and senses of self.
A kinder, more empathetic and thoughtful angle would be to say this is a story about two people born with a sense that there is something inherently wrong either with the world or with them being in it, who try to find the way to live in it less painfully, in a way that allows them to be who they are meant to be, or not.
How mysterious that sounds. It doesn’t play out that way, but there are a great deal of scenes where we are not sure if what we are watching is real or imagined, or feels real enough that even if it isn’t literally happening, we are meant to think it should be(?)
I will not pretend to be an expert on any matters relating to this flick. I can only say how I feel about it, how it looked to me, what feelings it provoked, or how disturbing I found it.
The director’s previous film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was a strange flick that mostly took a new way of telling a story about some very lonely, very online people losing their minds over meme conspiracies, seemingly willingly, for want of anything better to do, and recording them through their laptop cameras.
Of course it came out during the lockdowns, when a lot of people were losing their minds, voluntarily or not.
This flick carries over certain elements. The previous main character had a seeming terror of her father or step-father, and the two main characters in I Saw the TV Glow are also terrified, if not traumatised, by their father figures. Fathers loom as these hostile sentinel-like figures, often just out of shot, not clearly seen, always angry, always waiting to abuse, berate, brutalise or mock. Mothers are either sympathetic yet powerless, or absent.
Our main kid Owen (Ian Foreman as the younger Owen, Justice Smith as the older teen and adult) is an isolated and fearful kid. He acts like he is terrified of the world, and especially of people, including his step-dad (Fred Durst, yes, THAT Fred Durst, of Limp Bizkit fame). He is not terrified of his mother (Danielle Deadwyler), but he lives in a strictly controlled household, so he has little freedom, but would not know what to do with it even if he had more of it.
He bumps into a surly teen called Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) at school, who’s minding her own business and reading a book about her favourite TV show, which is called The Pink Opaque.
Stop me if this sounds familiar: it’s a show about teenagers battling supernatural enemies with monsters of the week and season-long Big Bads and teens delivering clever quips in between staking or decapitating their demonic enemies.
They have the most awkward conversation together, but he comes away from it convinced, absolutely convinced that he has to watch this show, and, in order to watch an episode, he’ll have to lie to his parents and pretend he has a sleep over at a former friend’s house.
Johnny Link is that former friend. Who is Johnny Link? Why aren’t they friends anymore? Who the fuck knows, the movie never tells us.
Once he tricks his mother after the drop-off, he sneaks over to Maddie’s house, who looks neither happy to see him nor aggrieved.
And he finally gets to watch an episode of The Pink Opaque.
His world is forever changed. He sees a world where people have connections that stretch across distances and dimensions. Enemies who can change their appearance at will, and appear as friends and family, but always plotting with ill intent. A Big Bad, as in, an antagonist who feature in multiple episodes or seasons, called Mr Melancholy, whose purpose seems to be to depress teenagers to the best of his abilities by cutting out their hearts and forcing them to drink stupefying Luna Juice.
He also happens to look like the Moon from one of the earliest films, being Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon from 1902. Giant, scary moon face.
He sees an engaging and entrancing world depicted in which the problems teens face are given corporeal or symbolic form, and the heroes get to battle their fears and complex issues, and triumph over them, instead of having those issues linger around (for the rest of their lives) indefinitely. They achieve things, and succeed, and have meaning in their lives, even if they’re separated from the ones they love.
Owen literally has absolutely nothing else in his life now. The show is everything. He still can’t watch the show at home, because it plays on Saturdays at 10.30pm, and that’s past his bedtime. So Maddie records the show and leaves VHS tapes for him in the dark room at their school for him to pore over at home.
Years pass. They were never friends, as far as I could tell. They have these moments, these brief interactions, but I can’t say that they were actually friends at any stage, however much they might have bonded over their shared love of the show. She asserts that she’s gay, and wonders about Owen’s orientation. He calmly intones that whatever is inside him that would point him in any direction, as in either girls or boys or both, has been scooped out (by life), and he’s too afraid to peer inside and see if there is anything left.
An older Owen contrives to fake another sleep-over, and watches the show with Maddie one more time live, but a crying Maddie states that she must flee, they should both flee together, they must leave town together or she’ll die.
Owen is not the chap one runs away with. Terrified (a common state for him), he runs back to the house of the former friend, knocking on the door and having a full on panic attack telling Johnny Link’s mother (Amber Benson – THE Amber Benson, who played Tara all those years ago in Buffy) answers the door and tries to console him and figure out what he’s jabbering about, to no avail.
Owen’s mum dies, more time passes, Maddie disappeared, and, worst of all, The Pink Opaque was cancelled.
Years pass. Many years pass. Owen is an adult, but of course not a happy one. He is a large child who never seems to have matured past adolescence despite driving, having a job at a cinema, but he is happy neither in his job nor his life. Reality doesn’t seem that concrete anymore, but it doesn’t seem to bother him beyond the perpetual dissatisfied state that his life seems to transpire in.
When he meets Maddie again, for the last time, they prefer not to be called that anymore, though I don’t recall what name they preferred, and I think they don’t identify as female anymore, but the story they tell is…
Terrifying, and they want Owen to come with them, into the world of The Pink Opaque, but for real this time, and all they need to do is… be buried alive.
This might seem to be an unquantifiable film, as in, one not easy to slide into any particular genre, but I think ‘horror’ covers it enough. So much of it transpires in a hallucinatory way, but there are enough choices made to deliberately keep the atmosphere unsettling and uncomfortable, rather than ‘pleasant’, which keeps everything prickly and discordant, so we’re not lulled into any sense of security, false or otherwise. You’ll be watching a scene where there is voiceover, and then the person you’re watching turns to camera directly to address us. It’s deeply disturbing. It’s the ultimate fantasy / nightmare of our relationship with what we watch: what if you so desperately wanted the characters you were watching on tv to look at you and talk to you directly, and they did it? What then? Wouldn’t it mean we’ve lost our fucking minds?
At their last meeting, Maddie drags Owen to a place called the Double Lunch, which is pretty much the inexplicable but welcome return of The Bronze. The point of The Bronze in Buffy was to give the kids a venue to congregate at that actual bands played at, and to show how down with the kids the showmakers were, with performances by Aimee Mann, Sprung Monkey, The Breeders, even Australia’s Own Angie Hart! How that was meant to work was an absolute mystery that was never solved, as in, how was there a ‘dry’ bar in the heart of Sunnydale in the 1990s that had daily all ages gigs and yet stayed in business with no alcohol sales?
All that is lovingly recreated here, except with performances by Sloppy Jane (of course featuring Phoebe Bridges), and a terrifying performance by King Woman. It’s all too much.
It has an amazing soundtrack of contemporary female or non-binary identifying bands and performers sounding as 90s indie as possible, with an excellent score as well from Alex G.
But that’s all window dressing. That’s all surface. The film is here not to comfort, but to confront. Since the ‘real’ theme of the flick seems to be gender dysphoria, it allegorically tries to show us the price of someone not getting to affirm their gender identity, and perhaps the price it exacts in getting to do so as well. I can’t even really figure out which it is saying is the higher price, because either way seems to exact a brutal toll.
The last part of the flick is the least explicable without reading interviews with the director, who identifies both as trans and non-binary, but by then the worlds of the tv show and our main characters have meshed, and it’s not really meaningful to unbind them. Owen inexplicably has lived another twenty years into the future, miserable and barely able to breath due to worsening asthma, though we were assured that off camera he somehow lost his horrible step-father, and gained a family of his own (one that we never see any evidence of). And he is somehow still working at a kids entertainment centre, despite being middle-aged. That last sequence is…strange and messed up yet somehow so mundane for a flick that trades in such deliberate strangeness.
It’s a strange ending, even for this flick, which is clearly also influenced by a David Lynchian irrational horror Twin Peaks vibe, which left me very uncomfortable and very unsatisfied by the ending. I grudgingly have to admit that, given the themes the flick is working with, it was seemingly intentional on the part of the director, and you’re meant to give them credit for that.
I feel a lot of complex feelings about it. As the father of a trans kid, I feel like understanding a work like this is more important than usual (for me, not necessarily for anyone else), more important than getting other flicks, because I don’t ever, as long as I live, want to be one of the dads represented in this flick. I dread being one of those dads.
And yet in the end I’m perhaps putting too much importance on something that’s, after all, just a movie. This isn’t, either, a flick I would think my kid would get anything out of, because all the references are so specific to the 90s, and the overall message seems to be such a dark one. But in time maybe I’ll understand it better, and see what is there, and what I’m missing.
The film is so strange and so mundane that I don’t even feel like talking about the acting in the flick makes any sense. The performances are… probably whatever they need to be for this flick, but in themselves, they seem awkward and flat and deranged even in mundane circumstances.
Emotionally, I come away from this flick mostly filled with great sadness. Not a teary sadness, like a feeling of great loss, but a great sadness for people who don’t get to live the way they want to live, in a way that’s honest about who they are.
But also, very confused, and maybe a little bit hungry. Time for a midnight snack, and some Valium / whiskey, in order to calm the fuck down after all that.
8 times I saw the tv glow, and eight times more it glowed right back out of 10
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“Time wasn't right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls asleep in the supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I told myself, "This isn't normal. This isn't normal. This isn't how life is supposed to feel." - I Saw the TV Glow
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