Movie Review : I Saw The TV Glow (2024)
If you haven’t lived through pre-internet television days, you’ll probably never understand how weird and insane it was.Everyone watched television all the time then and broadcasters raced to find whatever they could to fill airtime. So much crazy shit aired only one, half of the time you weren’t sure whether you dreamed it or not. If you’ve lived through this era, you’re going to understand and appreciate a film like I Saw the TV Glow.
It’s the definition of an acquired taste.
I Saw the TV Glow tells the story of Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), two queer teens bonding over a strange television show called The Pink Opaque, somewhere in 1990s small town America. As they grow older and navigate their troublesome lives, their bond to The Pink Opaque starts strengthening as reality starts to blend into the show and vice versa. Their fate seems intrinsically linked to something that was already shot and recorded.
The Art of Living Vicariously
A lot of people were underwhelmed by I Saw the TV Glow and I can understand where they’re coming from? It’s a very personal movie about precise fears and anxieties. Notably, the fear of not mattering and going through life invisible to others. People who feel this way invest themselves too much into a unilateral relationship to a cultural artifact of some sort. They feel understood by characters who cannot interact with them and (therefore) invalidate them.
You see this all the time in popular culture and perhaps you’ve felt it also. Maybe you’re watched a movie or a television series and said to yourself (because you would’ve died before saying it out loud): “oh my God, (s)he’s literally me”. What makes I Saw the TV Glow such a charming movie in my opinion is that it portrays this unhealthy, fusional one way mental state through the funhouse mirror of nineties television.
If you know, you know. If you don’t know, you probably just felt I Saw the TV Glow was odd and subdued. I thought it was disturbing as shit for reasons both writer and director Jane Schoenbrun and I understand even if we don’t know each other.
I Saw the TV Glow portrays this very idiosyncratic type of relationship through Owen, who has a tenuous link to reality. He barely has the right to exist in his own home and he doesn’t really exist to anyone who isn’t into The Pink Opaque. He’s a person in their lives, but he’s interchangeable. His relationship to the show is the realest thing he has, even if he technically stops existing when he’s watching it. He’s alone in a basement, nobody knows he does.
It’s a nice touch. I Saw the TV Glow is about the details that add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Neon-Colored Psychosis
So yeah, there’s a part of I Saw the TV Glow that’s not crazy at all and another that’s more psychedelic than outwardly freaky if you don’t buy into to movie’s allegory. It’s not a movie that makes a lot of sense, but it’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to make you doubt the nature of your own reality. It’s supposed to make you think: oh fuck, what is everything that I ever believed about my life is false? It might not scare you, but it sure scares the fuck outta me.
Also, I loved how the movie used a clumsy nineties kid show aesthetic. It’s colorful, oversaturated and glowing with faded neon colors reminiscent of a television glow. The two universes of Owen and Maddy are bleeding into one another in every shot and become one in the last bone chilling scenes of the movie where their colorful obsession and their dark destiny collapse and become one glowing end of the world.
It feels different even if it’ll remind you of a hundred things.
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I Saw the TV Glow is not for everyone. It’s its blessing and its curse. Were it made ten or fifteen years ago, a lot more people would’ve seen the beauty in it. It’s a movie about feeling alone and unseen and connecting with something that makes you want to transcend your reality. It’s beautiful feeling and to a certain extent there’s no greater calling for art, but it can take a dark turn if you live in unescapable circumstances.
I liked I Saw the TV Glow for personal reasons, but the circumstances of my upbringing aren’t unique. If you’ve ever seen hallucinatory late night television, you’re going to appreciate it.
7.6/10
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