‘I Saw the TV Glow’ is All FOFU
This moody, slow-as-molasses contemplation on identity pivots on one terrific horror idea: The fear of fucking up.
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Horror is a slippery genre, sometimes. What you find horrifying might not scare me much, and what keeps me awake at night might amuse you to no end1. That’s why films like I Saw the TV Glow can be divisive: If the buttons it’s pushing don’t resonate with you, you finish your viewing experience with a raised eyebrow and a sense of outrage: That was supposed to be scary2? But if it does push your buttons, it’s a film that can really stick with you. It’s low-key, but it’s low-key terrifying.
But maybe not for the reasons you might assume. When you read about I Saw the TV Glow you will read a lot about it as a transgender metaphor. As you should—the metaphor is right there, and writer/director Jane Schoenbrun has been pretty clear about their goals for the film. I mean, like, if you miss it you must have been doing household chores while you let it run in the background. That’s not a bad thing—we sometimes over-value subtlety, and sometimes art works best when it’s operating on a clear and obvious level3.
That narrative might make you assume you can’t appreciate this film unless you truly understand the underlying experience being explored there, but that’s not true. There’s more going on in this film, and the true source of the horror is deeper than the explicit metaphor. At its core, this is a story about the fear that you’re not only going to fuck it all up, but that you already have fucked it all up4.
I’m Sorry About Before
I Saw the TV Glow tells the story of Owen (Justice Smith), an unhappy kid living in a nondescript suburb in the 1990s. Owen loves his mother but his father is cold and uncommunicative. When he’s just entering adolescence he meets the slightly older Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who encourages him to check out a television show called The Pink Opaque, which is about two teen girls who use a shared psychic connection to battle monsters and the ultimate Big Bad, Mr. Melancholy. Owen sneaks out one Saturday night to watch an episode with Maddy5, but can’t do this regularly as it involves lying to his parents. Maddy begins leaving VHS tapes of the show for Owen at school, and the two become deeply immersed in the show’s universe, to the point where Maddy regards it as realer than the real world6.
Several years later, Maddy tells Owen she is running away, and asks him to join her. He is too scared to do so, and Maddy vanishes. For eight years, Owen gets on with his uninspiring life: He’s bullied and unhappy, his mother dies, leaving him with his stern father, and he works at a movie theater where the manager and his co-workers mock him. One night, Maddy returns and tells a shocked Owen that she has been living inside The Pink Opaque, the universe of the show itself. She tells Owen that they are actually the main characters of the show; in the fifth season’s finale, the two girls were each trapped underground by Mr. Melancholy, left to suffocate. Maddy tells Owen that he has to be buried alive in order to travel to The Pink Opaque so they can wake up and start “season six” of the show7.
Owen, terrified, runs away. He never sees Maddy again. Twenty more years go by. And this is where the real horror begins8.
I Think That, I Like TV Shows
Much of the explicit language in the film evokes the transgender experience in many ways, and the fact that this is grist for horror is kind of heartbreaking. But underlying all of it is the Fear of Fucking Up (FOFU), that fear we all carry around with us that at some point in our lives we’ve made—or will make—a choice based on fear that will haunt us forever9, forcing us to constantly pretend that everything is fine when we’re really dying inside, knowing that we were cowards and will now pay the price.
For Owen, this moment is when Maddy returns after being missing for eight years: He was too scared to go with her the first time, resigning himself to a mediocre and misery-lite kind of life, but he’d been a child in high school. Now as a young adult he’s given the chance to make the choice again: Maddy has come back explicitly to save him. All he has to do is realize that his reality is not real, that he’s been duped by Mr. Melancholy, and take a leap of faith.
But Maddy is kind of nuts. Her story of being buried alive and suffocating and then waking up inside The Pink Opaque is nuts. Owen is justifiably terrified of this person he hasn’t seen in eight years10. And so he runs away, and locks himself in his house, and lets the years speed past—but as things get worse and worse, he’s haunted by a simple question: What if Maddy was right?
In some way, you’ve been there. Someone asked you to take a leap, and you refused out of caution, or sheer terror, or due to a lack of trust11. And now you think about that moment and worry that it was your chance for greatness, for freedom—your chance to be your true self—and you’ve lost it forever. And what burns the most, what keeps you awake at night isn’t just the possibility that you could have had it all if you’d only made a different choice. It’s the fact that you made your choice based on fear.
While the references to gender identity and the transgender experience are pretty clear, FOFU is a more universal horror. One day you’ll be 70, or 45, or 90 and you’ll be sick and you’ll look back on that moment and wonder if everything would have been better if you’d been brave for that one moment. When Owen breaks down at the end and starts screaming that he’s dying, it’s the existential howl of someone who realizes that they are trapped in an unreal world, that they could have made a different, better choice—if only they’d been brave. It’s a powerful moment no matter who you are, and it’s what sells this unsettling, quiet film as a unique horror story.
For me, this moment was in Eighth Grade when I quit the Crossing Guards12 and my teacher tried to convince me that it would ruin my life. Not a day goes by that I don’t wonder: What if she was right?
NEXT WEEK: Civil War is too smart for its own good.
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Mostly a diffuse, general fear of waking up transformed in my bed into a gigantic insect.
It’s like when you play a song for someone and tell them it’s the catchiest song you’ve ever heard and they just listen in silence for 3 minutes and then nod vaguely and say “Nice.”
I say this as a person who also operates best at a clear and obvious level. Subtlety and Jeff do not mix, which is why I enter every room like the Kool Aid Man shouting OH YEAH.
Like when you wake up one day in your 50s and you realize the haircut you committed to when you were 23 was maybe a mistake. Not that I understand that.
The film does a good job capturing the sense of adventure as a kid when you went over someone else’s house. Everything would be different and strange and they often had better snacks.
When I was a young’n I was obsessed with The Incredible Hulk starring Bill Bixby and spent a lot of time trying to experience immense stresses to trigger my own latent hulk powers. Some say this is where Young Jeff went wrong.
Like a lot of horror, ISTTVG plays around with the line between “I found Narnia in a closet” and “I am clinically insane.”
Pro tip: If you’re watching your life flash before your eyes and there’s a title card that says TWENTY YEARS LATER, you’re boned.
E.g., the aforementioned haircut. It’s too late for me, save yourselves.
I wish weirdos who vanish from my life and then reappear after years had something this interesting to say. Mostly they just want to borrow money.
Or, in my case, because you were extremely comfortable on the couch and didn’t want to ruin it by standing up to go adventuring.
We got to wear bright orange belts and stand around in the street like jackasses. I regret nothing.
8 th grade crossing guard? I was one, but I think after 5 th grade we were replaced by professional crossing moms.