People like to say there are only two kinds of stories: “someone goes on a journey” and “a stranger comes to town.” But what if neither one ever happens? What if you’re born with something missing, and you never fill that hole?
Technically, a stranger does come to town in I Saw the TV Glow, at least metaphorically, when seventh-grader Owen meets Maddy, who’s a few years older than he is and is obsessed with a TV show that’s clearly supposed to remind us of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The two bond as Maddy slips VHS tapes of the show to Owen, who’s not allowed to stay up late enough to watch it. I say they bond, but Owen seems unable to connect with other people on much of any level. And for the stranger-comes-to-town archetype to work, we’d expect some kind of change to follow, but Owen refuses that change at every turn, through fear, anxiety, denial of self, or a complete lack of real introspection.
The film begins in the late 1990s and is astonishingly good at evoking a very specific part of that time and the peculiar loneliness that came along with it. It alludes to pop culture of the period, sometimes overtly, sometimes obliquely, occasionally reinforced by blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos. But this is no nostalgia trip—the movie is painful, sad, upsetting… and extraordinary. It’s certainly disorienting, cutting together seemingly unrelated images and sometimes using uncomfortable camera techniques, as when the opening tracking shot actually made me feel like I was going to fall over.
I Saw the TV Glow can be read in a dozen ways, and each is as legitimate as the other, but it’s important to note the movie’s director, Jane Schoenbrun, is a trans woman, and that influence on where the film takes us can’t be ignored. We talk of people living lives of quiet desperation, but there are fates worse than that, as some of us wait for a primal scream that never comes, or when it does, we immediately apologize for the disruption.
I Saw the TV Glow is available for rental now and streams on Max beginning September 20th.
This episode originally aired on June 27, 2024.
