Dream About Me – A Review of I Saw the TV Glow

Dream About Me – A Review of I Saw the TV Glow

The Matrix meets Paper Towns meets Twin Peaks, I Saw the TV Glow is a surrealist drama by trans writer and director, Jane Schoenbrun (they/them). First shown in January at Sundance, the film depicts the bizarrity and dubiety of trans childhood with haunting effect; an egg-crack tale that shows the less than clean break of coming out. Spoilers ahead.

Orbiting its two main characters, American high schoolers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), the film follows them over the years as they bond over their mutual infatuation with The Pink Opaque, a weekly late-night TV show hosted on the young adult network. The show itself, a standard Monster of the Week structure, follows novice Isabel and no-nonsense Tara as they battle the latest baddie. Despite the pair living on opposite sides of the country they’re telepathically linked by their bond, the eponymous ‘Pink Opaque’. One night, Maddy, deciding she has had enough of her physically abusive father and numbing life in the suburbs, claiming she will die if she stays any longer, Maddy runs away, The Pink Opaque cancelled in its fifth season not long after she disappears. Schoenbrun had been long been interested in using the concept of a cancelled TV show in their writing, explaining in a Guardian interview.

“I realized it was an attempt to talk about how the process of realizing you needed to transition and how starting the transition felt. [. . .] And I was obsessed with this idea of characters who were never really able to move on from this unresolved ending of a TV show. The metaphor at the center of the film hinges on something being wrong, almost like an identity or a path being foreclosed in the moment.”

Owen’s frail reality only warps further when eight years later Maddy reappears to tell him that not only were the events of The Pink Opaque real, but they themselves are its protagonists, trapped in another dimension by the show’s Big Bad, Mr. Melancholy. She implores to Owen that they need to return to The Pink Opaque to live their real lives and start the sixth season, the process requiring that they bury themselves alive, effectively dying in this dimension to re-enter their original one. “I know it’s scary. That’s part of it,” she tells Owen, moments before he—terrified—flees back to his home never to see his friend again.

I Saw the TV Glow is not a trans story in the overt sense that there are any canonically trans characters, but it is undoubtedly a trans allegory, as is confirmed by Schoenbrun across interviews. Minutes into I Saw the TV Glow, this trans motif is conveyed in the image of a young Owen walking under a blue, white, pink and purple parachute, tracing his hands along the nylon panels, stopping himself before he hits pink. And if not solely trans identity, then transformation is an undisputed central theme of the film,  such as when young Maddy marvels aloud at the notion of her simple high school being transformed into a polling station for the 1996 presidential election, thus making it “special.” Maddy’s extensive knowledge of The Pink Opaque¸ her certainty in her sexuality as a lesbian and strange yet strong demeanour places her as the savant of this dimension and its others, her and Owen both big fish in a small tank but only she with the madness/assuredness to jump out. 

A debate surrounding the film is its deserving to be categorised as a horror, and though it maintains a trickle of eeriness throughout, it is certainly like none of the other horror films A24 have distributed in recent years. More sombre than scary, the few scares of I Saw the TV Glow are intentionally gauche, more evocative of 90s classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) or The Craft (1996), rather than, say, Talk to Me (2022). Set in the 90s and 2000s and with heavy referencing of the period typical pop culture that defined their childhood, I Saw the TV Glow rekindles and reflects on Schoenbrun’s life prior to transitioning. Like a mature TV show you watched as a kid but only now understand the meaning of once you’re old enough, looking back on your childhood as a trans adult can be both painful and healing.  In a speech prior to the film’s premier at Sundance, Schoenbrun recalls first writing I Saw the TV Glow, at the time around three months on hormones and “dealing with the overwhelming calamity of blowing up your life in such a way that you have to when you come out.” Questioning the boundaries of home and family, Schoenbrun’s script portrays the confusion, euphoria and crushing weight of facing your truth and the escapes we seek out in our youth, whether yet aware of our identities or not. 

Throughout, Schoenbrun deftly captures the estrangement trans kids feel towards their own home, marrying dreamy nostalgia with harsh reality; Owen’s life in the suburbs feels so alien to him and to us that the film might as well be set on Mars. In a world painted in wishy-washy watercolours, in lonely blues and sickly greens, The Pink Opaque, by name, is vivid, solid and certain. “The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life. You know?” Maddy admits to Owen one night, encapsulating the yearning a closeted person feels when they resort to fiction to supplement their reality, cobbling together some semblance of sanctuary and community out of mass media and fandom. With an original score composed by alternative darling, Alex G, as well as an original soundtrack comprised of songs by Caroline Polacheck, Sloppy Jane and Pheobe Bridgers among others, the film maintains a misty, sonic melancholy throughout. Perhaps the most impactful piece of music, however, comes from yeule’s ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’, of which has become, well, an anthem for trans and gender-questioning fans of the film. Numerous accounts have used the track on TikTok to confess and explore their gender identity, as well as to admit their choice to remain in the closet for the sake of not wanting to complicate things. The song’s lyrics, most notably the lines “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me” resonate with many who can only dream of their ideal selves, the fantasy of transitioning placed on a high, unattainable shelf, only to be taken down and entertained on rare occasions.

Every trans person, perhaps more than any other virtue, bears an unyielding capacity for patience. We are a community that understands better, maybe even the best, the doubt and despair that creeps in while you wait for your real life to start. ‘Sit Tight!’ and ‘Any Day Now!’ are mantras that ought to be hung on banners above every GIC waiting room. Some of us wait years or even decades before we feel ready to truly live, and even then it is likely not without “calamity”, as Schoenbrun said – not because it is intrinsically painful to live as your authentic self, but because so much of the world is pained (inexplicably) to see you live authentically.

The most harrowing scene of I Saw the TV Glow lies in its final act, in which Owen (née Isabel) twenty years after last seeing Maddy/Tara is now shown working at a family entertainment centre. If the relevance of Owen’s asthma was not made apparent to us before, Maddy’s explanation that “the longer you wait [in this world] the closer you get to suffocating” makes it clear and all the more heartbreaking as we see him wheeze and drag himself through his day-to-day at the Fun Center. During a child’s birthday party, amidst encores of ‘Happy Birthday’, Owen suddenly falls apart, collapsing into a corner as he screams that he is dying, all while his coworkers and the party guests go limp, immune to his pleas for help. What other visual metaphor better encapsulates a closeted trans person’s perspective? How many of us have had to put aside idle notions of transitioning in place of work, of paying the rent, of just trying to make it through the week? How Owen’s inaction has corroded him over time, leaving his other (‘beautiful and powerful’) self to suffocate underground. The only brief relief is when he’s seen recovering from his breakdown in the bathroom, taking a boxcutter to his torso and smiling in the mirror as he pries apart his chest to reveal reams of bright TV static, Isabel still buried somewhere deep between the glow. The pink and lilac sheen that used to harbour feelings of trepidation and uncertainty now sings smally of genuineness and . . . is that hope, I see?

However, the film cuts away from this reprieve, Owen dressed and back to work by the next scene, still wheezing and apologising profusely to apathetic attendants and coworkers before the film abruptly ends. Upon first watching, I was frustrated by the sudden ending, the apparent lack of a resolution. With a runtime of only 100 minutes, in an age of near-three-hour long blockbusters, I felt entitled to at least 20 more minutes of movie until I realised my dissatisfaction was the likely intention, that for all of I Saw the TV Glow’s absurdity, there were no cheap tricks being played in its depiction of the average trans life, of the unaccounted percentage of the community who, like Owen, do not get their typical happy ending. Those imagined 20 minutes of Owen travelling back to The Pink Opaque, reuniting with Tara/Maddy and becoming Isabel is as much Owen’s wish as it is mine. For many trans people, coming out is rarely a seamless process, sometimes resulting instead in digging deeper back into the closet. With encroaching threats to life-saving HRT such as puberty blockers, trans people are asking themselves if they can afford to live in a country that will be satisfied by nothing short of their complete detransition. In times of increasing hostility, it is an understandable reaction, though that does not make it any less debilitating.

Perhaps then that is the real horror of I Saw the TV Glow, the familiar story of denying yourself your own self is a flavour of despair lost on cis audiences. Trans people deserve honest stories as much as they deserve happy ones, and whilst few of the events of I Saw the TV Glow are realistic, their emotional potency is undeniable. The surrealism of I Saw the TV Glow is a refreshing departure from the clunkier, cis-sided takes on the trans experience, the film’s psychedelic quality a reflection of Schoenbrun’s own experience with gender dysphoria, as they described in the same Guardian interview cited previously: “[gender dysphoria] was this feeling of unreality, this longing to exist in a liminal, dreamlike space, because the space of the world felt limiting in a way that I didn’t understand at the time wasn’t normal.” Rather than a binary, linear take on the trans experience, I Saw the TV Glow follows the winding path of a trans person slowly piecing themselves together; and not always knowing how to accept the result. Its scenes blur, its narrative bends, images retract and charge, moments loop and dialogue lilts then fizzles out. What goes unsaid is just as—if not more—impactful as what is said. Owen may narrate his own story, but we never get the feeling that he is in control of it. Both he and Maddy are liminal entities, undefined and floating aimlessly like the pink glowing ghosts tattooed on the nape of their TV counterparts’ necks. 

I Saw the TV Glow, then, is a beacon glowing softly amidst the staticky dark. It is dedicated to those of us still watching, still waiting, still dreaming. Schoenbrun’s script and direction vouches for the trans experience and its lows, the ones that cannot always be represented and wrapped up in a neat, economic runtime for mass consumption. It speaks on the behalf of the trans population who have had to bury themselves. It answers their screams in sincerity, not with a solution but a hand, outstretched, open palmed and with a promise: there is still time.