the pink opaque
nostalgia, identity, and longing in "i saw the tv glow"
hello horror friends :)
last night, i went to see i saw the tv glow, one of my most-anticipated films of the year, and i have so many thoughts. so i thought i’d share them here.
there are going to be spoilers in today’s substack, because i’m not really sure how i’d avoid them, given the film is so rich in its own lore and surrealism. so please go see it before reading! and then come back and read this :)
if you’re not going to see it, though (and no shame! not every genre is for everyone, and my goal is that this newsletter will be interesting for people who do like watching horror and people who don’t!), hopefully this will be a good read even without the context of the movie.
as always, thank you for following along :) it means the world.
note: today’s post includes heavy spoilers from jane schoenbrun’s new A24 horror film I Saw the TV Glow. BE WARNED SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!
photo credit: CBR
When I was in middle school, I wrote a book about a boy who wanted to be in a fictional story.
I lived in California at the time, on a palm-tree adorned street. It was constantly warm, but never humid. My sister and I played with the neighborhood kids across the street, climbing their avocado tree and playing fashion show late into the summer evenings.
In between homeschooling and swim team, I wrote. I was half convinced I was one of the protagonists in my book, mumbling made-up phrases under my breath. I’d just lost my memory of my fictional world. But I would remember. I’d go back. I would.
I wrote journal entries in which I promised that I wouldn’t forget about fiction. i couldn’t forget about fiction, I couldn’t stop believing in magic.
Fiction is real.
I never stopped writing that. Even my philosophy papers in college revolved around that idea, that fictional worlds were reality. I was catering to my middle-school self, still clinging to the promises I’d made.
I feel like I let the book’s protagonists down, but not completely, because I still believe in magic even though nowadays it’s really hard to distinguish if something is my believing in magic (innocuous) or my bouquet of debilitating OCD subtypes (insidious).
“If you do x, y will happen” could just as easily be magical as it is my mental illness, right?
I believe Maddie when she says that she was in the Pink Opaque for years. I believe her that she’s Tara, with her memories buried in the dirt and her heart in the industrial freezer. I thought pretty much the same thing for years.
Owen, meanwhile, is reticent. Maddie never forgot; Owen did. Owen does, and we watch his life dissolve and time pass oddly, and we realize that he made the wrong decision. His reality wasn’t the real one—he was trapped in a reality that wasn’t his own.
Jane Schoenbrun has explained that I Saw the TV Glow demonstrates or depicts the trans experience, as a sort of “catharsis” following “repression.” They’re trans, and they’ve spoken about how the film reflects their experience, and the more general queer/trans experience. I’ve read dozens of Letterboxd reviews and articles online already—trans people saying that they’ve never felt more seen, queer people resonating with both the loneliness depicted in the film and the immersion in a fictional world that the film portrays.
I’m a cisgender woman, so i can’t speak to the trans experience, but I can see the agony Owen is in when he slices his chest open and apologizes to everyone in the arcade. There’s a wrongness that made me cry. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
If he’d gone with Maddie, I think they would’ve ended up in the Pink Opaque, but I don’t know for sure. I think it would have been better than where he is, though.
It’s interesting that they labeled this movie horror. I agree with it, though, and I think it definitely coheres with my argument that horror should be recognized as a wider genre than it’s often relegated to. It wasn’t scary as much as it was heavy.
I think they called it horror because it eludes and circumnavigates expectations—it’s a subversion of the expected narrative. The movie devolves into something horrifying and sad. It’s absolutely fucking terrifying to imagine living an unfulfilled life, to have had something nearly in your reach but not quite.
That’s what made me sob at the end. Owen had missed the opportunity, and now he couldn’t go back. He was lonely and unfulfilled. It wasn’t how things should have been.
I think you have to watch this one with some openness to narrative surrealism. You have to accept that the Pink Opaque is real, but also that you can’t really know. You have to accept that Maddie and Owen are speaking to you, but not, that things happen that you can’t really explain. (Additionally, you have to believe that it would be that easy to be front row at Phoebe Bridgers playing at a bar. I wish.)
Surreal movies often bother me, because I like understanding the flow of “what actually happened” in a story.
This movie? Somewhat impossible. It’s a matter of recognizing that you can’t just go through, scene by scene, and understand everything that happened. It’s an experience, and you have to understand it by experiencing it.
The Pink Opaque, though? I think it was absolutely real. I believe Maddie. A hundred percent.
This movie was heartbreaking, but I really did love and appreciate it. I gave it a 4.5/5 on Letterboxd.
Oh! And, fun fact! Jane Schoenbrun is a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and they threw in a fun little Easter egg—one of the main characters of the Pink Opaque is named Tara, and the actress who played Tara on Buffy was actually in the movie briefly. Tara and Willow’s relationship was groundbreaking in the early 2000s, so it makes sense that Schoenbrun nodded to it in their film. (Also, I noticed that the papyrus-looking font in the Pink Opaque credits seemed very similar to the Buffy theme credits.)1
Thank you for following along :)
If you’ve seen I Saw the TV Glow, please do let me know what you thought! You can find me on Letterboxd or on Instagram @horrorwithhenri
In the next couple of weeks, I’m hoping to cover more giallo (I’ve been watching a ton lately), In a Violent Nature, The Strangers Chapter 1, and whatever else I watch besides Bridgerton in the next couple weeks.
As always, thank you for following along :) I’m so grateful and honored to have you here.
My parents loved the 2002 Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling soundtrack to the musical episode of the same name in the sixth season of the show. We listened to the CD all the time in the car, far before I was allowed to watch any Buffy episodes, so Buffy is very nostalgic for me, funnily enough.