****/****
starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Helena Howard, Danielle Deadwyler
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I have a summer evening inside me, a particular one, a purple one. It’s almost dawn, and the sidewalk is warm beneath me. I’m lying there staring at the sky pushing into dawn; it’s the last day of my life. I feel like I’m still there sometimes. I left enough of myself there that I’ll always be there. I’ll never leave. I don’t remember much of my life up to and including high school. It was a confusion of sensation and shadows. I hold shame and sadness in a cage with my heart and won’t let them out. But I remember this night, because it was the day I tried to kill myself. There are times I think I didn’t fail and that all of these decades since have been a moment between breaths. I can smell the moss phlox growing by the street if I concentrate. What if this ends soon? I will blink awake and be there on the warm concrete, waiting for the last sun to rise, and maybe that would be alright. Maybe it would be alright when the stars fade into the blue of day. Maybe it would explain why everything, all this time, has felt so strange, and why that clean, wide-open night has always been so close to me.
Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a masterpiece of dissociation and disaffection. It ripped me apart. It understands how traumatized children can become unstuck in time, can experience adolescence as a fever dream and seek to anchor themselves to an expansive storyline, looking for a place where they can be important and strong. Near the end, an old man drags a box opener from his neck to his navel and pulls himself open. Inside is the glow of a purple night when he was young and made decisions impossible to make correctly and met someone he’s never stopped thinking about because he spent the last night of his life with them for a while as the purple bled into blue. When he’s an awkward child without many friends, he’s called Owen (Ian Foreman)–quiet Owen, who lost the only friend he had in school and has an eight-o’clock bedtime, meaning he’s not allowed to watch the new show he saw a commercial for, “The Pink Opaque”. He sees older Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, who’s nonbinary, though their character in this film is referred to with she/her pronouns) sitting by herself, reading an episode guide for “The Pink Opaque”, and she’s the most beautiful, the most interesting, the most mysterious person he’s ever seen. He talks to her. And then he pretends to be sleeping over at that friend’s who isn’t his friend anymore just so he can sleep on Maddy’s floor after watching that episode of “The Pink Opaque” where a monster made of ice cream refuses to go away when the summer is over. Schoenbrun does a slow push-in on Owen’s face as he watches an ice-cream truck burn in the show, the smoke purple like the dusk of his childhood.
The font used for “The Pink Opaque” is the same one used for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, but you can’t fool me: “The Pink Opaque” is my childhood: a series of long hallways and classrooms and music so loud it drowns out everything but the walking and the bells and sometimes the colours and sometimes the people I loved who have disappeared into the ruins of the kingdom of my memories. Owen (Justice Smith) is 15 now. It’s two years after that sleepover. He remembers looking at Maddy in the sickly green light cast by a basement aquarium, and I remember sleeping in a bag on the basement floor at a friend’s house in a flash so pure and astonished it’s like falling through ice into a black lake. Maddy has continued to smuggle tapes of “The Pink Opaque” to Owen, who still has a curfew and a bedtime and now a mother (Danielle Deadwyler) who has lost all her hair and is probably going to die. Owen asks to sleep over again, and Maddy tells him she likes girls. Owen says, “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all of my insides and I know there’s nothing in there but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check. I know there’s something wrong with me.” He checks to see if Maddy is still there. They’re sitting on bleachers. It’s the magic hour. In Owen’s memory, it’s always magic hour. They watch “The Pink Opaque” together and Maddy sobs like her heart is breaking. It hurts when nobody you know sees you but art does. Art insensible. Art created by an artist who does not know you but knows your secrets, and what have they done? They’ve told everyone. On the last night of my life, I asked the friend who sat with me for a while to stay even longer. I didn’t want to be alone. She had to go. I had to let her.
Maddy tells Owen after the show, “I’ll die if I stay here.” He doesn’t beg her to stay. Maddy draws a pink ghost on the back of his neck, like the tattoos their heroes on “The Pink Opaque” have, and I can remember how girls sometimes wrote their phone number on the palm of my hand and drew a heart around it in the same way that kids do when they’re practising for eternity. Owen can’t sleep. Hanging in the air above him is a cathode ray beaming onto the screen at the back of his eyes. It’s writing itself there. It’s writing over things like a palimpsest. Owen scrubs the doodle off his neck, leaving a raw patch. Not every layer of paint is covering another layer of paint. Maddy disappears when Owen’s mother dies, and Schoenbrun closes in on an image of a CRT television on fire. As televisions have long been the “hearth” of our culture, seeing one burn is loaded with the potential energy of childhood and loss. Did I tell you there’s an image of a parachute game early on in I Saw the TV Glow? The one where you went into the gymnasium with all of your friends and formed a circle around a parachute, then lifted it together above your heads and let it drop to form a dome over everyone? For a little while, you’re alone with your friends–and your bullies. And the girl you have a crush on, to whom you will write a note that she’ll read out loud on the bus ride home, and you will want to forget that like you’ve forgotten the rest. But you can’t.
Eight years pass. Owen has a job he hates. He’s stopped by a downed power line on the way home one evening, and scattered along the road are pages from the “The Pink Opaque” episode guide he saw Maddy reading ten years ago. One burnt page describes an episode from the sixth season where the heroes confront the villain of the show, “Mister Melancholy,” the man in the moon. Owen apologizes to his dad (Fred Durst) for being late. His dad didn’t notice. His dad doesn’t notice that he’s home. Owen doesn’t have a curfew anymore. He goes grocery shopping after dark when there’s no one else around. Maddy is there one night, though, and asks if he remembers her. He hugs Maddy, but she doesn’t hug him back. Maddy wants to know if Owen remembers “The Pink Opaque”, and he says it’s his favourite show and always will be. Maddy wants to know how he remembers it, because there are two ways that things are: the way they were and the way you remember them. Like how every night is purple, and every walk you took with the person you think about was at magic hour. “Do you ever get confused?” Maddy asks. “Like maybe the memory’s not quite right? Like time isn’t moving the right way? Like it’s all out of whack?” Yes, now that you mention it, I think about my life in terms of things that happened and things I remember happening and how they aren’t the same. The membrane in between becomes more diaphanous the shorter the years get. It’s so thin now I know I could see through it if I put my face up hard against it.
Did I ever tell you about the time my hands were so cold I couldn’t bend my fingers, and suddenly I remembered a time my mom hit my knuckles with a yardstick when I messed up during piano practice, hard enough that I couldn’t play again until the swelling went down? Mister Melancholy licks the tears off Isabel’s cheek and tells her to drink his poison so she’ll forget everything, even that she’s dying. It sounds like his poison is water from the River Lethe in Hades, which the dead drink before they’re reincarnated to cleanse their memory of previous lives and deaths. Mister Melancholy buries Isabel (Helena Howard) alive. It’s the final episode of “The Pink Opaque”. Owen tries to kill himself when it’s over by climbing into the television. “This isn’t my home,” he says. “You’re not my father.” He vomits television static into the toilet and believes he’s survived his attempt–but things are always two ways, aren’t they? The way they are and the way you remember them. Maddy talks about the stuffing in dolls and how time isn’t right. “And then I was 19. And then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls, asleep in a supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21.” It’s funny how your time here is counted down by counting up. Maybe we should start at the age we’re going to die so that when we die, we are at zero. If I were my dad, I would be four this October. Owen finds an inflated parachute in the school gymnasium of his memory and crawls inside. It’s a planetarium. Maddy is there. Counting up. Maddy wants Owen to come with them to the Midnight Realm before he suffocates. He runs. He’ll never see Maddy again.
Sometimes, in his memories of their last time together, Owen imagines that Maddy is right. He imagines there is a place where he is beautiful and brave: brave enough to leave or brave enough to stay–one or the other and not both. Years go by. Owen has a family now and loves them very much. He doesn’t sleep well. One night, he starts “The Pink Opaque” over, and it’s nothing like how he remembers it. It’s for kids, all of it: the being beautiful, the being courageous. He’s old at this point and working at another job he hates. Intellectual property mining has turned “The Pink Opaque” into a cheap video game. It’s 20 years later. Owen is going to die soon. I Saw the TV Glow is about what we leave in our wake and what follows us even though we’ve tried to leave it behind. It’s nostalgia as a disease. In his head, Owen screams a piercing, desperate scream because he is surrounded–but no one and nothing sees him anymore. He used to be part of a grand drama. He cries for his mother. He needs some time alone. No one is left who remembers what he remembers, and maybe he never left that summer evening. Not really. How could he? Things were possible then, and the world was larger. Now, there’s not even enough space in my chest to take a complete breath. I have always been watching this movie.
