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This piece was originally published on June 4, 2024.

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We are recirculating it now thatI Saw the TV Glowhas made its streaming debut on Max.

For most of my life, I thought I was a character in a TV show.

I knew that I occupied reality.

I knew that the things I said and did mattered to the people I knew and loved.

Being the main character gave my very boring life an inherent importance and sense of purpose.

What happened to me had nothing to do with me.

It was subject to the whims of alternate-universe Nielsen ratings, of fan favoritism, of the writers room.

I was deeply ashamed of this belief.

I assumed as I grew to adulthood the compulsion would wither away.

Once I stopped doing that, I ceased to be fictional.

My sense of reality and actual reality finally aligned.

What if I hadnt?

What if I was like Owen at the end ofJane SchoenbrunsI Saw the TV Glow?

I never want to say anyone has misunderstood a movie.

Yet as I read criticism by cis writers onTV Glow even wildly positive reviews!

To explain why, lets quickly step through the plot.

The rest of the time he looms menacingly.)

Maddy disappears, having finally run away.

Maddy lays her cards on the table:The Pink Opaqueis real.

The suburban world they occupy is the midnight realm, which they must escape.

But the only way to return is for both to bury themselves alive.

She has done it once, and she can do it again.

Owen, quite reasonably, cant go through with it.

After that, he says, I locked myself inside.

He stays at home, waiting for her to force [him] underground.

He never sees Maddy again.

The audience sees someone who might be her leaving a message in sidewalk chalk: THERE IS STILL TIME.

So we enter the third act, 20 years later.

And yet he knows something is wrong.

In the films last sequence, he begins screaming, Im dying!

at a childs birthday party at the fun center where he works.

Later, in the bathroom, he cuts open his chest to discover he is full of TV static.

Yet I find that interpretation lacking.

In it, Maddys second disappearance is likely because she died.

At best, shes living a marginal existence somewhere, grappling with a major mental-health crisis.

ThePink Opaquethemed arcade games at the fun center might just be a cheeky wink toward our nostalgia-saturated culture.

Isnt that reading rather grim?

So lets try something else.

Lets assume everything Maddy says is completely, 100 percent accurate.

We are not watching a film calledI Saw the TV Glow.

We are watching the season-six premiere ofThe Pink Opaque.

We even get a mid-episode music break with a double bill at the Double Lunch.

What if this isnt a movie about loving a TV show?

What if its a movie about being an egg?

Egg cinema typically exists within a genre context because it requires its metaphors for gender to berealon some level.

For instance, the Matrix really exists inThe Matrix.

Notably, in both of those works, the weird shitdoesreally happen.

To argue that it doesnt is to twist yourself into pretzels.

Owen never returns to her life as Isabel.

Instead, she quietly suffocates, all the while shuffling through an increasingly torturous life in the midnight realm.

She is locked up inside.

There is still time but not infinite amounts of it.

She is barreling toward death and away from the portal.

Even the high school she attends is called Void High School (or, cleverly, VHS).

But on TV, theres always another episode.

It is not for nothing that one of thebiggest Letterboxd reviews of this filmis a coming-out post.

Except, perhaps, that third act.

When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents.

You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing.

There is still time untilthere isnt.

See, the grimmer read of the films ending truly is a nihilistic one.

It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit.

Yet you must activelychooseto read that ending as nihilistic.

I think about that guy sometimes.

I hope hes okay.

I hope he sees it.

I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward.