31 Days of Halloween 2024 — I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
After a diversion into the sillier side of horror with Zombeavers (2014) yesterday, we turn our attention today to something a little more serious. I want to write about the use of nostalgia in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024).
You can currently catch I Saw the TV Glow on Max.
There will be spoilers following.
12. I Saw the TV Glow
Nostalgia is a powerful tool when it lands, and can alienate when the audience does not carry the legacy or attachment to the things you present nostalgia for. Nostalgia is loss, but it only lands when we are aware that we have lost something. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is suffused with painful nostalgia in so many dimensions that for the right audience there is an overwhelming melancholy to all of it. Outside of that audience, there is still much they can admire about the film, but for the intended audience it just hits differently.
I am a 90s child. My first year of high school had the unfortunate timing to happen the same year as 9/11 and I wasn’t even an adult when the world went to hell in a very real way with the hyper jingoism of Middle Eastern conflict discourse on popular culture. I mention this because I am nostalgic in many ways for the 1990s, which was my childhood decade. I got wistful upon seeing a Frutopia vending machine in a shot in the film, and it wasn’t even the whole vending machine either. I saw it and recognized it and suddenly felt that little regret of not having that drink anymore — not even really remembering if it was any good. It was just part of my youth that can’t be recaptured.
That kind of nostalgia is entangled around I Saw the TV Glow, but there is another nostalgia as well. If we can accept the idea that nostalgia is an apparatus used to psychologically explore loss, and that nostalgia is a method for discussing and framing loss in literature, then I Saw the TV Glow’s main strategy as a film is nostalgia.
The Remembered Past
The remembered past is the surface of the film. Not to dismiss it as superficial, mind, but rather it is the first level and is treated with plenty of depth and complexity. The artifacts of my millennial experience haunt every frame from Frutopia machines to VHS tapes. The film’s central nostalgic device is the Young Adult Channel’s 10:30 pm show The Pink Opaque — a show that comes to absorb and define the two leads of Owen (Justice Smith, and Ian Foreman as young Ower) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Pain).
The parallels to the Nickelodeon of my past — before SpongeBob Squarepants are obvious. This Young Adult Channel is the SNICK of Are You Afraid of the Dark, Space Cases, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and The Secret World of Alex Mack. The Canadian roots of Nickelodeon continued into the mid-1990s between the Nicktoons like Ren & Stimpy, Doug, and Rugrats. The telling presence of a cameo from Michael Maronna and Danny Tamberelli (Pete and Pete themselves), sells the inspiration behind The Pink Opaque. It would have fit right in, a show trying its best, maybe even at times subversive and challenging, for an audience that would ultimately age out of it in two-year waves.
I have fond memories of my era of Nickelodeon, and much like Owen in the film, had a chance to revisit them in the streaming era and a particularly key moment of transition. I moved into my first apartment with Holly, my partner, and with the little money we had, were able to get our internet connection hooked up. We couldn’t afford Netflix, but we did have Pluto TV just after it was bought by Viacom, and wouldn’t you know it, a 24/7 stream of Nickelodeon shows happened to land on the app. And wouldn’t you know it, it was reruns of Are You Afraid of the Dark and The Adventures of Pete and Pete. I spent a week watching these episodes back-to-back in my free time between job-hunting.
It was fun to revisit the show, but something was different about them. I was older, and I had real concerns, such as seeing if I could swing money for food besides Oscar Meyer deli slices, plastic cheese, and corn tortillas cooked on the stove. They weren’t as fun, they didn’t land as I’d hoped. I will never recapture the joy of staying up before bed to watch experimental Canadian children’s TV.
These experiences from these shows still very much carry meaning to me and inform a lot about my social and aesthetic development, but those things can never be recaptured. Brutal nostalgia at work.
The life Owen remembers as they narrate the film is one of the coloration of nostalgia and the emphasis on the things of childhood that we all find ourselves defined by, one way or another. It differs for everything, but we all have that thing that we half remember and half objectify. It’s that pang of finding a baseball card, a LEGO minifigure, or a set of pogs. For some, it may be television.
But that nostalgia for something can also become an obsession and fixation when it is used as an escape from the bad feelings. Often our obsessions -our things - are our things because they are the comfort we turn to in a moment of need. They are a liferaft in a sea of hurt. My late-night TV shows kept me from sleeping, from the dark, where I thought about death constantly. I was 10 years old and had ulcers. Family wasn’t great then. In some ways I never recovered from my childhood, and as much as I have fond memories of Are You Afraid of the Dark, the nostalgia is just as much a reminder of what hurt as it is a reminder of how I got through it.
That is the key to the second layer of nostalgia in I Saw the TV Glow.
The (Un)Remembered Past
The trans allegory of Schoenbrun’s film is obvious as the information we need to work within that allegory is parcelled out rather quickly and the theme is iterated upon throughout the runtime. It’s very solid filmmaking and I am excited to dive into their previous film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). When I say the allegory is obvious, it comes from a place of admiration.
Owen is presented as a quiet kid, one with no real social life, with an overbearing father, a mother who cannot seem to offer Owen what they need, and little that seems interesting to them. You’ll note that I am using the pronoun “they” here, because the Owen of the film may not be just Owen, but rather Isabel, one of the lead characters in The Pink Opaque. Owen bonds with an older girl, Maddy, who comes from a similarly troubled family. They bond over secret sleepovers to watch the show, and Maddy sneaks Owen VHS tapes. It becomes their obsession, their escape from their troubles, troubles that only continue to multiply. Troubles that their escape can’t always mask.
Maddy is gay. She struggles with her attraction to other girls in the late 1990s. Owen is seemingly uninterested in sex. Owen feels empty inside. Maddy vanishes for years at a time, only returning long enough into Owen’s life at various stages of transition — moments of change where Owen can pursue something — if only they knew what it was they wanted. Owen loses both parents over the years but remains stuck in what feels like a shell of the heteronormative existence that is expected of them. Timid, lost Owen doesn’t want to experience the question they received from their father again; “Isn’t that a girl’s show?”
Yet, the void inside remains, even through the years of doing things expected of them. Owen even mentions starting a family that is never seen. Owen never works outside of the small social group they have worked with, moving from the movie theater to an entertainment center. Passive and empty.
Owen remains haunted by Maddy’s second and final appearance where she reveals that the villain of The Pink Opaque, Mr. Melancholy, has had them trapped in the void following the season five finale — Maddy and Owen are Tara and Isabel. It all makes sense. it just requires Owen to take the step and be honest about who they are, transition from the void to the sixth season of their beloved show. But Owen rejects this. Owen pushes Maddy to the ground and runs, seeking to pursue that “normal” life, to buy into what Mr. Melancholy has assigned at the birth of this world.
And in 2026, Owen, is wheezing and old, their animus gone. What life there was in them seemingly spent. Only around 40, Owen seems so much older from living the path expected of them, rather than being true to themselves. Whether it is too late for Owen, by the end of the film, to figure out who they truly are, is one of many questions I am left with. Was Maddy coaxing Owen to a tragic suicide, or was the world of The Pink Opaque reality? Does Owen’s vision of the static in their chest mean there is hope for them yet?
I would like to think so.
It has taken a long time, but each moment of transition for Owen gets them closer to something. Owen has yet to take action, but we all have known people like Owen.
The second layer of nostalgia of I Saw the TV Glow is that for a past (un)remembered. The haunting of a path not taken; whether it is good or bad no one can say for sure, but it is something different and clear. The exit is in the rearview mirror and each glance is that painful reminder of the choice not to choose. The loss of agency. The loss of oneself.
The Pink Opaque, if Maddy (or is it Tara?) is right, is Owen’s real past and who they should be: Isabel. But ignoring every instance to take the path, to right their way into the past that could have made them happier is that past (un)remembered.
As the sidewalk graffiti in the movie says: there is still time.
