As my spree of Halloween write-ups reaches its end, I Saw the TV Glow seems like the perfect place to leave things. A horror where most of the chills come from an uncanny recognition of parallels between the onscreen/offscreen lives of the characters and our own, it delivers a towering rebuttal to the cynical nihilism which some use to police the tone and content of culture that is ‘acceptable’ to the mainstream.
It is a running theory of mine, that horror is the only genre committed to honestly evaluating the 1990s. While mainstream politics and popular culture routinely hark back to that as a last golden age of stability, which we should all want to return to, the fact is the contradictions of the 1990s led to the waking nightmare we are living through today. This has made 90s nostalgia the perfect cue for horror in our present moment.
With the continued, ominous positioning of images of Bill Clinton, Osgood Perkins repeatedly foregrounds the systemic failures which enable the horrors at the heart of Longlegs to take place. With the act of lumping the kids in front of the Teletubbies at the start of 28 Years Later, as the world falls apart around them, Danny Boyle references a decade where people in power spent their time putting kitsch band-aids over cracks that have since widened to fissures in the modern world.
I Saw the TV Glow develops this in a way I find especially interesting, though. Culture from the 90s provides a refuge to the film’s protagonists – but when it is viewed from a point of nostalgia, of longing for the past, it becomes an engine of self-destruction.
The Pink Opaque
The story begins, tellingly, on election night 1996; a moment which US liberals still look back on with increasingly misty eyes. If only they could return to that safe, normal existence of Clinton-era America… But of course, the safety and normality are only superficially reserved for certain people – for others, alienated by society’s dominant ideological norms, there is no such feeling of security.
Owen and Maddy are two teenagers who find themselves on the brink of a great pit of dread. On some level, they feel or know that the ‘safe and normal’ world they are about to inherit will exclude and torment them, the moment they deviate from the narrow set of social parameters which they do not fit. But they manage to find comfort and community in each other, bonding over a young adult television show.
The Pink Opaque is a programme which follows psychic teenagers Isabel and Tara as they use their powers to combat a supernatural villain named Mr. Melancholy – who can warp time and reality. Pointedly, the one aspect of 90s life which gifts Owen and Maddy a sense of security is horror – and a narrative which speaks to their inclination of a world where everything isn’t safe and normal. In doing so, the show provides our characters with a space to reckon with their feelings, without being patronised or browbeaten by the adults in their lives – who either insist everything will in fact be fine as it is, or try to immediately reshape their children as ‘normal’.
As Owen and Maddy grow with the show, The Pink Opaque importantly allows them a space to explore parts of their identity which are off limits in their familial environments. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has said openly that the story is inspired by the “egg crack”, a term which describes the moment in a trans person’s life when they realise their identity does not correspond to their assigned gender.
The slow-burn horror of I Saw the TV Glow really begins to unfold after this moment – because while engaging with culture helps the characters to reach their important ‘crack’, acting on that revelation is another thing entirely. As economic, political and social life mobilise to smother them, and reshape them into a fictional vision of ‘normality’, Owen and Maddy are pushed into increasingly miserable positions.
The emptiness of nostalgia
I don’t want to go any further into the film than this, because I would heartily recommend that you watch it tonight. But I will conclude by noting that one of the ways in which Owen in particular is beaten into submission is through a revisiting of The Pink Opaque. Revisiting it, not in order to engage with it, but out of some half-bored impulse to find something, anything to consume and keep up the façade of ‘normal’ living. The ultimate use of nostalgia: not to grow, but to use what used to be as a mechanism to ignore what is.
Streaming it late at night on a widescreen television, via some Netflix-adjacent content mill, Owen encounters an entirely different show – the moodily lit, Buffy-style narrative has been replaced by a kitsch, kidsy Goosebumps-esque programme, which leads to feelings of embarrassment.
In the years since first seeing the show, Owen has been shaped and reshaped by normative pressures, causing them to utterly deny who they are. This version of Owen, the one who presents this supremely violent enforcement of their personality as ‘part of growing up’, cannot interact with The Pink Opaque on a genuine level anymore – causing it to devolve into an object of childish fantasy.
This has grave implications for Schoenbrun’s story relating to the LGBT+ subtext – and I don’t want to diminish that. This is absolutely the primary point that the film goes about making. But beyond that, I also believe it is a grim reflection of daily interactions with culture beyond that. In a world where every reactionary with an internet connection can weaponise ‘embarrassment’ against things they don’t like, ‘taste’ is often used to police people’s interactions with art, and distance them from work that might resonate or empower them.
Here, I Saw the TV Glow takes aim at the concept of cringe. It leans into that task so hard that at times, its closing act resembles a Tim Robinson sketch gone wrong – the difference between comedy and horror being context, and that line becoming razor thin by the end. As much as purveyors of dominant ideology might want you to feel that engaging earnestly with risk-taking culture is something to be embarrassed by, it is the everyday rituals of ‘reality’ which ultimately are the most hideously cringe-inducing here – and that is an uncomfortable, unnerving punchline that will linger with you into your daily routines, asking an important question relating to unrealised facets of yourself.
Is there still time?