This whole week has been weirdly cloudy and overcast. I’m saving money on my electric bill since the clouds are keeping the temps cool (cool for June in Oklahoma), but the moody gray-green lighting is starting to mess with me a little bit. I’m already in a weird headspace because of life events, plus I’m coming down from two days spent pretty stoned, and then yesterday I watched a strange and compelling movie called I Saw The TV Glow that has really stuck with me.

The movie follows a boy named Owen who grows up in the 90s in some nameless American suburb somewhere. He befriends a girl at his school named Maddy, who is an avid fan of the live-action science-fiction show The Pink Opaque that airs every Saturday night on a channel for teens and tweens. 

The Pink Opaque is a show in the vein of other classic 90s live action shows targeted at teenagers: in terms of plot, characters, special effects, and overall aesthetic, it brings to mind series of yesteryear such as Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Goosebumps, Animorphs, The Secret World of Alex Mack, etc. The two main characters of The Pink Opaque are a pair of teenage girls named Tara and Isabel who share a special telepathic link that allows them to communicate via the psychic plane, even if they are thousands of miles apart from each other. Naturally, the girls must use their powers to protect the world from the evil machinations of Mr. Melancholy—a mysterious moon-themed supervillain with disturbing powers of his own.

Maddy convinces Owen to watch The Pink Opaque. Unfortunately it comes on after Owen’s bedtime, which is strictly enforced by Owen’s controlling and narrow-minded father. Owen timidly tries to ask permission to stay up late, but his father mocks him for wanting to watch “a show for girls” and Owen’s request is dismissed. In order to watch the show, Owen lies to his parents that he is staying the night at a friend’s place, but secretly he sneaks over to Maddy’s house and watches The Pink Opaque with her. From that point forward, Owen is as avid a fan as Maddy. She starts taping episodes of The Pink Opaque and leaving them with Owen so he can watch the show without having to lie and sneak around. 

Maddy and Owen form a friendship that is based not only on a shared obsession with The Pink Opaque but also shared feelings of loneliness and isolation. Maddy grows increasingly frustrated with the quiet suffocation of life in the suburbs. She tells Owen that The Pink Opaque feels more real to her than the supposed “real world.” One night, Maddy informs Owen that she has to get out—she’s planning to run away and she wants Owen to come with her. Owen is too scared to follow her lead and he chickens out the night that he is supposed to run away with her. Maddy makes good on her plan and disappears without a trace, though her TV set is found burning in her backyard after she leaves town.

Years pass and Owen grows up. His mother dies to cancer and Owen never moves out of his childhood home, so he has only his father to keep him company. His life is even more lonely, muted, and small than it was during his childhood. When he’s not in the dark cramped bedroom he had as a kid, he’s wandering around the quiet, dreamlike movie theater where he works, sweeping up stale popcorn and patrolling the aisles in liminal silence. All he has left of his friendship with Maddy is a collection of bootleg The Pink Opaque VHS tapes, which he still watches in secret so his father won’t mock him.

One night, while shopping for groceries in a supermarket that is as curiously dark and empty as the rest of his world, Owen sees Maddy. Once he realizes who she is, he embraces her, delighted and overwhelmed to see that she is alive and well, but Maddy’s reaction to finding Owen is somewhat reserved. She urges him to go “somewhere safe” where the two of them can talk. He follows her to a bar. There, Owen asks Maddy what happened to her when she ran away years ago.

Maddy dodges the question at first and asks Owen a question of her own. She reminds Owen of The Pink Opaque. He tells her it’s still his favorite show. She goes on to ask about his memories of the show. Puzzled, Owen tries to get back to the topic of her disappearance, but then Maddy shares the revelation that is her entire purpose for returning to Owen’s life: she believes that she and Owen are actually Tara and Isabel, that The Pink Opaque is not just a TV show but is actually the world that the two of them belong to, and that the world they have always thought was real is actually a prison created by Mr. Melancholy. The reason they have always felt so alone—the reason that time has been moving so strangely—the reason that their world of quiet isolated suburbia has always seemed so wrong—is because the two of them are in the wrong bodies, with the wrong identities, in the wrong world. Maddy/Tara tells Owen that she successfully escaped Mr. Melancholy’s prison and returned to her home reality as depicted in The Pink Opaque, but she willingly returned to the fake world in order to tell Owen the truth. When Owen protests that none of this could be real, he calls her “Maddy” and she tells him that “Maddy” isn’t her name.

Maddy/Tara insists that Owen is actually Isabel, and though Isabel’s mind is currently in Mr. Melancholy’s prison, Isabel’s body has been buried alive in “the real world” of The Pink Opaque and that Isabel is suffocating to death. If Owen cannot escape, then Isabel will die. Maddy/Tara tells Owen that he can escape the same way she escaped. The two of them must bury themselves underground and “die” there. Upon “death” by suffocation, they will wake up in the right bodies with the right memories in the right world.

Owen is not convinced. He allows Maddy/Tara to take him to the high school football field, near the area where she wants them to bury themselves alive, but ultimately he can’t bring himself to accept what she is saying as true and so he runs away. He never sees Maddy again.

Years pass and Owen is now an older man, frail and sickly because his childhood asthma has only gotten worse. He no longer works at the movie theater but now has a job at a local arcade/event center for kids. Like a ghost he quietly shuffles around from one room at the event center to another: a ball pit, a game room, a dimly-lit dining area, a storage space. Even when there are other people onscreen, they seem distant and disconnected. Owen’s labored wheezing is louder than any other sound. The entire film has felt like a strange dream, and in this final act, it transitions to a nightmare. Owen and his coworkers at the event center start singing “Happy Birthday” to a child having a party there. The workers clap and sing energetically, but Owen struggles to keep up with everyone and is trailing behind as the workers race into the dining area where the birthday party is being held. Owen becomes increasingly disoriented by the noise and shouting and clapping until he completely loses his composure and starts screaming at the top of his lungs. He calls for his mommy. He sobs openly and loudly. He collapses to the floor, weeping. No one responds. In fact, everyone becomes totally silent and motionless, as if they are just waiting for Owen to get over his breakdown and then resume singing and clapping.

Owen drags himself to the bathroom. There, he takes off his shirt and uses a box cutter to slice open his chest vertically, from sternum to navel. There is no blood. In front of the bathroom mirror, Owen puts his hands on the wound and peels the skin back, revealing a glowing pink TV screen inside his chest. Shortly after, he emerges from the restroom, dressed in his work clothes, with neither wound nor TV visible. Quietly Owen addresses various people in the arcade center, apologizing for his earlier outburst at the birthday party, but no one acknowledges him. The film ends.

So…yeah. Damn. What a movie. I’m not even a “movie guy”—especially nowadays—but this one had been on my radar for some time and I was just in the mood to watch a movie yesterday. It was so gorgeous and freaky and haunting. The shots themselves—like, the way the scenes were framed and the lighting and the colors and all that—were so beautiful and eerie. I’ve always been drawn to the liminal, and this movie basically was one long liminal space: the ball pit after all the kids are gone and the event center is closed, the football field at night when it’s totally empty, the rows of houses in a dreamlike maze of suburbia—all of these settings were so dreamlike and evocative. Also, as a child of the 90s, of course I was attracted to the nostalgia factor. I remember watching shows like Animorphs and wishing so fervently that I was one of those teenage hero characters, with superpowers and a gang of awesome friends and a destiny to save the world. 

Also, the film reads as a trans/queer allegory. I’m not trans, so I can’t definitively analyze what scenes and lines had what kinds of trans symbolism and all that, but some of it was quite obvious if you have even a vague idea of what it might feel like to be trans. Like, feeling as if you’re in the wrong body, or feeling as if the whole world seems like it was made for someone else besides you. And, of course, I know from firsthand experience what it’s like to have other people police you and keep you inside a box that’s far too small. I also know what it’s like to hyper fixate on a given show or book or whatever and fervently believe, against all reason and sanity, that it’s not just some piece of media but is actually a gateway to another world. A better world. A world made for me, and a world that, if I could rejoin, would make me feel so complete and whole and understood. 

There’s this one part I didn’t mention yet where Owen rewatches The Pink Opaque as an adult and it’s totally different from what he remembered it was like as a kid. As a kid, The Pink Opaque was dramatic, intelligent, and well-acted, with high stakes and frightening monsters, but the version he watches as an adult is so cheap and cheesy that he finds it embarrassing that he ever loved it. I also know that feeling: you remember a show being so scary and so cool when you were little but then you watch it as a grown-up and you see all the flaws and all the plot holes and all the low-budget effects and you’re like, “is this even the same show?” Now, in the case of I Saw The TV Glow, so many things like this are left ambiguous. Like, did Owen fall in love with a show as a child and then watch it as an adult and see the reality of how poorly-made it truly was? Or, is Owen actually Isabel, and was Owen/Isabel’s adult rewatch of The Pink Opaque so different because of Mr. Melancholy’s insidious entrapment? 

That’s one of the many things I found so enjoyable about I Saw The TV Glow. You’re never quite sure who is telling the truth. Is Owen just a miserable old person, dying slowly in terms of both body and soul in the purgatory of suburbia, feeling suffocated by loneliness and gender dysphoria? Or is Owen actually a teenage girl named Isabel, who in the real world is actually being suffocated while her psyche suffers in a hell devised by the evil Mr. Melancholy? Is Maddy a person so disconnected and depressed that she has been driven to suicide and she wants her friend to join her in her decision to end her life? Or is Maddy actually a teenage girl named Tara who is desperately trying to save her best friend, and by proxy, perhaps the rest of her world as well? Is this a movie about two lonely queer people who could only find traces of joy in some defunct old show from their childhoods? Or is this a movie about two girls trying to break out of an oppressive dream prison constructed by a malevolent force? Or is this a movie about how it feels to be trans?

My personal interpretation is that…well, no matter what’s real or what isn’t, the only way for Owen to find joy is to embrace the reality of who Owen is on the inside. Maybe Owen is really Isabel and she has to leave the dream world and rejoin Tara back in the real world. Maybe The Pink Opaque really is just a campy kid’s show from the 90s and Owen is never actually going to “return” to that world. But either way, there is something inside Owen that has to be set free, and I choose to believe that the scene with Owen revealing the TV screen inside is meant to show the viewer that Owen has finally begun the hard but necessary work of self-examination and self-confession. The movie ends with Owen acknowledging that 1) the world Owen lives in is a fucking nightmare and 2) there is something special and bright inside Owen that Owen can’t ignore any longer. I think those are the two ingredients necessary for change to happen.

Also, throughout the film is this message: “there is still time.” There is still time to be true to yourself. There is still time to save yourself. There is still time to come out, or transition, or wake up, or make a change, or whatever.

Owen—Isabel—I’m going to choose to believe that you got out of Mr. Melancholy’s liminal prison in the nick of time, and that you and Tara found each other back in the real world, and that the two of you combined your powers and foiled Mr. Melancholy’s evil plans yet again. And you’ll do it again, over and over. You’ll constantly save yourselves and each other and emerge victorious. And, if someone were to take these fantastic events and tell some kind of story about your lives, well, it would make a hell of a TV show, right?