5/29/2024

Ultraviolet Light and the secrets of I Saw the TV Glow

There are some colors humans can't see. Ultraviolet, infrared. shades and hues beyond the spectrum of our vision. Moths, butterflies, bats, they have the eyes to see the world bathed in this secret light. 

I spent most of my childhood in basements watching movies I was too young to see. My mom agreed to stop policing my media consumption when she stopped recognizing the movies I was watching. If I knew enough to be passionate about them, I knew enough to watch them. And so, night after blue night, I watched grainy footage and arthouse opulence until I fell asleep in the green leather chair in front of the TV. I was bathed in light. In color. 

Walking out of the theatre after watching Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow, I couldn't breathe. I felt like a butterfly, like some insect version of myself and finally, after years of squinting, someone told me what the color was. The color I'd seen my whole life, without seeing it. The color at the pink, crackling core of that TV in that basement.

TV Glow is a parable about what it means to find yourself. And what it means to lose yourself. At least, it looks like that. If you have the eyes, if you've bitten your way out of the cocoon and greeted the true sun, you see what's really there, lit up like a blacklight Christmas.

The film opens with our protagonist Owen, a child, sitting too close to the TV. Our first glimpse of Owen and they are bathed in light, watching a commercial for a show they are too young to watch about two girls fighting a world set supernaturally against them. Later Owen meets a cool girl, Maddy, reading The Episode Guide to the same show: The Pink Opaque. Owen and Maddy strike up an unwieldy friendship centered on the show and around their respective parents. 

The kinship the characters feel with their show in the basement, the awakenings and discoveries therein, are ultraviolet. Even after our protagonist's father scornfully tells them that the Pink Opaque is "for girls," Owen is snuck tapes by his friend to watch in secret. I know these colors. I have seen them, hidden before.

I first saw David Cronenberg's Videodrome when I was in high school. I couldn’t look away, watching a wan, basement-dwelling James Woods discover his new flesh in grubby TV shows, in trash art, in videos, in the flicker and hum of a CRTV as the only light in the world. I thought my kinship with Max, with Cronenberg's philosophy, was more abstract. I thought the New Flesh was an idea. 

Even when the TV Missionary Brian O’Blivion told the camera that “Brian O’Blivion is not my name. It is my television name. Soon we will all have special names,” I didn’t think about the way I would bend my tongue around the name “Kimberly” as a kid, marveling at what the world would be like if it was truly mine. 

Even when Max's chest opened into a quivering, vaginal orifice and swallowed the gun from his hand, I just thought it was a cool movie. The thousands of potent mechanisms of self-delusion were so in place, they wouldn't allow me to see something as painfully unsubtle as a yonic mouth eating a phallic symbol in a movie full of people shouting about the New Flesh. It was just a movie that made me feel weird, without saying why.

I’m a firm believer that, with few exceptions, spoilers aren’t really a thing. A postcard will never be Paris, and a friend telling me the ending of a movie will never be the movie. That said, if you care about such things, skip to the next paragraph. Eventually, Maddy’s home life becomes untenable and she disappears from Owen’s life. After eight years she returns and tells Owen that the Pink Opaque is real, and they are the main characters of the show, Tara and Isabel. The possibility that Owen is actually this psychic, plucky girl destined to save the world, and Owen’s reaction to it become the emotional molten core of the film’s second half.  

Dodie Bellamy says “Bad metaphors are the only way to talk about the important things.” I’ve quoted this elsewhere on my blog, but you don’t throw away an umbrella because it kept you dry once before already. Watching Videodrome, I found my way to talk about the important things. For Owen and Maddy it’s The Pink Opaque, a show that seems cobbled together with themes and aesthetics from The X-Files, Animorphs, The Secret World of Alex Mack, and So Weird. These shows about the unexplained, about the truths beyond the truth, about kids changing their literal bodies at will.

Every trans person I know has a piece of media that they point to as, at least subtextually, “trans as fuck” regardless of its actual transess or the involvement of any trans creators. We hold these close and credit them with our shattering discoveries. When Maddy confesses to Owen that the Pink Opaque feels more like real life than real life, I felt that. Watching Videodrome or The Fly, now, becomes a museum of all the clues I missed as a kid. All the nascent clues to the mystery I failed to solve. We want Owen to listen to Maddy. We want Owen to solve the mystery and defeat Mr. Melancholy, the Man in the Moon determined to rule the world in The Pink Opaque. We want Owen to be Isabel so badly that it physically hurts to watch Owen be Owen. 

It hurt when I was who I wasn’t. It hurt to be lost and not know why. To let time pass for years that flowed swift and unchallenged as seconds. To look up from autopilot and feel like I skipped scenes that were instrumental to the plot of my life. The brutalist title cards of ONE YEAR LATER and EIGHT YEARS LATER in I Saw the TV Glow feel like gunshots. We want to know what happened in those years. We want to know if we missed anything. I missed so much. I missed so fucking much before I found myself.

In his poem “Gray Side of the Moon,” Bucky Sinister chronicles his journey from the wastelands of Arkansas to the art scene in San Francisco. He finds a central metaphor in the Wizard of Oz. 

“I watched Wizard of Oz on a black 
and white TV when I was young.
I had no idea Dorothy’s world became 
color once she landed in Oz.

This was long before we people like us had
VCRs.
Either you watched it when it came on
once a year,
or you missed it.”

There’s so much longing and despair in this simple fact of the poet’s poverty. It also is exactly how it feels to watch Owen struggle. It is also exactly how it feels to live in the closet as a trans person. There’s the ever-present anxiety, the dooming fear that you missed it. That you had your chance and didn’t learn the truth in time. The lie is your prison and you’ll never be free. Your world will never be color. You missed it because of something wrong with your glow, with your eyes, with how you see.

I Saw the TV Glow dares to be a movie for those with eyes to see. It’s a staggering achievement of thoughtful filmmaking in black and white, but to those of us who can see it, it’s a masterpiece. It is a movie for butterflies, for moths, for those of us with wings.

It dares you to change with the watching of it. It dares you to open your eyes, and see your real eyes, in the pink opaque of a lit up TV. It dares you to see your reflection in a new color.

I am daring you to go watch this movie.

I’m begging you, don’t miss it.

There’s still time.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B