Surprise! After a four-year hiatus, we're back with 10 W33ks of Spooktober. Get it. The Es are 3s because this is the third time we've done this series. This time, we're starting with I Saw the TV Glow, and Kelli is joining us to chat about this movie. So bathe yourself in the pink opaque, and let's get ready for another season of scary movies.

It’s 2024. We live in a time where millennials are entering their 30s and 40s, starting to question their decisions and even their realities. And yes, 90s nostalgia is at an all-time high, for better or for worse. Enter Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a horror film that confronts that nostalgia and the discomfort of exploring the realities of the lives we’re living versus the lives we imagined for ourselves. And this movie is queer. And it’s about the trans experience. And Kelli and Emily, (disclaimer) two cis-women and founders of the very popular, very beloved Queer Girl Book Club, are here to discuss it.

Spoilers ahead.

Emily: Phew, where to begin. Okay, I guess I just want to start by saying I really loved this movie.

Kelli: Me too!

Emily: I saw it by myself at Alamo Drafthouse, and before the movie, they played a bunch of clips of Nickelodeon TV shows like Pete and Pete and Are You Afraid of the Dark? And they showed some Buffy as well. I feel like it really set the stage for what I was about to watch and put me in that place. I did the math, and I’m pretty much the same age as the main character Owen, played by Justice Smith. I was in this. I was ready. And this movie really shook me.

I Saw the TV Glow starts in 1996 and follows Owen, a middle school kid who has a really severe, strict father (played by Fred Durst…yes, really). He’s curious about this show called The Pink Opaque, but his dad won’t let him stay up to watch it. Enter the cooler, older 9th grade kid Maddy who offers Owen a window into The Pink Opaque. Owen watches an episode at Maddy’s house while he’s pretending to stay over at someone else’s house, and he’s hooked. From there, Maddy starts sneaking Owen video tapes of recorded episodes and the rest is history. The Pink Opaque is life. 

Kelli: First, I have to admit that I did not know the name Fred Durst, and so every time someone was like, woah, Fred Durst is in this, I was like, the murderer? He’s an actor now? Wait, didn’t he die? (Sorry to Limp Bizkit fans.)

Anyway, I am a bit younger than you and Owen, but it’s not too difficult to think of The Pink Opaque as representative of any sort of TV show or piece of media a person on the Millennial Spectrum might have grown up with. I do think that the slightly spooky/monstrous element of the series is important with regards to queerness, as queer people in our generation tend to gravitate towards the fantastical — Harry Potter (RIP) is a good example of another fandom many queer people clung to in adolescence and beyond. 

Emily: Sailor Moon is another good (and more, in retrospect, queer-friendly) example of a TV show from that time period that, IDK, definitely became a lifestyle for me. And I feel like The Pink Opaque is definitely paying homage to the magical girls genre. Obviously, as I mentioned, The Pink Opaque also feels like a lot of the weirder Nickelodeon shows from the ‘90s. And yes, it’s probably a little Buffy as well. 

Kelli: Shout out to the Buffy credits font which was used for some credits in The Pink Opaque, and also to Amber Benson, who has a brief cameo here in reference to her character on Buffy (Tara, a famously buried gay).

Emily: Point being no matter what show became your obsession as a queer millennial, The Pink Opaque sees you.

Kelli: As Owen and Maddy grow up, The Pink Opaque is pretty much their sole point of connection. They’re both people who have a hard time socializing — though it’s never stated explicitly, they’re almost definitely neurodivergent — and even though they both seem desperate to leave the depressing suburban nightmare they’re stuck in, when Maddy tells Owen she’s leaving town and he should come with her, he’s too afraid to follow through. The rest of the story centers around Owen and the ramifications of his decision to stay put. 

Something really cool about this movie is that there are a lot of different ways to read it. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, it’s very obviously about being queer and, more specifically, about being trans, but as for what actually happens plot-wise, everything is up for debate. When you were watching it, were you thinking at all about what was real or how literally you should take things, or were you just kind of letting it wash over you? I know you’ve seen the film twice now, so I’m curious if you read it differently the second time around. 

Emily: To me, with stories like this, the question of what’s real and what isn’t seems irrelevant. My retort when people get wrapped up in questions like this is always, “Well, it’s fiction, so none of it is real.” And I get really defensive about this because I tend to write stories with a vague sense of reality and I personally like stories that go in that direction as well. So, my short answer is no, I wasn’t worried about what was real and what wasn’t. Ultimately, everything experienced in this movie is real to Owen, and I think one of the things we see in this movie is that reality is subjective and can change based on where you are in your life and your perspective. Which I think is really cool. 

Side note: We’re just going to say “really cool” a lot probably. We’re good writers like that.

Kelli: Really good writers.

Emily: In terms of this movie being about queerness and being trans, I think, yeah, there are a lot of ways you can interpret this movie. But! If you miss that on top of all of those things, this movie is about being trans, then I think you are kind of missing the point. Should we break that down first since I think we both agree that’s a pretty significant part of the movie?

Kelli: Yes!

So, in addition to a lot of visual signaling that happens throughout the movie — one of the first shots is of young Owen beneath a parachute in the colors of the trans flag — the film’s transness is most obvious, to me, in the idea that Maddy and Owen are actually Isabel and Tara, the main characters of The Pink Opaque. Maddy believes that they've somehow been trapped in the wrong world, the world outside of the show, and that they need to find their way back.

When Maddy returns to town years after high school and tells Owen about her experiences, she describes what she went through as a sort of death, a burial of the self and a resurrection. This is the point at which the movie takes a turn for the more surreal, but the metaphor is clear: the people they were meant to be have been inside them all along.

As adult Maddy explains the theory to Owen, we see flashbacks of Owen in a dress — the same dress Isabel is wearing in a sequence on the show — and Maddy begins using the name Isabel for Owen, who seems both intrigued by and skeptical of this concept. Eventually, Maddy leaves, and Owen once again fails to follow. The drudgery of the life he lives following this encounter is evidence that his forcible repression of his true identity will only continue to make him miserable.

Emily: And while we see flashes of Owen in a dress, in these scenes where Maddy returns to Owen to try to get him to come back with her, she is also presenting herself in a more non-binary way. I really appreciated how Maddy’s appearance and self-expression (even the way she talks and the way she carries herself) changes through each time period in her life. This is Owen’s story for the most part, but we also get to see Maddy’s journey of self-expression and her exploration into her own queerness.

Speaking of self-expression, I think we have to also talk about Justice Smith’s voice in the movie. Y’all are all probably aware of who Justice Smith is as an actor (and if you’re not, please watch the D&D movie because it’s so good). Anyway, if you know who Justice Smith is, then you probably know this is not how he normally talks. He has mentioned that the voice was actually inspired by Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights. He mentions in a Letterboxd interview that Julianne Moore spoke that way because she wanted a separation of the head and the body. And he wanted to create that same separation for his character in I Saw the TV Glow because Owen isn’t comfortable in his own body. Bridgette Lundy-Paine talks about Maddy’s physicality in this interview too, and it’s also, like, only four minutes long, so you should just check it out rather than listening to what my dumb ass has to say.

Kelli: There’s so much in the movie about the discomfort of being in the wrong body. Maddy definitely seems much more at ease with herself when she returns, while Owen just grows more and more uncomfortable in his skin. He also deteriorates physically, his asthma worsening over the years, and by the end of the movie he looks haggard, despite the fact that he’s supposed to be, like, 40. 

A common complaint from people who disliked this movie is that it made them feel weird and bad, but I think that’s the point. Part of what this film does is capture the discomfort of gender dysphoria. I say this as a cis person only having read a lot of trans writing on the subject — google ‘gender dysphoria I Saw the TV Glow’ and you’ll find plenty! Anyway, everyone has their reasons for disliking movies, and there are plenty of movies that I hate based on vibes alone, but the sense of unease this movie provokes really worked for me.

Emily: We also touched on this a little bit, but this movie is also about nostalgia. Not, like, the warm fuzzy kind of nostalgia that a lot of movies and TV shows try to capitalize off of. This isn’t Stranger Things. This is the kind of nostalgia that makes you feel like shit. It’s the melancholy of feeling like you’ve missed out on something or that you once had something that you’ll never again be able to recapture in the same way.

Kelli: Yeah, so one thing that happens that I find so horrifying and so viscerally real is that when Owen goes back to watch The Pink Opaque as an adult, he realizes that it's nothing like what he remembered. The effects are cheesy, the acting is bad, and it doesn't feel special or magical to him anymore at all. It reminds me of the feeling I would get when I'd try to play with my Barbies as a preteen, but I was getting older and somehow I couldn't access the part of myself that had enjoyed it so deeply for so long. I kept trying, but it never felt the same, and eventually I stopped.

I think this ties back in with Owen’s fears about exploring who he really is. At first he's afraid, and then he waits so long that it feels like he's trapped in a life he didn't anticipate for himself, one completely devoid of magic. 

Emily: As someone who was also a Barbie kid, I highly recommend The Sims. Which is just Barbies for grown ups. This is my hot tip. Okay back to this movie.

Kelli: When I first saw the movie, I felt like the ending was so, so sad. But when I got home and started reading about what other people had taken away from it, I found that a lot of people — and many trans people specifically — found a hopefulness that I didn't pick up on. So many trans folks come out late in life, and while the movie is in some ways a warning of what might happen if you deny yourself the pleasure of ever embracing your true identity, the film also has a different message: there is still time. This message is literally written in chalk on the sidewalk, but I'm a big dummy and didn't make the connection between that statement and Owen as a character. 

What were your thoughts on the ending?

Emily: I did pick up on the “There is still time” message and I found that hopeful, but to me, the ending was still really sad. I was depressed for a while after watching this movie. Which is not a bad thing. I feel like I was supposed to be sad. The happy ending that would have wrapped everything up in a tight bow for me? Well, when Owen goes into the bathroom and rips his body open, he would be transformed into the most authentic version of himself. And then he would unapologetically be able to live in the body that makes him feel the most comfortable. 

But instead, we see him open himself up and find the truth within himself. And rather than living with that truth, he pulls himself back together. The last thing we see in the movie is Owen apologizing to literally EVERYONE. 

To me, that was really sad, but I think it also felt more real. Self-discovery, for most people, isn’t an easy journey. And it doesn’t happen right away the moment you first realize it’s there. So I think there is still hope for Owen. The good news is he has learned what he is capable of and who he is. The question is will he return to it one day when he’s ready? We don’t have the answer, but it’s not closed off to him. The possibility is still out there.

Kelli: Right. The sadness for me was in my assumption that Owen would never be able to show himself to other people in a way that would allow him to live the life he longs for. I want to think that he gets there eventually. But it’s true that the fact he’s had to live this way for so long is sad too, whether or not he eventually finds joy. There are a lot of people who are denied years of living happily out as trans because of the way our society/country/world treats trans people.

One other thing I wanted to touch on was mental illness (me? Talking about mental illness???). There are a couple of scenes that stand out to me as possible allusions to suicidality, and I wondered how you read them. 

One of the darker potential interpretations of what’s going on in this story is that Maddy and Owen’s experiences with The Pink Opaque are part of a shared delusion. Maddy’s desperation to escape into the world of the show — or, in her mind, take up her rightful mantle as one of its main characters — involves her burying herself underground, and while I like to think of that moment as a metaphor for her gender rebirth, it can be taken more literally as an attempt at suicide. Similarly, there’s a moment around this part of the film where Owen’s father (of Limp Bizkit) finds Owen in the living room with his head inside the broken television. He drags Owen to the bathroom, and we watch while Owen fights against his dad, crying and vomiting what appears to be television static. Watching the movie, I couldn’t decide whether I thought this represented an attempted suicide or an attempt to escape, to follow Maddy out of town (though maybe in this case, that’s the same thing).

Anyway, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this, and on other ways this movie explores mental illness, specifically depression.

Emily: I’m a naturally sad person. I’m not trying to be “oh poor me” about it. That’s just a fact. I’m sad a lot of the time, and I love a movie that’s on my level, which is perhaps why this movie worked so well for me. I got to come out of this movie and just live in the sadness of it. There are maybe (MAYBE) moments of hope here, but yes, it was overall very melancholy, and I think it does a good job of creating that feeling in viewers.

I really don’t know how else to describe it. I love a movie that can take a feeling that maybe not everyone understands and make it more tangible. I feel like one thing this movie is doing really well is it’s saying, “You know that feeling of depression? That feeling that you just don’t feel right in the world? That feeling that you’re missing something really big that might fix everything for you and you might just never be able to reach it? No? Well this is what it feels like.”

And yeah, that’s uncomfortable, but I think for people who have felt that way, it’s really comforting to have those emotions expressed on a big screen and understand that you’re not alone. There’s something so powerful about that. I do think this movie alludes to suicide and self-harm, but not in a way that’s so overt that I think it would be triggering to people (of course, everyone’s triggers are different). The way this movie deals with depression and feelings of self-loathing is very tastefully done. As you mentioned, it’s all through symbolism rather than directly showing us images of these things. Which, to me, is so much more affecting.

Kelli: I totally agree. Mental illness is tough at all stages of life, but it can be especially difficult when you’re a teenager, and the fact that this movie is set during millennial coming-of-age means that these characters haven’t been afforded the resources for talking about this stuff that exist now. That, too, is extremely isolating — being a teenager and watching everyone around you having what you perceive to be a good time and wondering what’s wrong with you, why you can’t just be normal. Of course, as an adult I know that way more people were going through it than I realized at the time, and that those people probably looked at me and thought I was doing fine too because I got really good at hiding it. And that’s what Owen is doing, because he thinks that if he does the things ‘normal people’ do, like get married and have kids, buy a house and a big flatscreen TV, work without complaining and stand out to no one, maybe he’ll be able to feel normal, too.

Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that we both loved this movie and could keep talking about it. I look forward to watching it again, and I am also really looking forward to whatever Jane Schoenbrun does next — I know they have several projects in the works.

Emily: I will be there, Jane Schoenbrun! I gave this movie 5 stars! And, dear reader, if you want to watch this movie, you can. It’s streaming on Max. Enjoy.