"I experienced that film as a cautionary tale about how not to let a work of art possess you, a caution that not only these troubled teens but many Lynch fans and even perhaps the filmmaker herself should take to heart."
I've seen other cis gendered film critics say things like this, and I gotta say it's a very confusing take. Every scene in I Saw the TV Glow is more or less just a thing that happened to me. It's not a movie about a TV show at all? It's all pretty straightforward and only barely metaphorical. It's about depersonalization and looking for a spark of identity where you can find it but also snuffing out your own spark. The problem with the protagonist isn't that they're obsessed with a TV show for little girls, it's that they are afraid of what being obsessed with a TV show for little girls means, and so they end up falsifying their own memories. The protagonist isn't being harmed by the show, and in a world where they had the courage to be buried alive, everything would have been fine. But that was too scary, so it didn't happen, and that is the thing that's killing the protagonist, not a fan's obsession gone too far.
I mean, you don't mean that literally. You didn't literally cut yourself open and find a television inside. You didn't put your head into a television show that was sparking and get pulled out by your dad. Your friend didn't tell you that you need to bury yourself alive to be reborn inside a television show where you really belong. You mean that the story spoke to you on an allegorical and/or metaphorical level.
But metaphors are always slippery. Is being "buried alive" a metaphor for rebirth to your true self? Or is it a metaphor for suicide? Or is it hard to know which it is a metaphor for when you're actually in it? What happened to Maddy? She says she disappeared from our world and wound up living inside a television show. That didn't literally happen. So what's it a metaphor for?
I think the film is much less tidy than some readings make it, and that's a good thing. And they (the filmmaker) have said they don't like stories that present simple "solutions" to fundamental conditions of existence. I don't think they would agree that if the protagonist had done x or y or z everything would have been "fine." I certainly didn't get the feeling from the show that that was the case.
You’re right that these things didn’t literally happen to me as depicted in the movie.
Instead of cutting myself open and finding a glowing TV set, my heart was a frozen block of ice that cracked open on my second honeymoon. I didn’t put my head into a TV set and get pulled out by my dad. It was my mom was warning me that the TV in my grandparent’s shag carpeted attic was filling me with X-rays. And it wasn’t my friend telling me I needed to be reborn while Phoebe Bridgers sang with Sloppy Jane. It was a bar in Yokohama where a drag queen was singing Bette Middler and I was trying to seduce a drunken salaryman. Instead of my friend being into a show that was a single combination of Buffy, the X-Files, and Are You Afraid of the Dark, my friend was really into Buffy, the X-Files, and Are You Afraid of the Dark. And instead of seeing graffiti of There’s Still Time on the sidewalk, I just cried reading the social media links my friend who transitioned before me had posted. Instead of losing myself in the Pink Opaque, I was depressed for a week as a child whenever the Noozles reached the end of its syndicated run because I was sublimating myself into its magical girl protagonist.
So it wasn’t literally the same, but all of those things happened to me, just not necessarily in that order with those characters.
I think there are two readings of the movie that are possible: the weird stuff is literally real or the weird stuff is not literally real. If the weird stuff is real, yes, Maddie really did wake up in the Pink Opaque. If the weird stuff is not real, then she definitely didn’t commit suicide because she’s not dead unless Owen is hallucinating her, which nothing in the movie indicates is the case. I think the Occam’s razor reading of the movie is that in either case, Owen’s problem is that he is scared to act and it’s killing him from the inside whereas Maddie found some degree of freedom by running away from her abusive past and reinventing herself.
The scene of Owen in girl’s clothes basically only make sense on the reading that Owen is trans (either in the normal way or because the Pink Opaque is real) but does not want to be (because no one does at first), and then the rest of it is about Owen suffering from the effects of falsifying their own memories. The way that it is presented is really important. We the audience see it only briefly because Owen is afraid of it, and while the memory is perfectly clear, everything has been structured so that Owen does not have to remember it or confront it. The cautionary message of the movie isn’t “don’t get sucked into hyper fandom and lose yourself,” it’s “don’t erase your own memories because you’re scared of what they mean.”
I hear you! That's a lot of correspondences! And I completely understand why the movie was so compelling for you, and spoke so directly to your own experiences.
I don't think, though, that your two possible interpretations of the movie are the only ones possible, though. A third possibility is that Owen is, indeed, dying inside by not confronting and, ultimately, accepting who he is (and taking whatever action is required to achieve that acceptance), but that Maddie is *not* a good guide: that she *believes* that the Pink Opaque is real, that she's *wrong* about that and is just projecting her own personal issues into a TV show, that she's become increasingly crazy since leaving Owen, that when she returns she *is* enticing him to commit suicide, and that she kills herself after he flees her, which is why she's never heard from again.
A huge amount of how one reads the movie depends on how one views Maddie, not Owen. I clocked her as bad news from square one. Owen is a lot more ambivalent about her, because she's the only person who sees him, or who opens up space for him to allow himself to see himself. But her intensity is also terrifying to him, and for good reason. And when she comes back she is *really* insistent that *she* knows what *his* experience means.
I know plenty of people who've been in relationships like that -- I've come close to them myself a couple of times in my life -- and they can be extremely dangerous. You run the risk of falling into a folie a deux, where you hype each other into ever greater heights of insanity. I felt like I was seeing a relationship like that in development, and I really hoped Owen didn't go off the deep end with Maddie.
But I *also* hoped Owen would find himself, would accept himself, would save himself from his misery. My heart went out to him, and I agree with you that gender identity stuff is clearly indicated as being at least part of why he shuts down. (I think he also clearly reads as on the spectrum, which may not be unrelated to why he becomes so fixated on a TV show.) I think the ending leaves open a possibility that Owen did/will find a way to save himself. I saw it as tragic that, at a crucial age, he felt he had to choose between Maddie and suppressing himself. I think, in life, that's a false choice: no other person has *the* answer for you; the work is work you have to do yourself. But lots of us -- and I include myself here at times -- easily fall into thinking that these choices are starkly binary, and lots of us -- I include myself here as well -- have been tempted to adopt identities whole hog from someone else's script rather than writing it ourselves.
I'm not sure that I read the movie as a "message" movie -- I don't tend to like reading films that way, and told tend to enjoy films that ask explicitly to be read that way. Indeed, one of the things I appreciated most about it is that it felt significantly open to interpretation.
In any event -- I'm really glad you wrote, and really glad you shared your story.
I think the end of the movie is deliberately ambiguous about whether Owen has decided to finally change or just become further resigned.
I should rewatch the movie so I can pay more attention to the relationship between Owen and Maddie. The other big trans movie of the year (I don't count Emilia Perez) The People's Joker was very explicit—in a speaking directly to camera sort of way—that the relationship between the two trans characters was necessary for the growth of the protagonist but ultimately toxic. I can see either reading for TV Glow, but I'd need to rewatch to have a more definitive opinion.
"I experienced that film as a cautionary tale about how not to let a work of art possess you, a caution that not only these troubled teens but many Lynch fans and even perhaps the filmmaker herself should take to heart."
I've seen other cis gendered film critics say things like this, and I gotta say it's a very confusing take. Every scene in I Saw the TV Glow is more or less just a thing that happened to me. It's not a movie about a TV show at all? It's all pretty straightforward and only barely metaphorical. It's about depersonalization and looking for a spark of identity where you can find it but also snuffing out your own spark. The problem with the protagonist isn't that they're obsessed with a TV show for little girls, it's that they are afraid of what being obsessed with a TV show for little girls means, and so they end up falsifying their own memories. The protagonist isn't being harmed by the show, and in a world where they had the courage to be buried alive, everything would have been fine. But that was too scary, so it didn't happen, and that is the thing that's killing the protagonist, not a fan's obsession gone too far.
I mean, you don't mean that literally. You didn't literally cut yourself open and find a television inside. You didn't put your head into a television show that was sparking and get pulled out by your dad. Your friend didn't tell you that you need to bury yourself alive to be reborn inside a television show where you really belong. You mean that the story spoke to you on an allegorical and/or metaphorical level.
But metaphors are always slippery. Is being "buried alive" a metaphor for rebirth to your true self? Or is it a metaphor for suicide? Or is it hard to know which it is a metaphor for when you're actually in it? What happened to Maddy? She says she disappeared from our world and wound up living inside a television show. That didn't literally happen. So what's it a metaphor for?
I think the film is much less tidy than some readings make it, and that's a good thing. And they (the filmmaker) have said they don't like stories that present simple "solutions" to fundamental conditions of existence. I don't think they would agree that if the protagonist had done x or y or z everything would have been "fine." I certainly didn't get the feeling from the show that that was the case.
Anyway -- thanks for writing.
You’re right that these things didn’t literally happen to me as depicted in the movie.
Instead of cutting myself open and finding a glowing TV set, my heart was a frozen block of ice that cracked open on my second honeymoon. I didn’t put my head into a TV set and get pulled out by my dad. It was my mom was warning me that the TV in my grandparent’s shag carpeted attic was filling me with X-rays. And it wasn’t my friend telling me I needed to be reborn while Phoebe Bridgers sang with Sloppy Jane. It was a bar in Yokohama where a drag queen was singing Bette Middler and I was trying to seduce a drunken salaryman. Instead of my friend being into a show that was a single combination of Buffy, the X-Files, and Are You Afraid of the Dark, my friend was really into Buffy, the X-Files, and Are You Afraid of the Dark. And instead of seeing graffiti of There’s Still Time on the sidewalk, I just cried reading the social media links my friend who transitioned before me had posted. Instead of losing myself in the Pink Opaque, I was depressed for a week as a child whenever the Noozles reached the end of its syndicated run because I was sublimating myself into its magical girl protagonist.
So it wasn’t literally the same, but all of those things happened to me, just not necessarily in that order with those characters.
I think there are two readings of the movie that are possible: the weird stuff is literally real or the weird stuff is not literally real. If the weird stuff is real, yes, Maddie really did wake up in the Pink Opaque. If the weird stuff is not real, then she definitely didn’t commit suicide because she’s not dead unless Owen is hallucinating her, which nothing in the movie indicates is the case. I think the Occam’s razor reading of the movie is that in either case, Owen’s problem is that he is scared to act and it’s killing him from the inside whereas Maddie found some degree of freedom by running away from her abusive past and reinventing herself.
The scene of Owen in girl’s clothes basically only make sense on the reading that Owen is trans (either in the normal way or because the Pink Opaque is real) but does not want to be (because no one does at first), and then the rest of it is about Owen suffering from the effects of falsifying their own memories. The way that it is presented is really important. We the audience see it only briefly because Owen is afraid of it, and while the memory is perfectly clear, everything has been structured so that Owen does not have to remember it or confront it. The cautionary message of the movie isn’t “don’t get sucked into hyper fandom and lose yourself,” it’s “don’t erase your own memories because you’re scared of what they mean.”
I hear you! That's a lot of correspondences! And I completely understand why the movie was so compelling for you, and spoke so directly to your own experiences.
I don't think, though, that your two possible interpretations of the movie are the only ones possible, though. A third possibility is that Owen is, indeed, dying inside by not confronting and, ultimately, accepting who he is (and taking whatever action is required to achieve that acceptance), but that Maddie is *not* a good guide: that she *believes* that the Pink Opaque is real, that she's *wrong* about that and is just projecting her own personal issues into a TV show, that she's become increasingly crazy since leaving Owen, that when she returns she *is* enticing him to commit suicide, and that she kills herself after he flees her, which is why she's never heard from again.
A huge amount of how one reads the movie depends on how one views Maddie, not Owen. I clocked her as bad news from square one. Owen is a lot more ambivalent about her, because she's the only person who sees him, or who opens up space for him to allow himself to see himself. But her intensity is also terrifying to him, and for good reason. And when she comes back she is *really* insistent that *she* knows what *his* experience means.
I know plenty of people who've been in relationships like that -- I've come close to them myself a couple of times in my life -- and they can be extremely dangerous. You run the risk of falling into a folie a deux, where you hype each other into ever greater heights of insanity. I felt like I was seeing a relationship like that in development, and I really hoped Owen didn't go off the deep end with Maddie.
But I *also* hoped Owen would find himself, would accept himself, would save himself from his misery. My heart went out to him, and I agree with you that gender identity stuff is clearly indicated as being at least part of why he shuts down. (I think he also clearly reads as on the spectrum, which may not be unrelated to why he becomes so fixated on a TV show.) I think the ending leaves open a possibility that Owen did/will find a way to save himself. I saw it as tragic that, at a crucial age, he felt he had to choose between Maddie and suppressing himself. I think, in life, that's a false choice: no other person has *the* answer for you; the work is work you have to do yourself. But lots of us -- and I include myself here at times -- easily fall into thinking that these choices are starkly binary, and lots of us -- I include myself here as well -- have been tempted to adopt identities whole hog from someone else's script rather than writing it ourselves.
I'm not sure that I read the movie as a "message" movie -- I don't tend to like reading films that way, and told tend to enjoy films that ask explicitly to be read that way. Indeed, one of the things I appreciated most about it is that it felt significantly open to interpretation.
In any event -- I'm really glad you wrote, and really glad you shared your story.
I think the end of the movie is deliberately ambiguous about whether Owen has decided to finally change or just become further resigned.
I should rewatch the movie so I can pay more attention to the relationship between Owen and Maddie. The other big trans movie of the year (I don't count Emilia Perez) The People's Joker was very explicit—in a speaking directly to camera sort of way—that the relationship between the two trans characters was necessary for the growth of the protagonist but ultimately toxic. I can see either reading for TV Glow, but I'd need to rewatch to have a more definitive opinion.