Below are mild spoilers for I Saw The TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun, in theaters). This essay was edited by Autumn Fourkiller.
I remember being told that the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz were scary, that the rodents of unusual size from The Princess Bride were scary, that the scene where Bill Sikes beats Nancy to death in Oliver! was scary. But the Monkey was the first time I was scared all on my own.
The Monkey was a character in a video game we played in my first-grade computer class. We’d each get our own technicolor iMac to sit lined up in rows along the brick walls, and learned to type and spell with a seemingly basic mid-90s educational game. Nothing out of the ordinary until the game went wrong, spluttering and glitching on early aughts technology. The Monkey's mouth would freeze open, face distorted, eyes wide. I would panic, enter my own frozen hysteria as I silently melted down to the confusion of my classmates. I was switched to an older computer with a floppy disk drive, where I played a game definitely intended for preschoolers that I swear to God was in black and white.
The Monkey has become a jokey bit of lore amongst my friends, a funny example of an early experience with the uncanny that I've used to therapy-splain away my dislike of rubber masks, gummy 3D animation, and CGI faces. In my memory, the Monkey fills the entire screen. Its teeth gnash, it bangs cymbals, its high-pitched voice distorts into a computerized scream. When, two decades later, I was able to scour the internet to find the source was a game called Alphabet Blocks, I was surprised at how mild it was. I knew that after years of telling this story, of hearing my parents recount this story, I had dramatized it. I was sure it probably didn't have foam dripping from glistening fangs, or beady eyes that flashed like a snake’s. Still, I wasn't quite prepared for this level of 1994 goofiness.
I remembered the Monkey while watching I Saw The TV Glow, the sophomore feature from Jane Schoenbrun. Schoenbrun's first feature, We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021), explored ideas about online nostalgia, identity formation through media, and digital obsession. I Saw The TV Glow goes bigger on its A24 budget, a frightening exploration of dissociation, dysphoria, and the allure of disappearing. Opening in the mid-90s, Owen (Ian Foreman as a child, then Justice Smith) is a friendless seventh-grader who is immediately enraptured with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), an older teenager whose awkwardness swirls into bravado. He spots her reading an episode guide to a show he's fascinated by but never watched: The Pink Opaque.
The Pink Opaque mimics several mid-90s/early aughts shows, but takes notes most keenly from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (even casting Amber Benson, who played witch Tara Maclay, as a classmate’s mom). The Pink Opaque is about two teenage girls, Isabel and Tara (again like Buffy), whose psychic connection allows them to fight crime despite being an entire county apart, a distance that would be seemingly inconsequential to anyone but car-less suburban teenagers. Though Maddy and Owen never quite become friends—like Isabel and Tara, they only hang out a handful of times—Maddy tapes the show for Owen and leaves him episode notes. He diligently watches and rewatches, saving each tape.
There's a blistering, familiar accuracy in the alliance between Maddy and Owen. They are not the besties we’ve been primed to see in high school movies: this isn’t Ladybird. Neither seeks companionship and they don’t talk about much besides The Pink Opaque. Their first hang-out is powerful enough in Owen's memory that when he suggests they watch the show together ‘again,’ he barely seems to acknowledge that it was over two years ago, fractionally 1/7 of his life. Maddy's disappearance feels similarly grounded, occurring in a haze of tragedies that all seem equal to Owen: Owen's ill mother dies, he’s left to live with his stormily disapproving father (a shockingly effective Fred Durst), The Pink Opaque is canceled.
We watch Owen age quickly. He remains in the same house, in the same minimum-wage job. He claims his life is happy and filled with family but we see him alone, crooked, and ashy. A boy who has been forced into manhood by someone else's clock, unable to admit that his life is passing him by without his input. Smith plays Owen from the age of fifteen to his mid-forties, with only minor cosmetic aging, aiding the unsettlingly rapid timeline. When he returns to watch The Pink Opaque, now streaming, the show has transformed. There are no grinding simian fangs, no glittering eyes. It's a corny, moral-of-the-week sitcom. He doesn’t have his old notes and tapes. He upgraded his television years ago, trashed his VHS player.
Maddy is gone. Their connection is severed.
I've been digging through old tech these last few months because I've been writing a lot about emerging and disappearing technology. I don't know if nostalgia is the same for every generation, or if having digital technology rooted so deeply in our lives has changed how we remember the past, the same way we allegedly don't dream about iPhones. It's recent in human history that we're able to show photographic proof of what we remember, that we can say definitively that the cake at our seventh birthday party was pink, or that we wore our hair in braids for ninth-grade picture day, or that the Monkey didn’t ululate and crash cymbals when you misclicked.
The fuzziness that defines I Saw The TV Glow is the same fuzziness that surrounds the Monkey — an eerie recognition that only half of the memory is the actual event. The other half is something else. I Saw the TV Glow is the first movie I have seen that understands that media doesn't always have to scare us to fundamentally unsettle us: that media can enter us to become a part of our self-definition.
There are plenty of movies about haunted technology. Videotapes that will kill you after seven days (Ringu/The Ring), records that, when played, unleash demons (various iterations of The Evil Dead). But the horror in I Saw the TV Glow isn't death, it's life. It’s how elusive any kind of certainty is. TV is the only thing Owen knows that he likes. He seems to have no sexuality or desire, and though Smith plays him with a warm sensitivity, we only get brief glimpses of his deeply-buried emotions. Through Smith’s careful performance, we see Owen’s fear of any type of self-knowledge. If it's not frightening enough to be unsure of your desires, your gender, your sexuality — what if you couldn't be certain of what you knew you saw?
The surety that no one could just be this dulled to life is what fuels Maddy’s certainty that the world she’s in is not the world she’s meant for, and propagates Owen’s fear of following her into the rabbithole. He doesn’t want to understand his dysphoria, his inability to connect with the world around him. To interrogate his desires would mean recognizing he has never met them, or maybe that they never existed.
I Saw The TV Glow is fixated on uncertainty; that dream-like feeling of knowing that you're misremembering, but not really caring about getting to the truth. Did Owen and Maddy actually meet up at the Double Lunch, or was that the name of the teen hangout in The Pink Opaque? Was their high school really called Void High? Did any of what Owen tells us happened actually happen, or has he fully dissociated from reality after so much loss and loneliness?
Had I been older, I would’ve recognized the Monkey as just a funny glitch. Had I been younger, it probably wouldn’t have registered at all. But I was at the exact right age where the distinction between reality and make-believe was still blurry, and the desire to always ask why, why, why, was stronger than any sense of self-preservation. Alphabet Blocks had plenty of off-putting graphics, but it was only the Monkey that upset me. Its gaping black mouth and vague, brutish humanness. The Monkey made me realize, early on, that people could likewise become distorted.
Owen’s fears and paranoia are far deeper felt, and harder to shake, but I think most of us find images of things on screen more frightening when they’re familiar. For Owen to admit his fear of Maddy and her search for self-determination, or of the monsters of The Pink Opaque, would mean accepting that they were familiar. It would mean recognizing that the show’s distinctly feminine queerness lived within him, that he has an interiority he’s terrified to access — until he finally rends himself open.
Schoenbrun is a singular talent that makes comparisons to Lynch, or Cronenberg (particularly Videodrome), or Carpenter inevitable, and like these iconoclast directors, it's hard to think of any contemporaries who have been able to achieve what Schoenbrun already has. But their tastes and vision is individual, unconcerned with trendiness, and I can’t think of anyone able or willing to create such a rich, unyielding texture of loneliness and unconsummated dread.
In I Saw The TV Glow, we get a portal into the uneasy stuff of ambient adolescence and our fractal relationship with television, an artform that was never devised to be timeless. When I walked into the theater for my second viewing, I wondered if when I left, I would also be distorted.
love this. i also watched I Saw The TV Glow twice in cinemas because it unnerved me so deeply the first time. the first screen experience that really scared me was when the air conditioner in Brave Little Toaster has a temper tantrum so hard it dies. i rewatched the scene as an adult and it actually did still freak me out lol. i think what disturbed me most about owen’s rewatch of the Pink Opaque was his apathy toward it. the idea that the passions that so consumed us in our past can lose their spark entirely. it feels like heartbreak to me.
I like this a lot. You got at more of the unnamed psychological currents than I could.