"I Saw the TV Glow" (2024)

I pan the creek that is horror cinema for the gold nuggets that can be found there. Most of the genre is garbage, but it has a high potential for meaning, message, and allegory. Sometimes, though, you stumble across horror that is disturbing, and effectively so, for all the wrong reasons. It doesn’t shake and jolt you to wake up to a moral reality, it just points out something deeply troubling. “I Saw the TV Glow” is one such film.

Dylan Roth, in his review for the Observer, put it this way:

“Sometimes calling a film “challenging” is code for “I don’t like it, but I don’t want to sound stupid or uncool for not liking it.” My challenge with I Saw the TV Glow is that almost everything I dislike about it is done on purpose, and effectively. As a piece of art, I can’t deny that it works. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun transported me to a realm of deep, humming, ambient despair, and I did not enjoy my time there.”

The creator of the film is trans and claims that it is a story about that identity. However, it is actually a fairly effective representation of the deeper cultural undercurrent behind things like transsexual identity, and it is a disturbing one at that.

The story revolves around a boy who is an outsider. He finds the tiniest scrap of “belonging” in the “friendship” with a girl built entirely upon the fandom of a strange TV show. The show is reminiscent of “Doctor Who” or (according to the filmmaker) “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” However, it is nothing even nearly so coherent as either of those shows. The friend has some deep seated phycological problems, likely due to abuse, and she wants to run away. The boy decides to not run away with her at the last minute. Years later, the girl reappears and claims that they are not living in the real world, but in the fictional world of their TV show, and that they need to die to reawaken in reality. Your basic “drink the Kool-Aid,” cult type logic. Again, the boy does not follow her.

Years later, we get a scene of the boy, now as an adult, having a psychotic episode, running to the bathroom where he works, and seemingly tearing open his chest to reveal the white static of a TV screen.

The whole thing is an unpleasant, disturbing yet somewhat boring cinematic world of ambivalence. However, behind it all is an effective argument AGAINST the expressive individualist view of the world that our culture preaches. This view is summed up in the ideas:

1. Your inner world is more real than the outside world. In fact, everything around you is created by your inner world. You need to pursue freedom, meaning, and self-expression based entirely upon your feelings.

2. The world around you (that you have created) is out to destroy your individuality and meaning.

3. You are inherently good, but the culture and institutions around you are evil and want to hold you back.

4. We have the ability and technology to make any of your desires possible. Change yourself and the world around you to fit your feelings

5. We need to tolerate and affirm everyone else’s feelings and desires.

The problem, of course, is that like the boy in the story, our inner world of feelings and thoughts are untrustworthy, ever-changing, and not any kind of coherent or stable foundation upon which to build anything. This is what makes the story so unpleasant. The kids in the film have no anchor, other than a poorly produced and shoddy TV show. It is a disturbing picture of the idea our culture is trying to sell us as good.