There’s a way to read the end of Jane Schoenbrun’s masterful new movie as grim, even nihilistic. But you must actively choose to see it that way.
Photo: A24
For most of my life, I thought I was a character in a TV show.
I knew that I occupied reality. I knew that the things I said and did mattered to the people I knew and loved. But I also knew that in an infinite number of possible universes, there was at least one where I was, indeed, the subject of a TV show. Every week, people tuned in to watch a scripted drama series in which I and everyone I knew were the main characters. Being the main character gave my very boring life an inherent importance and sense of purpose. It meant I didn’t bear any responsibility for my own life and I didn’t have to make choices that might rock the boat, lest the status quo of my “show” be interrupted. What happened to me had nothing to do with me. It was subject to the whims of alternate-universe Nielsen ratings, of fan favoritism, of the writers’ room.
I was deeply ashamed of this belief. I assumed as I grew to adulthood the compulsion would wither away. Instead, it only grew stronger, fed by a wicked combination of depersonalization (in which my fundamental connection to my physical body felt tenuous) and derealization (in which my connection to reality itself felt tenuous). When I came out as a trans woman in my 30s, I discovered that my shame-provoking delusion was an overdeveloped coping mechanism. I really had been living a fake life (“as a man”), dictated by the whims of others (family, friends, society, etc.). Once I stopped doing that, I ceased to be fictional. My sense of reality and actual reality finally aligned.
When talking to other trans people, especially those of us who didn’t come out until adulthood, I have found that many of us clung to a vague notion that we were not real, that we were characters in a novel, a video game, a simulation. To be a trans person who has not yet self-accepted — often called an egg — is to make peace, daily, with the unreality of your existence, then have the world insist you are right to occupy a twilight version of yourself.
I escaped that twilight, but sometimes it feels like I did so only by the skin of my teeth. What if I hadn’t? What if I were still stumbling through my day-to-day life, insisting everything was okay, apologizing to anyone who looked at me for fear they might realize I was lying? What if I was like Owen at the end of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow?
I Saw the TV Glow is one of a tiny handful of films made by a trans filmmaker without “Wachowski” in their name to receive a wide, mainstream release. And cis critics have showered the film with almost as much praise as trans critics, thanks to writer-director Schoenbrun’s skill at taking a very trans experience of derealization and glomming it onto the more universally applicable sense of losing oneself in one’s favorite TV show.
I never want to say anyone has “misunderstood” a movie. Once a film enters the world, it belongs to its audience, and all viewers will draw their own conclusions about it based on their own experiences. Yet as I read criticism by cis writers on TV Glow — even wildly positive reviews! — I grow frustrated by a seeming reticence to engage with the film on a level beyond what it says about media consumption or fandom, which is to say a reticence to engage with the film as a fundamentally trans text.
That divide perhaps explains why many cis critics, professional and amateur, have taken issue with TV Glow’s third act, wondering if it either bit off more than it could chew, disappeared up its own navel, or (in the words of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast) “embraced nihilism.” It is here where the need to engage with the film’s transness becomes most apparent and where the reluctance to do so becomes most glaring. To explain why, let’s quickly step through the plot.
I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen and Maddy, teens who connect over the TV show The Pink Opaque, a kind of Buffy-by-way-of-SNICK supernatural drama only ’90s kids will understand. Eventually, the two make plans to run away together, but Owen bails, seemingly because he is terrified of his abusive father. (Owen’s dad has only one line of dialogue in the whole film, saying “Isn’t that show for girls?” of The Pink Opaque. The rest of the time he looms menacingly.)
The Pink Opaque is canceled, ending on a devastating cliffhanger in which its two teen heroines, Tara and Isabel, are buried alive and trapped in “the midnight realm” by Mr. Melancholy, the series Big Bad. Maddy disappears, having finally run away. Owen tries to move on with his life, getting a boring movie-theater job and continuing to live with his father, apologizing for being home late well into adulthood.
After eight years have passed, Maddy mysteriously reappears to pepper Owen with questions about what he remembers about watching The Pink Opaque. He is suddenly struck by either a repressed memory or a repressed fantasy of watching the series with Maddy while dressed identically to the character Isabel. Maddy lays her cards on the table: The Pink Opaque is real. She is Tara. Owen is Isabel. The suburban world they occupy is the midnight realm, which they must escape. But the only way to return is for both to bury themselves alive. She has done it once, and she can do it again.
Owen, quite reasonably, can’t go through with it. After that, he says, “I locked myself inside.” He stays at home, waiting for her to “force [him] underground.” He never sees Maddy again. The audience sees someone who might be her leaving a message in sidewalk chalk: THERE IS STILL TIME.
So we enter the third act, 20 years later. Owen has gained the status symbols of a fulfilling life — job, house, big TV, even a family. (Chillingly, he says he has one and that he loves them very much, but we never see them.) And yet he knows something is wrong. In the film’s last sequence, he begins screaming, “I’m dying! Help me!” at a child’s birthday party at the fun center where he works. Later, in the bathroom, he cuts open his chest to discover he is full of TV static. Instead of doing anything about this, however, he exits the bathroom to apologize profusely to anyone he might have upset. Roll credits.
I would never suggest that reading all the above as a cautionary tale about the perils of fandom or the ever-encroaching tendrils of nostalgia is inaccurate. Yet I find that interpretation lacking. In it, Maddy’s second disappearance is likely because she died. At best, she’s living a marginal existence somewhere, grappling with a major mental-health crisis. The Pink Opaque–themed arcade games at the fun center might just be a cheeky wink toward our nostalgia-saturated culture. Owen might just be a man realizing how much of his life he’s given away to a TV show with every asthma-induced wheeze.
Isn’t that reading rather grim? So let’s try something else. Let’s assume everything Maddy says is completely, 100 percent accurate. We are not watching a film called I Saw the TV Glow. We are watching the season-six premiere of The Pink Opaque. We even get a mid-episode music break with a double bill at the Double Lunch.
What if this isn’t a movie about loving a TV show? What if it’s a movie about being an egg?
I Saw the TV Glow is in conversation with a loose grouping of films I have previously dubbed “egg cinema.” These films capture — usually accidentally — the experience of being an egg. In brief, they are interested on a cursory level in questions about gendered existence, but only up to a point. They typically feature a portal between one world and another, and they are often written about as though they are, wow, so wildly inventive. (A few notable examples: Being John Malkovich, Midsommar, Poor Things, and, yes, The Matrix.)
Egg cinema typically exists within a genre context because it requires its metaphors for “gender” to be real on some level. For instance, the Matrix really exists in The Matrix. And in interviews, Schoenbrun has mentioned Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return as touchstones for I Saw the TV Glow. Notably, in both of those works, the weird shit does really happen. To argue that it doesn’t is to twist yourself into pretzels.
What sets TV Glow apart is how it questions the underlying assumption of egg cinema: You must go through the portal. Owen never returns to her life as Isabel. Instead, she quietly suffocates, all the while shuffling through an increasingly torturous life in the midnight realm. She is locked up inside. There is still time — but not infinite amounts of it. She is barreling toward death and away from the portal.
In an early scene, Tara (for that is what Maddy would rather we call her) describes Isabel as the protagonist of The Pink Opaque “but not really” and says she’s kind of a drip, both qualities that could easily be applied to the Isabel we see throughout the film. Indeed, what distinguishes our Isabel is that she doesn’t once do the key thing all protagonists do and make a choice. She forever hovers on the edge of a decision, begging gravity to suck her over the cliff and make the choice for her. Even the high school she attends is called “Void High School” (or, cleverly, VHS).
Viewing this film via the grammar of TV also helps because it recontextualizes its ending, taking it from bleak and hopeless to just another cliffhanger. Yes, the action of this story is Tara and Isabel reconnecting, against all odds, and Tara attempting to save Isabel and failing. But on TV, there’s always another episode. If you are a trans person, the ending is somehow both your worst nightmare (a life you have no agency over) and full of an immense, beautiful hope (because there is, despite it all, still time). It is not for nothing that one of the biggest Letterboxd reviews of this film is a coming-out post.
To be sure, plenty of cis people recognize that the movie’s ending is about what happens when a person does not take agency over their life. And also to be sure, one need not be trans to hate one’s body, to experience derealization, to long for an escape to another world. Even within the film, it’s possible to read everything that happens as part of Owen’s inability to cope with his father’s abuse.
Except, perhaps, that third act. To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.
This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.
Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).
And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.
See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.
In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.
Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.
