Frann Michel
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
written & directed by Jane Schoenbrun
produced and distributed by A24
“THE OLD WORLD is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters,” observed Antonio Gramsci (according to a 2010 translation by Slavoj Zizek).
Monster movies — or more broadly, horror films — are having a moment, and writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a horror film about, among other things, the meanings of horror media. It riffs on 1990s genre TV and the value of fan communities, nostalgia and changes in entertainment media, the perils of entertainment as escape, and the pain and promise of times of transition.
Economic and social disruptions do not necessarily or directly lead to particular cultural responses, but art that organizes and orders our sense of horror can provide solace in distressing times. Horror films may even, in their negation of the ideological status quo, “lay bare the possibility of social revolution” as the critic Robin Wood suggested in his “Introduction to the American Horror Film” (1984).
The heyday of classic horror films came in the depths of the Great Depression: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) The Mummy (1932), Vampyr (1932), White Zombie (1932), and so on.
After Japan became the first nation to suffer nuclear bombing of population centers, a series of kaiju (monster) films kicked off with Gojira (1954).
Slasher films flourished following the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system in the 1970s: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Nollywood vampire and monster films have reflected the horrors of Africa being drawn more fully into the circuits of global capitalism, as David McNally argues in Monsters of the Market (2012).
As genres evolve and audiences change, the meanings of particular monsters can shift. The dangerous outsider onto whom a society projects its terrors may turn out to be a sympathetic protagonist, wrongly misunderstood. In Shrek (2001) and its sequels, the titular ogre has a heart of gold; Warm Bodies (2013) features a zombie as romantic lead (it’s a rom-zom). And ever since Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (first filmed 1994), the blood-sucking undead are less often frightening figures of damnation and more often alluring objects of desire.
The series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) straddled these two meanings of vampires — some of its vampire characters were lovers, allies, or anti-heroes, while others were evil monsters to be slain. It was also a show with devoted fans, particularly those who appreciated its representations of queer characters.
Bonding in the Time of Clinton
I Saw the TV Glow pays homage to Buffy with The Pink Opaque, a fictional 1990s TV show about two teenage girls with supernatural psychic abilities who battle the villainous “Mr. Melancholy” and the monster-of-the-week. In Glow, the TV show becomes a bond between two alienated teenagers, Owen (played by Ian Foreman and later by Justice Smith) and the slightly older Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine).
The two meet on election night in 1996, at the high school where Maddy is reading an episode guide to The Pink Opaque while waiting for her photos to dry in the school darkroom, and where Owen has accompanied his mother who is voting for “the saxophone man.”
That allusion to Clinton perhaps points to the rise of neoliberalism and the Democratic National Committee’s embrace of antiracist and inclusionary rhetoric even while pushing through NAFTA and cutting welfare. Owen’s mother is Black, his father apparently white, and Maddy ambiguously white. The protagonists of The Pink Opaque are likewise of different races, white and black, but this multiracial representation does not appear to translate to any materially empowering redistributive politics in Glow‘s lower-middle-class suburbia.
But the show and their shared appreciation of it provide Owen and Maddy an imaginative refuge from unhappy homes: Maddy’s stepfather is violent and abusive, Owen’s mother falls ill and his father is distant and authoritarian, objecting that The Pink Opaque is “a show for girls.”
Maddy is clear about her sexual identity — she “likes girls” and is “not into boys,” but is mistreated by other girls for her sexual nonconformity. When Maddy asks Owen if he likes girls or boys, he replies that he likes TV shows. This is less a declaration of asexual identity than of repression or denial: “When I think about that stuff it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all of my insides and I know there’s nothing in there but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check.”
The film plays visually as well as conceptually with the ways cultural narratives and the communities built around them can shape identity and create meaning. Repeatedly, the light of a screen flickers across characters’ faces as they watch; muddled sound and mingled light hangs in the air over an unsleeping Owen. We see him physically dive into a television set and vomit cartoonish blue rays of light, and he eventually does slice open his torso, only to discover inside a glowing screen.
Back in the 1990s, Maddy tells Owen that she plans to run away from home, but he is afraid to join her, and tries to get himself grounded so he cannot leave. Owen’s mother dies, Maddy disappears, The Pink Opaque is canceled, and time jumps forward.
When Maddy reappears several years later, she reports that she has been living inside the world of The Pink Opaque, that the world Owen thinks of as real is instead a “pocket universe” contrived by Mr. Melancholy.
Again she encourages him to escape, as she says she did, by burying herself alive and crawling out of the grave. Again, Owen refuses, telling her, “This isn’t the midnight realm, Maddy; it’s just the suburbs.” Like the shift of vision by which the monsters of old stories turn out to be the heroes of new ones, Maddy’s story inverts the frame of reality in which the TV show is fiction.
But again Maddy leaves, Owen stays. When Owen revisits the show years later, via a streaming service, it is not the same: the cast is younger, the effects clumsier. While some of this clearly reflects the experience of changes in the viewer (as childhood locations look smaller when revisited), it also suggests material shifts in mass media. Television is no longer the same kind of shared event it was when Owen and Maddy watched the show together on Saturday nights, or made VHS tapes with handwritten notes about the episodes.
On both counts, Owen’s nostalgia for his prior experience of watching the show hints at his present unhappiness. In a late sequence at the “Fun Center,” Owen begins screaming that he is dying, but the people around him seem inert, and don’t appear to notice. He locks himself in the bathroom and cuts open his chest, revealing glowing television static within. But he dresses again and leaves the bathroom, apologizing to everyone he passes, none of whom seem to notice him.
An Allegory of Trans Identity
One reading of this narrative suggests a despairing tale of mass media making false promises and leaving viewers either passive and trapped, or else insanely detached from reality. The emotional engagement that gave solace in youth becomes a snare, deadening and isolating individuals from each other and the possibilities of action and change.
Yet Schoenbrun has stressed that the film is an allegory of trans identity. From this perspective, the film is more hopeful. When Owen recognizes he is dying and becomes willing to open himself up, this represents the moment known in trans experience as the cracking of the egg, the beginning of the process that leads to rejecting the shell imposed by assigned gender and conventional social expectations.
Although Maddy’s support is intermittent, and we don’t see Owen yet digging himself out of a grave to be reborn, he has begun the painful process.
For those seeking a view beyond the cracking of the egg, there is Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando: My Political Biography (2023). Based in France rather than the USA, its cultural touchstone for identity is not a television show but Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, in which a nobleman born in the 16th century lives 400 years, waking up as a woman sometime in the 18th century.
If I Saw the TV Glow leads up to the moment of the egg cracking, Preciado’s Orlando takes place post-hatching, the protagonists fledged and flying. Catalogued as a documentary, Orlando presents multiple enactments of, commentaries on, and flights of fancy springing from Woolf’s novel, as well as interviews with the cast of 26 trans and non-binary people, aged 8 to 70, many of whom play Orlando.
As is well known to Against the Current readers, trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people have been under heightened attack in recent years, and the assaults are likely to escalate in the under the next U.S. administration. A patchwork of state and local laws has sometimes protected but more often attacked people’s ability to access health care, use public bathrooms, participate in athletics, make corrections in identity documents, be referred to by appropriate pronouns, or in many other ways to live safe, dignified and flourishing lives.
Clearly these are forms of scapegoating, measures that divide the working class, deflect attention from the dangers posed by the owning class, and help rally a distressed population in the service of a right-wing agenda. Like attacks on abortion rights, attacks on trans rights and queer sociality aim to enforce capitalist forms of social reproduction and the bourgeois family, shoring up an idea of a private sphere while the state eviscerates public provisioning.
Some states have responded with laws prohibiting gender discrimination in housing, healthcare and other areas, and the 2024 U.S. elections also saw the election of the first openly transgender US Representative, Sarah McBride in Delaware, but the political landscape remains treacherous.
Neither of these films focuses on the transition between on one hand, I Saw the TV Glow‘s examination of alienation, quiet desperation, and the false escape of mass media without broader community, and, on the other hand Orlando‘s foregrounding of communal resistance to binary gender and celebration of self-construction and gender play. The tale of struggling to survive repression, and the tale of glorious flight, remain separated by an ocean and by the time of monsters.
Frann Michel is a writer and activist in Portland, Oregon.