I saw the TV glow

 I saw the TV glow (2023) is an expressionist film on psycho-sexual themes.  The picture is fully assured, a morbid essay in body horror that looks (and sounds) like a combination of David Lynch and David Cronenberg but with its own peculiar palette and ambience.  Everything is disorienting, lurid with super-saturated colors and histrionic performances.  The hero, Owen, talks in a high-pitched squeaky voice and his female counterpart and antagonist. Maddy, seems half-comatose when she is not importuning people to bury her alive -- this is world in which torture of various sorts substitutes for suicide.  The film is extreme in style and content --  it's like the most perverse aspects of Teutonic expressionism involving tormented adolescents, channeling theater works like Hans Henny Jahnn's Pastor Ephraim Magnus and Franz Wedekind's Fruehlings Erwachen ("Spring's Awakening").  There's no doubt that I saw the TV glow is impressive in a macabre way and stylistically very effective -- but the whole enterprise is so radically and vehemently nasty that it's hard to recommend the film.  (I should note that Martin Scorsese is a fan and has enthusiastically endorsed this movie -- it's a little like Mean Streets in its use of color and location, but much more fantastical; Scorsese admires Pressburger and Michael Powell's work, films that adopt a similar expressionistic vocabulary in their more outrageous scenes.)  The film's premise is that sex is a curse and affliction -- this message is a bit retrograde in that the variety of sex that seems most nightmarish is homosexual.  

The film's action spans a period of about 12 years, requiring two actors (young and adult) for the role of Owen.  Owen is lonely seventh grader when we first meet him in his mother's tow;she is voting in 1996 for the "saxophone player", that is, Bill Clinton.  Owen wanders off and encounters Maddie who is in 9th grade.  She is reading a book about a TV show called "The Pink Opaque", an episode guide to the program.  All the hip kids are obsessed with "The Pink Opaque" and Maddie asks Owen if he has watched it.  He can't watch the show because it airs (on the Young Adult Network) at 10:30 and his bedtime, vigorously enforced by his rather brutish father is 10:00.  Maddie suggests that Owen come to her house to watch the show under the guise that he is attending a sleepover with his friend.  He comes to Maddie's house, also dominated by an unseen, but brutal stepfather, and watches the program.  It's a weird cross between the X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The show's premise is that two teenage girls, Tara and Isabel, have met once at a "sleepaway camp" as it is called and formed some sort of psychic and telepathic bond.  Although the two girls are separate and live in different States, they collaborate on solving paranormal mysteries and battling dark forces -- embodied in the episode that we see involving a monster in the form of loathsome, melting ice cream cone.  The show, like The X-Files, apparently, alternates between "mythology episodes" carrying forward the overarching plot of the series and "monster-of-the-week" adventures.  Of course, Owen is enthralled and spends the night at Maddie's house sleeping on the floor under a murky-looking blue-tinted aquarium.  The central source of evil in "The Pink Opaque" is a figure called "Mr. Melancholy", visualized as a personified moon with cratered features and a vestigial face that looks a lot Georges Melies moon in the 1902 18 minute "trick film", A Trip to the Moon.  Although Owen's parents won't let him watch the show, Maddie video tapes it and sends him VHS copies.  Two years later, Owen and Maddie meet on the bleachers at their High School, rather endearingly called "Void" High.  Maddie is alone and has been stigmatized as gay -- she is accused of touching another girl who was previously her friend (and admirer of "The Pink Opaque") but who has betrayed her by becoming a cheerleader.  Maddie recognizes that Owen is also gay but in denial about his sexuality -- in a baroque speech, she establishes the film's controlling metaphor about being buried alive.  She says that Owen has allowed himself to be buried under dirt poured onto his chest and, therefore, interring his beating heart -- the film also uses still-beating hearts ripped out of people's chests as a metaphor for self-alienation.  Maddie wants Owen to flee this suburban wasteland with her.  He's terrified and admits to a neighbor lady that he's been deceiving his parents about the "sleepovers" which have not been at his friend's house, but at Maddie's place.  Owen wants to be "grounded" so that he can't elope from High School and his home with Maddie.  One night Maddie just vanishes.  Her TV set is set afire and burning in her front yard.  The movie starts with a puzzling image of a street covered in sinister-looking chalk fields on which small ghost-like pink apparitions are floating.  At the end of the street, we see an ice-cream truck with flashing lights and police cars.  Later, we learn that this is Maddie's house and represents the night that she vanished. (From time to time, the film reverts to this primal scene). Owen goes to work in a movie theater that ultimately closes for lack of an audience.  One night, coming home from work, Owen's road is blocked by a fallen tree and a live power line that flops back and forth on the asphalt.  In the debris, he finds the episode guide to "The Pink Opaque" discussing the sixth season of the show -- this is odd because Owen knows that there were only five seasons broadcast.  Owen's mother had died and his father tries to drown him in the bathtub in a weird inexplicable scene.  (The picture is full of images that elude my interpretation -- for instance, there are odd ruinous inflatables at "Void" High School, a translucent plastic dome of many colors under which Owen hides, and, later, a planetarium also in an inflatable dome with baroque images of the constellations as mythical figures.)

Eight years pass.  Owen has a family (we never see them) and works in a sinister "Family Fun Center", a sort of horrific amusement park.  One night while shopping in a strangely deserted grocery store, he encounters Maddie.  The film's imagery has become increasingly lurid and surreal -- the grocery store, invoking the idea of premature burial has a frieze of giant vegetables displayed above a compressed, green layer of produce where Owen is morosely pushing his cart.  Owen and Maddie go to a saloon called The Double Lunch where punk rock and extreme emo acts are performing in whirlpools of  blue and red light (here the Lynch influence is palpable).  Maddie says that she's been living in "The Pink Opaque" world for the past decade.  She tells Owen about hiring a kid to bury her alive.  This was accomplished but, after some horrific experiences under ground, she fought herself out of the premature burial and has now come to summon Owen to "The Pink Opaque".  Owen watches the last episode of the show on VHS:  Mr. Melancholy as a moon-monster with black empty eye-sockets and rippling craters on his face and brow forces one of the heroines in the show to be buried alive -- this is after cutting her open, pulling out her heart, and forcing milky "Luna Juice" down her throat.  Maddie tells Owen that he has suppressed his true self -- that is, buried himself alive.  She says that he must agree to be buried alive now to purge himself of  the impulse to repress himself.  A TV bursts into flames.  Owen takes a scalpel and cuts open his chest to reveal that where his heart should be there is only the luminous glow of the TV screen.  The film cuts to a nightmare birthday party in which the staff at the Family Fun Center are singing "Happy Birthday" to a child.  Owen begins to scream uncontrollably.  In the last shot, a long tracking sequence, we see him staggering through the amusement park begging everyone for forgiveness.  

As far as I can decipher this movie, the film suggests that in American suburbia, teenagers are required to repress and conceal their true sexual orientation and desires.  This is tantamount to being buried alive and, in fact, consenting to premature interment. There's really no escape from the repressive forces in suburbia except the TV, the cult show "The Pink Opaque" which seems to mirror the action in the real world:  the relationship between Tara and Isabel, the psychic girls, is similar to the interaction between Maddie and Owen.  And both "The Pink Opaque" and the real world (as posited by the movie) are imagined as haunted, and under constant assault, by Mr. Melancholy, the lunar force of depression and self-harm.  There's no escape:  Maddie has come out as a lesbian but this just inserts her deeper into the nightmare world of Mr. Melancholy.  Expressing your true self involves self-mutilation.  I read once that there is nothing within you that you haven't put there yourself.  It seems that Owen has clogged his torso with TV images so that the glow from the screen leaks out of his wounded flesh.  "The Pink Opaque" series when seen as an adult is puerile, 'cheesy' with bad special effects and worse acting.  Owen can't figure out why he was obsessed with the show. (We are shown a clip of the program late in the film and it looks nothing like the lurid, horror-show that we earlier saw in the film.)  This movie by Julie Schoenbrun is an impressive effort, intensely (even insanely) expressive, and I will be curious to see her next work.  (Schoenbrun, who uses the pronoun "they", is transgender.  They interpret the film as representing the moment when a transgender person realizes that they are embodied in the wrong sex.  This is not clear from the film in which the issue seems to be more about homosexuality.  However, on reflection, I think I can see a clue in the dialogue about the transgender theme -- when Maddie and Owen are sitting on the bleachers, Maddie says with disgust that people are saying that she is lesbian -- but, apparently, she identifies as transgender, although this isn't expressed except by her apparent anger at being called gay.  In any event, the themes involving burial alive, self-harm and mutilation, and being trapped in a hopeless universe apparently reflect the malaise of being transgender.)