“There is still time.”
These words are written in chalk on the street in writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film I Saw The TV Glow, bold and bright for both its protagonist, Owen (Justice Smith), and the audience to see. It’s a message that’s clear for the young man whose life continues to pass him by, each day seemingly another exhausting trudge and an onslaught of disappointment. Since his childhood, Owen has been on the margins of his own life, his only solace coming from his friend Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and the television show she provided him with VHS tapes of, The Pink Opaque. The teen sci-fi show isn’t just fiction, but strongly implied to be the “real” world, with Owen trapped in the show’s “Midnight Realm”—an eerily familiar suburbia populated by minions of the “big bad,” Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner).
As time slips him by, Owen remains unable to find pleasure in the things he once enjoyed, back when he was accompanied by Maddy, his lone friend who left him after she discovered her true self within The Pink Opaque, and he rejected her offer of helping him do the same. The protagonists of the show, Tara and Isabel (Lindsey Jordan and Helena Howard), aren’t just alluded to be mirror images of Maddy and Owen, respectively, but their fully realized selves; the characters are the most obvious allegory of a fulfilling transition that trans/non-binary filmmaker Shoenbrun provides for the viewer. That Owen rejects this transition—accepting himself as the woman that Isabel is—and instead chooses to live with this dysphoria, while continuing to be given the chance to change, is the core dramatic tension of I Saw The TV Glow.
