Poison, in UHF

A Review of I Saw the TV Glow

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) isn’t a good movie, but it’s a useful enough dipstick into Millennial and Gen Z culture. In critiquing this film, I also hope to critique several trends that I see as ubiquitous in recent cinema in general.

Millennial moviemakers need to find a way to move past the “eerie television nostalgia” trope. They’ve been retreading this same concept since at least Too Many Cooks (2014), an Adult Swim short with the same meta-horror approach to nostalgic media. Beyond that we have other entries like Brigsby Bear, Five Nights at Freddy‘s, and Jordan Peele’s Nope all sharing some of this same ethos. In I Saw the TV Glow, we are told the story of a young boy’s obsession with the subfictional 90s TV show “The Pink Opaque” as he questions the boundaries between his reality and the one on the screen, and whether or not his memories are deceiving him.

As it turns out, his clandestine love for this late night girly TV show is a thinly veiled metaphor for hiding one’s transexual identity from the Oppressive Father. After all, television is a kind of ‘out of body’ experience, and the culmination of ‘out of body’ experiences in our day is to become another gender. The only men portrayed in this movie besides Owen, the main character, is the overbearing white patriarch who doesn’t want his son to be queer, the debauched coworkers at the movie theatre, and the abusive offscreen stepdad of Owen’s best friend… in this movie’s cosmology, evil is just something that emanates senselessly from White Men, and the implicit question for the mixed race main character is if he will be different. The entire time we see him on screen, he is psychologically broken, isolated, stuttering, in contrast to all the white men, young or old, who are portrayed as completely confident and entirely evil. Taking in these clues, we begin to make sense of why a grown man would start putting on a dress and calling himself Jane, as the director of this film does.

To the movie’s credit, the main character is sympathetic in his weakness. The only one who loves him is a mother dying of cancer. Even his best friend is a standoffish, gruff lesbian who is in all likelihood deranged. He is completely fragile and delicate. Highly medicated. Asthmatic. He is so weak — and why not? What use would the modern world have for him if he were strong? Every year it seems like a wider and wider swathe of our young men fit this exact template, even if they’re not going so far as to put on silky pink dresses like. Is it all the movies we’re watching? Is it social media peer pressures? Is it something in the water? What’s turning everybody gay?

Music is one of the most powerful devices of the film, featuring Alex G, Caroline Polachek, Phoebe Bridgers, among others. These names might be unfamiliar to the older generation, but they are currently some of the most influential names in the alternative pop music scene. Despite retreading old meta tropes, I Saw the TV Glow definitely has its finger on the pulse of something.

I saw the TV glow–

I’m in the eighth grade

Sending grown men grainy photos

Of my ribcage

— sings Haley Dahl of Sloppy Jane, in a scene formed on that classic cinema trope of focusing in on a band while the main characters brood together in a dimly lit bar. What does this song teach us? Men are predators. Women are self-destructive. We always knew this, but we weren’t prepared for what this would look like in an age of unlimited television in your living room, or in your back pocket. No generation before millennials ever had so great of a torrent of media to wade through before they reached adulthood. Have they reached it yet? Most young people appear to be adrift in a sea of sexual dysfunction and failed household formation.

Enough about sexual issues, though. Let’s talk about race. Hollywood screenwriters (95% of whom are white men) have a bizarre fixation with puppeteering black men and speaking through them. I don’t think it’s just wokeness quotas. There’s a deeper thread here. Lack of confidence. Inability to speak for yourself. The need to mask yourself in other races and genders to be your mouthpiece. Why? 

Is it part of a Cultural Marxist project to subtly brainwash white Americans into hating ourselves? Is it simply the skewed incentives of Civil Rights law working themselves out, as some have been alleging lately? For some reason, I doubt that’s the full picture. It strikes me as a deeper and older phenomenon, this need white Americans have felt to totemize black men into some kind of moral fetish; the black man as the lynch pin that will unite all of America in harmony. Maybe it’s something as primordial as scapegoating. But I lack the sociological and historiographical tools to piece together that narrative in depth. I just care about the movies. And as far as cinema goes, it usually just comes across as deeply inauthentic to the way actual young black men talk. One more schlocky millennial screenplay after the next.

I Saw the TV Glow is more interesting than your typical Mouthpiece of Color main character, though. Owen is mixed race. He goes with his kind black mother to vote for “the saxophone man.” His white father pulls his head out of a television set and holds him into a steaming shower with completely inscrutable emotion. The Oppressive Father communicates nothing. 

‘This isn’t my home. You’re not my father,’ screams the transvestite boy as he vomits pixels and static into a bathtub. 

90s television, on the other hand, communicates all the emotions you’d ever need. Warmth. Friendship. Purpose. Lust. Horror. Pure cheesy fun. It even teaches you how to be a girl. The television is there for you when no one else is.  Maybe that’s why millennials can’t get over TV — maybe they were raised more by it than their own flesh and blood parents. It is their home. It is their father. Increasingly, it seems like shows are more meaningful to them than actual people in their life, or anything that ever happened to them in the flesh.

Predictably, the most interesting part of I Saw the TV Glow is the freakish art project vibe of the in-universe TV show and its carefully constructed replication of 90s cinematography. It speaks to the deeply insecure nature of the movie that it can’t simply adopt that wild, haunting zaniness at the surface level — it has to reframe its most imaginative elements in another layer of artifice and contextualized with questions about artificial memories. The movie is itself about the love we have for movies and TV shows that were utterly self-confident and had no self-consciousness about being absurd or cheesy. But it would be a bridge too far, I suppose, to actually make a movie that was self-confident, and to fearlessly pursue classic 90s goofiness. Why?

We see in the past decade an obsession with “nostalgic media” not just as an aesthetic but as a plot device itself, as something distant from us that we need to go back and retrieve or at least come to grips with. This reflects young people’s confusion over Hollywood’s growing inability to enchant them. A sense of betrayal. That there was something evil lurking in the heart of their innocent childhood enjoyments. (See, again, Too Many Cooks.) They grew up in a world where television and cinema was entirely absorbing.

Now, something seems off about almost every single new TV show and movie you see, including this one. Maybe it’s the lack of memorable actors. Maybe it’s the cheap set design, or the muddy LED lighting and bad spatial composition. Maybe it’s the stilted, unbelievable dialogue. Or the neurotic navel-gazing that spirals the story into meaninglessness. Hollywood was once capable of producing works either of high quality storytelling or, failing that, completely unselfconscious cheesy absurdity. But whatever this mysterious industrial process that enforced quality control was, it has broken down. Now Hollywood can do neither maturity nor immaturity well — it must blend the two into a slurry, where every scene is a self-conscious amateurish attempt at profundity, like a child pretending to be an adult or an adult pretending to be a child. Nowadays, you feel like ideas are being thrown at you, rather than a magic spell being cast, that you’re really being ushered into another world. There’s nothing seductive about movies anymore. And maybe that’s not all a bad thing — maybe we shouldn’t long for the days when they were.

Some millennial screenwriters and directors, then, like in this one, simply lean into this phenomenon by making their film as neurotically self-aware and meta-referential as they can. Movies about movies. Maybe it’s all they know how to do, as highly anxious, media saturated people.

Millennials are desperately clinging to that feeling of hope and wonder they first felt diving into the vast depths of television, wondering why they can no longer get a high from it anymore. Is it because we’re adults now and can no longer feel wonder? I don’t think so. I just don’t think the entertainment is as well made. The craftsmanship is losing its edge. Personally, I think that presents an opportunity for ambitious storytellers to step in and do the work Hollywood can’t, or won’t.

The movie is right about one thing. There is something deeply transexual about our media saturated culture. Men of the millennial and zoomer generations spend so much of our lives staring at screens, at work or at home or at the theatre, imagining ourselves inhabiting the cartoonish artificial bodies portrayed for us in video games or movies or pornography. Is it media saturation which has disconnected us from the absurd, raw confidence that comes with true manliness? Are we seeking an easy escape from the harshness and conflict that comes from striving in the real world as a man?

Is it the television itself that broke down masculinity and fatherhood? 

Maybe. The movie suggests otherwise. The media isn’t the source of the problem; it’s an escape. An iconography for people who already want to flee reality, so that they can reenvision themselves and reframe their numerous traumas into something they are willing to love and believe in. The real source is the sin that’s in the heart of men. I can agree with that, as far as that goes. But, of course, in this movie’s cosmology, sin only seems to emanate from white men. The rest of humanity just has to endure it.

“This isn’t the Midnight Realm. It’s just the suburbs,” says Owen at one point. But of course, we are supposed to recognize this as an ironic claim — in the leftist worldview, the suburbs do, in fact, hold the realm of shadows hidden in its breast. A nebulous, unfeeling hatred. Something something racism.

To the director’s credit, “they” do not waste time valorizing the alternative sexualities of “their” characters. These traits are simply taken for granted as the natural state that lonely, endangered people find themselves in. If anything, the story ties queer sexuality to mental illness and a lack of ability to correctly gauge reality on the part of the main characters. But what reality is there to gauge? The only passing moments in a reality outside the home seem to involve other vast institutions of disconnected entertainment — the movie theatre, the arcade, or athletic grounds, all of which are more or less stages for the characters to narrate continuously about their warped memories and trauma and media obsessions. 

As such there is no solid ending to the story, simply a meditation on self-mutilation and questioning whether medication distracts us from the real spiritual darkness that envelops us. The climax of the film is the main character having a panic attack at an arcade birthday party and, when alone in the bathroom, slicing open the skin of his chest to reveal a glowing television inside his ribcage. This is as helpful an autopsy of contemporary trangender identity formation as any that I’ve seen, and beyond that a perfect portrait of the emasculated millennial male.

Trans people have this way of referring to people, whom they suspect could one day become trans, as “eggs.” It implies that potentially everyone has a soul of another gender buried deep inside them, just waiting to be cracked open. An even further implication is that trans people have a sort of duty to help awaken (or even convert) those who are “in denial” about their fundamental trans-ness. As much of a gnostic horror as this vision is, maybe there’s some bitter truth to it, in our society in particular. Maybe all of our young men have been turned into women. It might too much of a stretch to suggest that it is television that did this to us, but… I think it’s undeniable it was part of the process.

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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