I imagine this may be a divisive movie for a variety of reasons. My feelings on it, on the other hand, are much less conflicted.
We’re all familiar with creepypastas, being young, hip people, right? Well, since my readership is largely made up of Facebook friends, my Mom, and other WordPress bloggers, maybe I better assume that our demographics skew a little north of “young and hip”. By way of explanation, a creepypasta is a horror story, legend, or meme that is passed around online. The most famous one is probably Slenderman, but there are countless examples in a variety of different formats. I am not well versed in creepypasta lore. I was in my twenties when I took notice of the term, and it is more of a genre for pre-teens, so I have had limited exposure. One creepypasta that I read a couple of decades ago has stuck with me, however. It was called “Candle Cove”, and it was a fictional message board where various users posted to reminisce about a local access children’s show that they watched in the 70’s. Their recollections became alarmingly more unhinged as the messages progressed, until finally one user reported back that he asked his mother about the show, and she declared that he used to say he was going to watch Candle Cove before tuning the tv to static and staring at it for thirty minutes. It was a well-written little vignette that made great use of the format. It was just realistic enough that you could imagine stumbling across the conversation on a real forum, and the stinger was a perfect cap to the increasingly horrific descriptions of the show and its characters. As soon as I first saw a little marketing for I Saw the TV Glow, my mind immediately went back to Candle Cove, and before I watched it I halfway assumed the plot was going to be very similar. That isn’t precisely accurate, but the material produced to depict “The Pink Opaque”, the TV show within the movie, engendered the exact same type of discomfiting fear response as reading that particular online horror fiction for the first time.
I’m way ahead of myself, though, aren’t I? I Saw the TV Glow centers on two high school outcasts who bond over a young adult show titled “The Pink Opaque”. They both have difficult home lives and struggle mightily with their identities in the face of their parents’, and the rest of society’s, expectations of them. Their favorite show may turn out to be more than just a show, however, and it impacts them along diverging trajectories into young adulthood and beyond. I know that isn’t a lot to go by, but this is a movie that deploys disorientation and unexpectedness as a weapon, so I don’t want to diffuse any of that for you in case you decide to watch it. I found it endlessly compelling, partially as a horror film but mostly as something I’ve never really seen before. I recommend it, although I don’t know how well it will translate for everyone else.
I have avoided most of the conversation about this movie, as I try to do for any movie that I’m going to review, but I did catch the title for one article that read something like “Style over Substance”. That isn’t a take that I can get behind, but I do think it gets to the root of what will turn some people off of the film. Perhaps a better descriptor would be “Style over Plot”, because there is absolutely substance here, and I actually found the central metaphor to be quite legible. Plot-wise, however, this movie functions as a somewhat surreal, psychedelic fever dream that follows a linear path forward, but with huge leaps in time and absent most of the hallmarks of a concise, three-act story. I found the ending to be heart-breaking, but it is in no way a climax or big reveal that wraps up loose ends. This is a movie that is very ambitious with form and not particularly interested in telling a conventional story, and I can empathize with having limited patience for that type of approach, especially if you are queuing up a movie looking for some straight-forward scares during Halloween season. I had a hunch that this wasn’t going to be straight-forward going in, and that helped me reframe my expectations, but I’m confident that the film’s quality would have won me over in any case.
My favorite element about the experience were those aforementioned clips of “The Pink Opaque”. I love the heightened example of an early-90’s adventure program meant for pre-teens, having lived through that era as one myself. I felt genuine unease bordering on terror during a couple of instances, particularly from the fictional series’ finale. The scene where one of the characters, now an adult, revisits the series after it becomes available on a streaming service and finds it to be something completely different than what they remembered is funny and sad and relatable, and also has interesting implications to the overall story. The way that we use media as “comfort food”, and how absurdly dedicated fandoms can pop up over seemingly trivial forms of entertainment, and the way that certain works can be co-opted in a way that would be unimaginable to their creators are all interesting concepts that are touched upon. As for that central metaphor, I don’t think its much of a spoiler to explain that its about both sexual and gender identity. There is the other “divisive” shoe dropping, I suspect. I can only give you my own take on how it was handled. What I value most about this movie is that it was able to take a life experience that I did not have and help me understand it better. That’s the beauty of art, isn’t it? It can convey ideas and emotions so much more effectively than a hundred interviews with Caitlyn Jenner or Jordan Peterson, or a thousand corporate Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging courses, or a million tweets by various people looking at the topic from every conceivable angle. I don’t know that I Saw the TV Glow is necessarily my favorite horror film of the year, but its the on that I find my self thinking about the most after watching it.
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