“We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.”
— Anne Carson, Antigonick
The fourth wall is, very simply, a testament to fictionality; ergo, the characters cannot see the audience. It’s an opaque mirror on the side of the dramatis personae and a transparent window on the side of the audience. As a result, when the fourth wall breaks, the characters acknowledge the presence of a camera or an observer, thus proving the fictional nature of their existence. Owen, the titular protagonist of I Saw the TV Glow tears down the fourth wall multiple times throughout the film. Well, you see, Owen and his friend Maddy are quite obsessed with a TV show called The Pink Opaque. As they grow up in the suffocating suburbs, worlds start to blur and Maddy goes on to discover a horrifying secret and realizes that the characters from their beloved show might not be as fictional as they thought to be. This somewhat of a Droste effect generates a three-way connection (i.e. the characters of The Pink Opaque, the characters of the film itself, and the audience), as if indulging the observer in a secret. The “secret” in question seems to be “the Midnight Realm” — a prison in the world of The Pink Opaque where captives are banished. At one point, Owen solemnly proclaims, “This isn’t the Midnight realm Maddy, it’s just the suburbs”. Blurring of worlds seems to be a recurring theme in the Jane Schoenbrun canon, previously applied in her very own We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021). Walls are broken to reveal what’s beyond them, but we rarely get any answers in this instance. There are too many questions in a distorted world like this. What is reality and what is fiction? What is time and what is happiness?
Owen and Maddy’s fixation with this show is shown as pure teenage obsession initially. The Pink Opaque was the last show before the Young Adult network switched to black and white reruns for the night and it was also the last streak of colour in Owen’s otherwise monochromatic life. I Saw the TV Glow is a non-normative coming of age that paints a fragmental picture of being scared to find your true self and the constant asphyxiation the queer youth are so familiar with. The suburban loneliness and depression are striking; the queerness, though not explicitly mentioned, is unquestionably present in the subtext. Maddy grabs her first chance out of the hellish land. Owen is left behind. Or rather, he denies himself the chance to start a new life constantly. There is no indication that Owen will escape his crippling cage of sadness. Owen’s relationship with everyone around him solely consists of pity towards him. His relationship with loneliness and his depression affect him throughout his life. He is not happy, no matter how many times a fast-forward button is pressed on the years of his life. He thinks the sadness will go away but it doesn’t. Maddy tries to save him a great many times but she is always brushed off or left waiting. After all, acknowledgment of one’s true self gives it legitimacy. To him, his queerness is not real if he keeps it inside, even if it kills him eventually. Owen doesn’t know not to hide. How could he live with himself, knowing that he has lived in a false world all this time? After all, he consoles himself profusely, nothing will be real if he “doesn’t think about it”.
The aesthetic of I Saw the TV Glow is disquieting, surreal, and gloomy. Time moves fast, everything seems fake and things are not as good as you remember them to be. It’s a Lynchian nightmare, giving the observer the impression that they are watching someone else’s dream like a weekly TV episode. Maddy declares so herself in the film (“Do you ever feel like you’re narrating your own life, watching it play in front of you like an episode of television?”, she says). The choked desolation is as jarring as it is heartbreaking. The film does not give us much hope of Owen’s survival for the most part. He is to the audience a slowly decaying corpse. For we know that when the body is not enough to sustain you, it will collapse within itself. The recurring tension between Owen’s self and his outer shell will make the system inevitably fracture. He will never go to The Pink Opaque. His self-created destiny will kill him.
Sound and music play quite an interesting part in the direction. It’s all gothic and nightmarish, with dashes of slow, plaintive music. Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl by Yeule plays twice. The neophyte audience probably dismisses it as inconsequential the first time. The second time, however, evokes the stark realization that maybe it was not quite innocent. This moment of knowledge when we recognize to what degree the music shapes our perception of a narrative becomes a very crucial element of art. That being so, we cannot judge music in the film as we judge “isolated” music, as it would indicate ignoring its status as part of the collaborative i.e. the film. Sound and music, therefore, do a lot of work in shaping the scenes in I Saw the TV Glow into a masterpiece.
The diegesis depends on Owen a lot of the time, as he makes eye contact with the audience often and addresses them. The breaking down of the fourth wall here gives new layers to the music, setting the mood and the tonalities of I Saw the TV Glow firmly.
There’s the impression that Owen is not entirely reliable as a storyteller. Narration often relies on “metadiegetic” images narrated (or “imagined”) by Owen. Maddy becomes a secondary narrator at times, describing to us in detail the vivid images, the bright colours, and the surreal happenings in a world vastly different than the one they live in.
Too many questions appear. Too much loneliness persists. One is left to wonder if his rebirth is even possible when he has time and time again rejected it. However, the film does let us hope. There are symbols, there are little moments of hope — Easter eggs — here and there. It’s so bleak and yet, it is so hopeful. Director Jane Schoenbrun insists that there is still time. There is always time. And you have to live before it’s too late.
References
Gorbman, C. (1980). Narrative Film Music. Yale French Studies, 60, Cinema/Sound.
Drucker, J. (2008). Graphic Devices: Navigation and Narration. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Satavisha Nandy is a student of English Literature currently living in India. She is passionate about film, literature, and art and she enjoys analyzing and writing about films, literary texts, and television.
Blue Labyrinths 