One day during my ninth-grade theatre history class, I noticed a tall girl I’d never spoken to was reading an issue of Buffy Magazine—yes, that was a real thing. It was the early aughts, and there was a magazine for everything, including my favorite TV show, which was airing its final season. I immediately struck up a conversation with my classmate and within a few weeks, we were calling each other during every commercial break when Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on on Tuesdays. We endlessly dissected the episodes, speculated on how the season—and the series—would end, sent each other fanfic recommendations, and marathoned previous seasons on DVD at slumber parties. Our shared love for Buffy was what initially bonded us together, but it wasn’t the only thing we had in common. Despite growing up in wildly different homes with unique family structures, we saw the world in a lot of the same ways. We thought the same things were stupid or funny. Was this because our favorite TV show had formed us into the people we were, or had we been those people all along and simply recognized something in each other?
I couldn’t help but think of my old friend, who I hadn’t spoken with in years, after seeing I Saw the TV Glow, A24’s buzzy spring quasi-horror movie. Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, the film follows two teenagers who bond over a shared love for a heavily Buffy-coded (down to the font used on the opening credits) young adult show called The Pink Opaque about two teenage girls with a psychic connection who battle demons every Saturday night at 10:30 pm. Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) strike up an awkward friendship in the glow of a Fruitopia vending machine on election night at their school. Maddy indoctrinates Owen into the world of The Pink Opaque, sneaking him taped recordings of episodes his strict father won’t let him watch. Eventually, Maddy disappears, reemerging years later and insisting that she and Owen are actually the two girls from The Pink Opaque and that Owen has to escape the false reality they’ve been trapped in. When they were teenagers, Maddy confessed that the show felt more real than real life, and now she’s convinced she was right. Owen is a bit more skeptical.
I’ve seen I Saw the TV Glow twice now. The first time I found it incredibly evocative of the moment it was trying to capture, but couldn’t decide if it was necessarily good. I liked it, but I wasn’t convinced it was great art. I also had an issue with how heavy-handed its trans allegory was. The first time we see young Owen (Ian Foreman) he’s beneath a trans-flag-colored parachute in his high school gym. When Maddy returns after years spent missing and asks him what he really remembers about their time watching the show, we’re shown cut scenes of Owen shyly trying on a dress in Maddy’s basement. The film’s ending pretty unambiguously confirms that Owen is in fact The Pink Opaque’s Isabelle, buried alive in another reality, suffocating both figuratively and literally in this one. A chalk mural proclaims THERE IS STILL TIME, a refrain familiar to closeted trans folks struggling to come to terms with their identity. The message was delivered a bit too bluntly for my taste, but I still found it effective, even moving.
For my second screening, I ate half of a very strong weed gummy, reclined my seat as far as it could go, and let the movie wash over me. The neon-soaked basements and parking lots were more beautiful on that round. The excellent soundtrack sounded even better, especially Caroline Polachek’s “Starburnt and Unkissed” and King Woman’s “Psychic Wound.” I found the performances much more compelling, particularly Lundy-Paine, who delivers an extended monologue in the third act in which she slowly sheds her apathetic detachment and crawls on the floor, hysteria mounting as she describes digging herself out of her own grave. The film genuinely unsettled me on this viewing, particularly the Lynchian quality of the Big Bad Mr. Melancholy’s crescent-faced henchmen, Marco and Polo. I gasped out loud at a scene I’d already seen: Owen’s father attempting to drag him out of a sparking TV screen as his son screamed in agony.
Some things still didn’t work for me the second time around. Justice Smith’s performance is serviceable, but never fully transcends until the final scenes. The trans metaphor still could have been more artfully done—the scenes of Owen trying on a dress seem like a last-minute addition a producer requested so audiences would understand what was going on, rather than trusting them to get there themselves.
But what worked far outweighed what didn’t, and the most important thing was how I felt watching it, the memories the film stirred up that I’ve been assimilating since I left the theatre. I can’t stop thinking about the pure ecstasy of seeing my teenage friend reading Buffy Magazine and realizing someone else liked what I liked. Someone who wasn’t a faceless figure on a forum, but a flesh and blood girl I could sit with at lunch and go to the mall with and talk to on the phone for hours. In remembering her I missed her, and I missed the person I’d been around her, a version of myself whose biggest problems were finishing my math homework and making it to next Tuesday so I could watch Buffy slay vampires again. That bond of shared obsession, the absolute certainty between us that the thing we loved was worth loving, the way loving it made us feel special and bonded us on a seemingly cellular level. If I DM’d her on Instagram, would she remember it the same way? Would that bond still be there, would it spark to life again as easily as turning on the TV? I’m not convinced the answer is yes, but I can’t stop asking myself the question, and that is the true power of Schoenbrun’s film. The way it captures the aching desire of loving a piece of media so profoundly it reorders your entire world and sets your imagination to burning. With that power, it may be just as effective as the nostalgia it's mining. It might live on just as long in my memory.
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There is so much I Saw the TV Glow gets right about the shows it’s referencing, particularly Buffy. The concept of a Monster of the Week (like the startlingly horrific ice cream monster who gets just enough screen time to be terrifying) vs. a season-long Big Bad (the funny-until-he’s-not Mr. Melancholy, giving the Master meets the Mayor). Tara’s quippy puns while demon slaying. While we’re at it, here are my top 10 Buffy episodes, in no particular order:
S1E12 “Prophecy Girl”
S2E14 “Innocence”
S2E17 “Passion”
S2E22 “Becoming (Part 2)
S3E6 “Band Candy”
S3E16 “Doppelgangland”
S4E22 “Restless”
S5E1 “Buffy vs. Dracula”
S5E22 “The Gift”
S6E7 “Once More with Feeling”
I was thinking how Buffy-coded The Pink Opaque was when watching the movie and almost fully missed that Amber Benson played Owen’s fake friend’s mom!