As I Saw the TV Glow fade to black, I couldn’t speak, nor could I move. Its ending is immensely powerful, but traumatic in a way that I’ll never be able to forget – not that I’d want to. “You need to help me.”
Jane Schoenbrun has a knack for illuminating the modern soul; their perceptive debut feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, conveyed the allure and crippling loneliness of life within the lens of the internet like nothing before or since.
It was a perfect palette adjuster (and a bad omen) for I Saw the TV Glow, one of the decade’s rare, true masterpieces, one of the best horror movies ever, and a peerless two-hander: it vividly and compassionately speaks to the trans experience, particularly to “eggs” (those who don’t realize they’re trans yet), but its analog-crackled odyssey of nightmarish escapism is relatable to anyone (and definitely me).
The film follows Owen (played first by Ian Foreman and then Justice Smith), an awkward tween who befriends Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a slightly older high-schooler. They bond over The Pink Opaque, a hazy late-night YA series that’s somewhere between Twin Peaks, Goosebumps, and Are You Afraid of the Dark – and by the end, it’s a gateway and a curse.
The ending of I Saw the TV Glow is horrifying
In the closing sequence of I Saw the TV Glow, Owen is suffocatingly alone, even with a family of his own. He refused to let Maddy bury him alive; according to her, it would have transported him to their actual reality inside the world of The Pink Opaque.
He never sees her again. Years later, his physical and mental health is deteriorating, his parents are dead, and he lives in their house, presumably with his wife and children, watching each day pass by with quiet, relentless futility. He was warned: “Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I told myself, ‘This isn’t normal. This isn’t normal. This isn’t how life is supposed to feel,” Maddy told him.
One night, he revisits The Pink Opaque, only to experience a universal disappointment: the thing you loved as a kid doesn’t hold up as an adult (this happened to me recently with 2005’s Shadow the Hedgehog game, I’m still not ready to talk about it). It’s not the mature, beguiling series he once obsessed over – it’s campy, schlocky, and juvenile. “I just felt embarrassed,” he says.
The next day (or years later, who knows?), Owen helps host a child’s birthday party at his cinema’s arcade. He hoarsely joins in on the celebrations, murmuring, “Happy birthday” as everyone else shouts and claps, drowning in the carefree jubilations of those who’ve never questioned themselves.
Panic sets in, and he suddenly screams and howls for help. Nobody in the room listens; they just hang their heads and eerily stand there, oblivious to Owen’s agony. That image, and his heartbreaking desperation, still haunt me months after I watched it for the first time.
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There’s still hope in I Saw the TV Glow
Owen flees to the bathroom and locks himself inside before pulling out a box cutter. Like me, you probably fear the worst, and but I Saw the TV Glow becomes even more surreal: he uses it to slice open his chest, revealing a scorchingly bright blue light. It’s scary, but comforting – just as he remembered The Pink Opaque.
What’s within Owen isn’t lost, despite him continually refusing to acknowledge the feelings that actually define him. That’s a hopeful end note; it doesn’t matter if you’re a teenager, in your mid-30s, or elderly; it’s never too late to discover who you really are.
As the director explained, “after half a lifetime of resistance, when Owen finally sees that glow inside himself – and to do so, he literally has to open himself up and see the heart that’s been taken from him, and see that it’s been replaced by this signal that could be something beautiful, but also carries the ambivalence and sinister nature of the emptiness of glow; the thing that it is representing what isn’t there inside him.
“This was my attempt to capture the ambivalence and overwhelming joy and possibility, but also things that feel sinister and terrifying about an egg crack — the moment when, as a queer or trans person, you understand that you aren’t yourself and that you need to become something else to conjure that magic that was maybe there in childhood and maybe there in these other moments in life.”
In the final scene, Owen stumbles out into the arcade, sheepishly apologizing for his outburst. It’s an upsetting grace note; even in this moment of mild revelation, uncertainty and anxiety still overwhelm him.
But it’s okay, because there’s a clear message in the horror: “There is still time.”
Find out how to watch I Saw the TV Glow, and as we approach the end of the year, check out our list of the best TV shows of 2024.
