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I Saw The Tv Glow - Blog Posts
Years go by like seconds, like chapters skipped in a dvd. And I thought, this isn’t right, this isn’t how life is supposed to feel.
it’s not. But at the end of the day, the week, the month, the year. I’m Owen, I’m Isabelle, I’m scared.
because as long as I don’t think about it, it can’t hurt me.
and I’ve tried to look at it, I’ve shown others. But in the end, it’s too complicated. Because I don’t fit into those boxes, and I won’t just be one.
so years will still pass like seconds, and every time it’ll hurt less until the pain is my regular. I’m not scared anymore.
I’m just empty.
how it feels to post about i saw the tv glow on here
Owen from I saw the tv glow (trans icon)
"There is still time"
If this movie doesn't break your heart, you are either cis or dead inside
i saw the tv glow but it’s ME!! i heart this movie so much. never related to something so much
Glad Sanji isn’t real bc they wouldn’t be able to handle seeing I Saw The Tv Glow without at least 4 mental breakdowns
what makes humans so beautiful is our diversity. we are intelligent creatures that cannot expect ourselves to fit into narrow labels of what we are “supposed to be”.
explore your identity. educate yourself on how anti-queerness is rooted in racism and colonialism (specifically the erasure of nonwhite cultures and how it led to modern day issues). if you can find community, don’t be scared to connect to it. try new things. expand your horizons. see the empathy and compassion in the world.
open your heart. there is love in your soul and kindness in your veins. there is still enough time for you. i love you and all that you are. happy pride month. i’m glad you’re alive and here to read this.
and if you feel like queer people are in anyway unnatural or wrong: reflect on what environmental and social factors led you to hold your current morals. do you have your own thoughts on these matters, or do you echo the voices of people who have thought for you?
Just finished I Saw the TV Glow, and I must say it has quickly become my favorite movie I've ever had the honor to watch.
There's so much beauty in it in so many different ways. It is a compassionate and raw perspective on transness and mental illness and feeling empty and nostalgia and isolation. Not only was the writing excellent my god the acting and the cinematography had me in tears. Some things I loved about the movie.
1. The writing (obviously)
The way this movie is a metaphor for so many different things that seem separate but are all intertwined is breathtaking. Something I found fascinating is at the end I didn't even really sit there trying to decide if it was all a psychotic break or it they really were from a tv show because it didn't matter. Because at the end of the day, it was still about being too afraid to be yourself. About holding it all in until you break. About life moving too fast but being too slow and monotonous. It was about fearing who you are and never taking the dive because it sounds crazy and you can't. It's about regret. It's about soulmates, about that on person who you never have to lie to. In the end, it would still be about those things whether or not there really was a tv show or not.
2. Cinematic Decisions
The filming decisions in this film made it what it was. One of the things I found fascinating was the lack of a true soundtrack. There wasnt particularly a lot of background noise excpet for chatter on the TV. All of the conversations and days are smothered in this thick heavy silence. The silence is so prominent it feels like its own character. The graininess and static making it feel like an actual tv show. The colors, the sickening neon glow from everywhere all the time. The unsteady camera and wide shots.
3. The relationships
While Maddy and Owen are amazing on their own, their relationship is the most compelling part of the story. Both feel alone and broken and like theres something wrong with themselves but not as much around each other. We see Owen isn't really talkative or open with his mom, that he barely says anything at all to her, but with Maddy almost immediately, he feels a connection to her. He seeks her out again and again. Owen doesn't have anything resembling a relationship with anyone else. He barely has dialogue with other characters. In the scene where his dad is holding him under the shower, he doesn't say a word, doesn't even look at him honestly. He says near the end he has a family, but we don't even see them. But with Maddy, he is close to her. They're intertwined, and around each other, they admit truths and secrets it doesnt feel like they've ever said outloud before. Even when Owen is freaked out by Maddy, even when he pushes her away and runs, there's till love there. It's not rejection as much as fear, and maddy doesn't blame him.
4. Parallels and Callbacks
One of the main cinematic choices I found myself noticing over and over again was the colors surrounding Maddy and Owen. in the first scene they sit across from each other as Owen leans against a oink vending machine and maddy a black. Owen has a pink sleeping bag and a pink shirt and a pink dress. Maddy is more often seen in black and white. Some great callbacks are the scene where we find out Owen doesn't have a heart, and Maddy reminds him of the bleavhers where he said he was afraid someone would dig up his insides and find there is nothing there. Seeing the chalk on the road clearly for the first time and it being the ghosts and "there's still time".
My personal favorite scene is the scene where Owen watches the finale, and then his dad comes in to find him with his head on the TV, screaming and crying. To me, this scene is very reminiscent of an attempt. He's finally been pushed to the edge and flung off of it. he's been holding everything in for so long and he can't take it anymore. Its heartbreaking in every way.
All in all this is a fantastic movie I highly recommend. All my love to the writers producers and directors.
Blurbs for “I Saw The TV Glow”
(Just saw this movie and I’m in awe)
quiet liminal horror
transfem allegory
90’s suburbia
queer soliloquy
neon pink glow
nostalgiacore
surrealist mind bending
isolation
interpersonal dimensional travel
fear of the unknown
highschool rebellion
television static fx
ambiguous reality
Traps you in a nightmare world AND trans your gender
“What transness and especially a pre-transition dysphoria actually feels like, to me at least, is much more internal and intangible. The language that I use to try to talk about it is language that I'm borrowing from the surrealism of David Lynch — the dreamlike nature of his films — or the body horror of David Cronenberg.” — JANE SCHOENBRUN, I Saw the TV Glow writer/director (x)
@lgbtqcreators creator meme (v2): [1/3] free choice
I saw tv glow is like YES the realization you are trans might implode your life and make the world you live in uninhabitable but that will happen anyway if you don’t do anything about it. if you retreat from your own needs and refuse to let yourself resurrect you’re still gonna run out of air and even the tv show that kept you alive at one point won’t be able to bring you back
the public reaction to i saw the tv glow is like a perfect case study into how cis people take up queer spaces and unknowingly mock and enjoy trans suffering. sitting in the theater, i had a pit in my stomach the entire time. so many times, i would tear up and then someone else in the theater would laugh. and i wouldn’t cry because how would they look at me when the lights came back on? because they don’t see it. they don’t see the pain. they think it’s funny. i left the theater completely silent, not saying a word to my boyfriend and he didn’t say a word to me until partway into the drive home. the people around us immediately got to picking it apart, explaining what it all meant to each other, dumbing it down, making theories. cis people see the the movie, just like transness, as something to debate. a conversation. something to dissect because it makes them uncomfortable if they don’t understand it in their easily digestible way.
thinking a lot about the almost.. homoeroticism of isabel and tara’s relationship (or at least the glimpses we get of it) and its implications in relation to maddy and owen’s
I saw the tv glow
there is something deeply calming to me about i saw the tv glow. its a horror movie, and im not saying those aspects dont affect me, they very much do, but the way the movie understands me so entirely makes me feel more seen than anything else ive ever experienced.
i cry and i yelp for air but its okay because im not alone. other people feel this way too, and i am seen. there is still time.
But I know that's not true. That's just fantasy. Kid's stuff.
I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024) dir. Jane Schoenbrun
i just realized i never talked here about i saw the tv glow. im basically talking to the wall here bcs who even sees my posts but the scene where owen screams at the end, i start crying violently. so glad i did not see this film in theatres, i wouldnt have been able tobget up afterwards.
alex g's music changed something inside of me fundamentally. it might be the transness in me speaking but listening to his songs makes me feel connected to someone out there who understands every facet of my being fully as if it were their own and the twinge of knowing ill never meet them.
also i saw the tv glow is really good, once a meetup me and my transfem friend sit together and cry listening to anthem of a seventeen year old girl.
Park that car, drop that, phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me 🏳️⚧️
Keep living. Keep the TV plugged in. 🩷🩵🤍🩵🩷
after watching both i saw the tv glow and we’re all going to the world’s fair i want to rant (/pos) on my impressions of both movies bc i will explode if i don’t get this out of my system
AHEM
I Saw the TV Glow -
as a trans system, this one hit SO hard. both looking at the story literally (aka ignoring all the trans and queer part of the story) and looking at it with a trans eye.
some of our introjects are from sources where they’re dead or dying and knowing that feeling of not being able to go back really hit us straight in the heart.
and from a trans perspective it just makes the movie so much more real. the line “it’s never too late” just reminded us that we’re lucky for being able to come out in this day and age. (and it hits hard bc we have and introject from the 90’s and the feeling of being trapped in a lie is familiar.)
all the people who don’t understand/relate to this film make me jealous. i’d like to be lucky enough to not relate to owen, to not feel like a piece of me is missing. but this film wasn’t made for them so i can’t be too mad.
We’re all Going to the World’s Fair -
as a mentally ill person this is just AUGH /pos. the whole point of this film (in my eyes) is the danger of mentally ill people being exposed to the internet. not to say all mentally ill people shouldn’t be on the internet! for casey it’s that they’re convinced their mental health is paranormal and so they’re not getting the help they need, and it’s also them clinging to a positive adult figure who’s pushing the paranormal narrative. (even if he didn’t realise it. i’m still conflicted on his character, haha.)
we DEFINITELY get this one as an autistic DID system.
unfortunately i seemed to have missed the underlying trans bit? idk it coulda been bc the captions broke and i couldn’t hear some of the lines:,] someone feel free to explain that bit to me:D
a little sketchbook spread following the delay of my hrt appointment, im a little frustrated and sooo dysphoric
“never too late to be who you might have been” by sara yukiko mon | still from i saw the tv glow, “there is still time”
WHO WAS GOING TO TELL ME ALEX G WORKED ON THE I SAW THE TV GLOW SOUNDTRACK.
I saw the tv glow and turned it’s brightness up.
I was happy to see that other people’s tv’s also glowed, but I noticed that my tv was a different shade than theirs. Soon after that, I noticed that my tv was a completely different colour. It was a deep green, turning into white, turning into grey, turning into black.
I turned the brightness of the tv down, but left it just enough to always play in the background, like a little song in the back of my brain that I can’t remember the words of.
I never saw a person whose tv had the same colour as mine and it made me feel like no one would appreciate it. It was quite an interesting colour; I did plenty of research on it, but the people who did have their tv that colour never really got to be a real part of society.
I turned the brightness up again this year—not by a lot, just a bit to make out the colours—and while looking at it, I realised something. If I were to let my tv glow, it would mean never truly feeling a part of this world.
Love was such a big part of a person’s life. So why didn’t I feel any of it? I loved my friends, I loved my family, I loved my pets. Why wasn’t I cable of loving on another level? Why didn’t romance strike me as this beautiful thing rather than this tedious chore? I wanted to rip my heart out—why wasn’t it feeling things like the other hearts felt them? Why didn’t it speed up at the sight of a pretty woman or handsome man? Why did it just pump my blood and not my feelings?
If I were to let my tv glow, it would mean embracing who I truly am. But I don’t know who I truly am. And I haven’t known for a really long time.
there is still time. there is still time. until your bones are in the fucking ground there is still time.
time wasnt right
there is dust
in my childhood bedroom
cobwebs span the corners
reaching out
to touch
the abandoned walls
everything is covered in dust
my books
my floor
my collections, long since abandoned
touch anything and you'll
come away
with gray residue
reminiscent of a life once lived
only
i am still here
living
right?
or am i, too
covered in dust
a relic
of a former girl
this isnt how life is supposed to be