*This contains mild spoilers for the film.*

Ever since I viewed it in May, I Saw the TV Glow has become stuck in my brain. Just as protagonists Owen and Maddy are enamored with the in-film series The Pink Opaque, Jane Schoenbrun’s genre-blurring sophomore feature is arresting in its presentation of the knotty tie between identity and media. For all its cinematic flourishes and levels of interpretations to sink your teeth into, it's in tandem with the wide range of sincere emotionality at its core that makes it something I can’t stop going back to.

The setup – Owen is an anxious kid we follow primarily at two points in his life. In the mid-90s, he befriends Maddy, an older girl in school, and through her, becomes a fan of The Pink Opaque, a vibes/aesthetic amalgamation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Twin Peaks. At some point, the film shifts eight years later, when Owen and Maddy reunite, the latter having run away from their hometown and now warning that The Pink Opaque is real, as are the dangers that threatened the leads in it. 

With a larger canvas to paint on coming from their first film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Schoenbrun further expresses, with increasing nightmarish elements as the film goes along, their interest in young people grappling with not just who they are but if they can take the steps to reach a sense of self-actualization. The uncomfortable feeling of something being wrong with you and wanting an escape is a core part of both their films; just as Schoenbrun weaves in their experiences being non-binary, so do they also reflect the lure and value of the screen that they find comfort in, as said in an interview with Letterboxd. I Saw the TV Glow boasts ideas and sequences that feel equal parts confrontational and comforting as if Schoenbrun is reaching from the screen with the willingness to tear out your heart and the grace to show how to carry on after. 

As loaded as it is with memorable imagery, courtesy of impeccable work from cinematographer Eric Yue and production designer Brandon Tomer-Connelly, it's also written with such poignancy. One scene early on still lingers with me in which Owen and Maddy talk to each other on high school bleachers, where the latter asks the former if he likes boys or girls. “I think that I like TV shows,” he responds with a withholding chuckle. It’s a moment several people in my life have likened to me – a junkie for all things movies and a little television on the side – but it’s when Owen then describes how he feels like “someone took a shovel” to dig his insides out and how he’s too nervous to look in that makes the response sting just that much more. That lack of resolve one finds in escapism, in this case through the screen, and ultimately how that impression can maintain influence over us in more ways than one is something a lot of people can strongly relate to, especially if they were to fall under the queer umbrella. (As an aside, being asexual, I found Owen’s expression of how he feels something is missing that is just intrinsically there in so many other people to be deeply resonating.)

The strength of the film ultimately is its ability to simultaneously allude to greater concepts without feeling the need to overcompensate or simplify itself even as its own reality grows more unsettling and extreme. Reference points are all over the place from the works of David Lynch and Gregg Araki to independent genre riffs of the 90s and early-2000s to cable fantasy/horror shows aimed at kids and young adults, but never does the movie feel burdened by these inspirations. Although it makes the experience richer, one also does not need to filter those films to enjoy or think on what Schoenbrun is showcasing here – indeed, the exact nature of the film and especially its ending is enough to chew on. Its open-ended merits and how people have discussed and approached this element of the movie has been incredibly rewarding as someone who loves to further examine other observations and insights. 

Per Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow is the second installment in a loose trilogy connected by the push-and-pulls of media, queerness, the Internet, and all the bizarre, lonely, scary things moving between them. Perhaps some feeling of resolve will come for those seeking it after their latest cinematic venture, but for me, the film succeeds in practically all it’s trying to do. It’s refreshing to watch something that moves from strange and harrowing to touching and even exciting in the ways the person behind the conception of the piece is utterly willing to lay bare so much of their curiosities, anxieties, and, yes, even hopes.

Logan Thomson is a writer based in Denton, Texas. Sporadically creative and always looking for movie recs, he can be found on Twitter @lat2049 and Instagram @logan2oo1.