Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 1 - I Saw the TV Glow

1. I Saw the TV Glow, dir. Jane Schoenbrun

There is a particular reaction I get from certain movies. David Lynch has pulled this off a few times. I could not keep a conversation with a friend just minutes after I finished Lost Highway. Inland Empire left me disturbed and half-zombied, unable to really function. These movies make me feel stoned, and I'm not somebody who much likes getting high. The basic movements of conducting life are suddenly are made utterly bizarre. I left the AMC theater after I Saw the TV Glow, walked over to a yogurt shop, and found completing the transaction with the guy behind the counter difficult. My brain was just in a fog of feeling and over-stimulation. I had completely disassociated from my body and my mind. I was not fully there, I was instead off writing a narration about what I was doing. Eric Fuchs ate his snack, feeling dizzy, while I wondered if I Saw the TV Glow was going to be the best movie of 2024.

Also, they had Spice Melange flavor yogurt in honor of Dune 2. Turns out it tastes like coconut lemon saffron. It did not open my brain any further to the greater magic of the cosmos, unfortunately. If there was transcendence to be found it was in the movie, not in the Spice.

I Saw the TV Glow is about a queer identity, it is about a very 90s-kid nostalgia for Teen Nick meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it is about losing your sense of reality when fandom is your only identity. But whether you have any personal experience with trans awakening or Are You Afraid of the Dark?, this movie has a universal message of terror. This creeping question of whether you have lived any life worth living at all. Whether the self you've created is utterly insufficient. That you denied yourself the opportunity to evolve, to become, to love and be loved. You locked yourself into an ideology or a lifestyle that is a false narrative, and are stuck like this. To use Duke Leto's phrasing, "the sleeper did not awaken". The Matrix was similarly powerful in its ability to create a techno-gnosticism - which also was at its core a trans metaphor. But you did not need to be trans to feel its energy. If anything The Matrix is over-universal considering its application in the worst kinds of people's worldviews, see that whole Red Pill fucking nightmare. That story is about escaping false realities to be a truer, romantic, perfected self.  

I Saw the TV Glow asks "what happens when you take the other pill?" When you strand yourself, maybe forever, in a false, insufficient life. It is the kind of thing I get to worry about now. I'm thirty-four, I work a service job that is not a career, writing has never paid a single bill, and these are all my own failings. Mortality has been on my mind a lot lately as my family members get older, frailer, and they might pass away before I feel like I've ever achieved anything. My anxiety about getting old has been creeping through this Top 15 with such things as Look Back and The Substance, these fantasies about restarting your life, maybe to do it all again, maybe to do it right this time. You never need to get old, it's never too late. I Saw the TV Glow is that full brutality of "you fucked it up". But even in this grim reality, like I said two weeks ago: reality is insufficient. There is still hope.

The color pallet of I Saw the TV Glow has a heavy use of blues and neon pinks. "Bisexual lighting" was a meme back in 2018, and here we have it again. Even a shared memory of many 90s Kids: the big gym parachute, is blue, pink, and purple. There are more "naturalistic" scenes with reds and greens. The starker the color correction gets, the closer we are to the surreal and fantastic. Our main characters watch their favorite TV show, The Pink Opaque, this young adult horror-themed program, and are awash in an impossible pink light. This is our lead, Owen (Justice Smith)'s first friendship with the older Maddy (Jack Haven, congrats on the new name, btw). It also becomes Owen's brush with sexuality, first moment to dare be independent from his parents, and we experience most of this through the hazy warped fog that is long-distant memory and nostalgia. Owen and Maddy stare into the TV and are transfixed by the glow, seeing something that might be meaningful only to themselves. It is liberation a half hour at a time, between commercial breaks.

Creepypasta as an art movement seems to have largely died down, but I Saw the TV Glow shows it at least lives in inspiration. Schoenbrun's first movie, We're All Going to the World's Fair, was about an online community playing a shared horror fiction game. The Pink Opaque is based a lot on the short story, Candle Cove, where a forum reminisces about a short-lived program that seems to be too horrifying and strange to have ever existed. What our leads see on the television has the structure of a YA program, two girls with magic powers battling suburban monsters. But the effects are terrifying, more extreme than a broadcast program should have been. The show ends with both of its leads captured by a nightmare Moon Monster, with perhaps Owen and Maddy as their reborn selves, prisons bodies with assigned genders at birth. Or maybe it was all just a TV show. The point is that Shoenbrun takes a concept that was designed to be fearful and disturbing, and instead conjures it as a vessel to something greater, a different plane of existence. That Pink Glow is memorizing because of its fear. Maybe we enjoy fear because there's something in horror that we admire, that we yearn for in ways we cannot express openly.

I Saw the TV Glow is a horror movie full of jump scares and great gore gags. There is a decent spooky part in that Ice Cream Monster though. More terrifying might be Owen's father (played by Fred fucking Durst!), this stern faceless creature of masculinity, who can devastate a scene with a single line: "isn't that a show for girls?"

Really I Saw the TV Glow works as a masterful work of vibes and discomfort. Owen is so awkward and so out of place in the world, or any world. The vague haze of the past actually feels more "real" than the future we are shown. Things get much more disturbing in I Saw the TV Glow's final act, when Owen begins telling us a narrative that is certainly not true. We see a new version of The Pink Opaque that is painfully aged and cheesy and whose plot is missing the two main characters. An older Owen announces to us that he has a family now, "I love them more than anything", said in a flatter tone than Justice Smith usually gives. This family is never seen. Owen either is making them up, or this character's life is so artificial and so going-through-the-motions of heteronormativity that in truth, they might as well not exist. Owen feels no love for them, no connection to this life they were "supposed" to have. We see Owen working a miserable job at a children's birthday arcade, another 90s-kid memory of places like Chuck E. Cheese or Discovery Zone. This is a menial task that would never allow them to provide for a family anyway. Owen is briefly so overwhelmed by anxiety they have a panic attack that glitches the entire reality of what we're seeing. The whole world pauses while Owen struggles to breath.

There is still a final surreal image of hope. That even at this late state, even in terrible old-age make-up, Owen can still be, whatever Owen was supposed to be. We see them tear open their flesh, revealing a very yonic slit in their chest, within which is the glow of a television set. It is in these moments, in secret, that Owen can still live a life of fantasy and possibility. Where the crushing boot of authority and complacency and naked hatred towards whole swaths of the country can be silenced and ignored. This is Videodrome, again rebuilt to not be body horror, but whatever that term I could not come up with in my Queer review was, a Body Romance, a Body Comedy? I Saw the TV Glow says 'Long Live the New Flesh' with pride and defiance.