Unreality + Late-Night TV
“Sometimes The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life.”
The Oscars are on Sunday. While I’m usually not that wrapped up in the Academy Award nominations, this year I’m feeling the snubs. Among these is I Saw the TV Glow, a mood-first cosmic mystery written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun that wrecks me every time I watch it. The film drowns in bruisy music and hues, transformative misalignments of reality, disorienting juxtapositions of childhood and adult responsibility.
Steeped in its characters’ dysphoria, I Saw the TV Glow has gained acclaim for its implicit trans narrative. This aspect of the movie resonates with me, but I’m not trans, and it’s not my place to write about the movie through this lens. Thankfully, at a time when my country’s administration seems keen to erase its trans citizens, such write-ups aren’t hard to find. Each is unique, and deeply personal. If you want a full understanding of this movie, take some time with these essays.
Still, it’s hard to write about I Saw the TV Glow without getting personal, because this cosmic mystery has as much to do with unknown things inside of us as unknown things beyond the world we know. Spoilers ahead.
A withdrawn, asthmatic man named Owen narrates a story that begins in 1996: Somewhere in American suburbia, as a seventh grader, he approaches ninth grader Maddy after he sees her reading an episode guide for a TV show, The Pink Opaque. The show fascinates him, but he’s never seen it. The Pink Opaque is the foundation for their friendship. Owen secretly sleeps over at Maddy’s house to watch it with her and her friend Amanda. Later, Maddy leaves VHS tapes of the episodes for Owen in the school’s dark room.
Maddy and Owen exist on the fringes of life at Void High (home of the Void Vultures!)—Maddy likes girls, and Owen likes, he thinks, TV shows.
“I know there’s nothing in there,” he says to her about himself, “but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check.”
“Maybe you’re like Isabel,” Maddy answers, comparing him to a character in the show, “afraid of what’s inside you.”
During one sleepover, Maddy becomes certain she will die if she stays in their hometown. She draws the ghost symbol from the show onto the nape of Owen’s neck and makes plans for them to run away, but Owen is too afraid to leave. When The Pink Opaque ends, Maddy vanishes.
Then one day, years later, she reappears out of nowhere, and tells Owen she’s been inside the show.
There are mysteries that are cosmic no matter who encounters them, and there are mysteries that are cosmic because of the thoughts and choices of their investigator. Owen is a mystery to himself, and he’s afraid to do anything that might solve this mystery—even when faced with the possibility that his favorite show might be real.
One way of looking at this movie is that Owen would have seized onto any obsession-ready show, comic, game, book. What matters is that Owen saw Maddy reading The Pink Opaque episode guide, and the cosmic show became the shape of Owen’s suffocation. Another is that there is something explicitly reality-warping going on, and it’s The Pink Opaque.
So what is The Pink Opaque?
It’s a supernatural show about two girls, Isabel and Tara, who are each other’s ‘imaginary best friends’ via an ‘ancient psychic connection’ which they discover when they meet at a sleepaway camp, the archetypal proving ground for teenage horror. This connection manifests through matching, glowing pink spectacled ghost tattoos on the napes of their necks. Even though they never see each other in person after that meeting, they use this connection to fight the evil Mr. Melancholy. He warps time and reality in hopes of trapping Isabel and Tara in his Midnight Realm, and ruling the world.
I’ve seen people compare The Pink Opaque to Buffy; Eerie, Indiana; and Are You Afraid of the Dark? I see the show’s kid-budget 90s practical effects and I think of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. But I think I wouldn’t see Power Rangers if I didn’t know it started off as footage from multiple iterations of the Japanese Super Sentai franchise and American actors, collaged by Saban and Fox Kids into a story that made sense for American children.
There’s something about The Pink Opaque that also feels like it comes from different things, cut up and reassembled and recontextualized for the sake of an audience it wasn’t intended for. And in those imperfect splices, the connective tissue isn’t so much a new script, but something unseen that feels truer than the edit.
The show plays on the Young Adult Network at 10:30 PM to 11 PM on Saturday nights, between the cartoons and the black and white reruns for adults. It’s episodic, with an overarching ‘mythology’ structure meant to evoke shows like Buffy and X-Files. Maddy navigates the show with the help of her episode guide.
Episode guides! Older cosmic detective characters like Claire DeWitt might reflect on the impact of Cynthia Silverton serial novels on her psyche, but for the mid 90s setting, I can’t think of anything with better cosmic vibes than a meta-ish text. The secrets they revealed, the glimpses behind the production curtain. I had my Ocarina of Time unofficial strategy guide memorized, and still it thrilled me to carry around a myth-in-the-making, too big for me to navigate alone.
Many cosmic mysteries revolve around fictional art. I talk a lot about how cosmic mysteries involve a growing awareness of the larger otherworldly forces that steer the investigator’s life, and that I like them because, in them, I recognize how the sometimes-overwhelming forces of economy, politics, and culture make me feel. I think fandom is a cousin to this, particularly the fixated, emotionally load-bearing fascination that Owen and Maddy share for The Pink Opaque.
Fandom is bigger than yourself. It’s fictional and, unlike late-stage capitalism or climate disaster or systemic injustice, you get to choose it—though sometimes it’s more like the right story comes along just as you’re feeling your worst, and it moves into your head. It becomes personal. It demands attention. It’s a private cosmic force that changes the way you interact with the world.
I know what it’s like to be obsessed with something that’s probably not as deep and mysterious and perfect as I think it is. I also know what it’s like to look at a fictional character that isn’t like me—the way Maddy looks at Tara, the way Owen looks at Isabel—and want to be them, without understanding why. These personal cosmic currents can help you reach an understanding about yourself and the way you fit into the world, or they can distract you from yourself, and what the world is making of you. Maddy cries at the end of an episode; Owen stares blankly at the screen.
One cosmic thread that runs through the movie is the question of which feels more real: suburban high school life, or The Pink Opaque?
While the movie makes it clear that Owen gets in plenty of dissociation during his daily schedule, it also blurs the line between Owen’s life and the show. Scenes from the show feature more nature, and only sometimes include a cathode-ray television filter. A gnashing, whirling chalk scrawl appears on the streets of both locales. Then Maddy mysteriously reappears, and outright asks Owen if he’s ever had trouble telling the difference between what happened in the show and in his life.
As they talk, Owen reflects back on his relationship with Maddy and the show. He remembers an episode featuring Isabel’s magic dress, an axe, and a football field. But sometimes, it’s Isabel and Tara, sometimes it’s Owen and Maddy.
Then Owen thinks back on the final episode. Isabel gets caught and buried alive by Mr. Melancholy. Using a snowglobe (probably a reference to St. Elsewhere’s twist finale), he looks at Isabel, trapped in his Midnight Realm. It’s Owen, sitting on the couch in 1996, watching an ad for The Pink Opaque.
Owen’s not an eager investigator, into himself or into the mystery presented to him. The first time I watched this movie, I thought it was a tragic chronicle of Owen’s refusal to investigate the truth of his own life. Having watched it again, I see it as a lifelong transformation from cowardice into curiosity, if not outright courage.
When Owen is young, the scariest force in life is his father, in part because his father may have a better understanding of him than he does, and such intuition doesn’t always make fathers kind. It seems Owen often uses his mom as a shield, such as when he lies to his parents so he can sleep over at Maddy’s house and watch The Pink Opaque. After Maddy makes plans for them to run away, he doesn’t tell her he doesn’t want to go, he tricks his dad into grounding him. (Which is some seriously unreal kid-brain logic right there, that you can’t run away because you’ve been grounded.)
In his twenties, faced with a downed power line, he gets out of the car and sees scattered pages on the road. Risking electrocution, he picks one up, and sees it’s from a The Pink Opaque episode guide—one that somehow includes information about nonexistent season six! But he doesn’t go after the other pages. Then Maddy reappears as Tara, and tells Owen he will have to kill himself a little in order to live for real. He goes so far as to meet her, only to panic at the last moment and run away. He tells himself “It’s not real if you don’t think about it,” a misremembered line from an episode of The Pink Opaque.
He never sees her again, but he wonders, “What if she had been telling the truth? What if I really was someone else? Someone beautiful and powerful. Someone buried alive and suffocating to death.”
Each time, the stakes get higher. They threaten to change his life, then threaten him with death, and the constant dread is that these baby steps won’t get him where he needs to be before he suffocates on his half-lived life.
Owen eventually caves to that millennial urge to rewatch a beloved childhood show on streaming. The Pink Opaque is different than he remembers. Not just because he’s watching on a massive LG flatscreen, but because it’s actually not the show seen earlier in the movie. Buffy teen-adjacent (and Owen- and Maddy-adjacent) Isabel and Tara are replaced by an Old Navy gaggle. The ice-cream monster is less John Carpenter, more cartoon. It’s not scary or mythic. It’s silly. Owen’s embarrassed by it.
But by this point, Owen’s already decided that it’s time to become a productive, male member of adult society and put away childish things. I don’t think this is an accurate representation of the show. I think the movie is once again warping reality around Owen.
This feels like this has to be the last trial, and that Owen’s turned his back on these mysteries for good. But Owen’s still living with something unknown inside of him, and he’s still afraid to look and find nothing.
Owen sleepwalks into middle age. He’s still played by Justice Smith, in theatrical old man makeup that looks like something out of The Pink Opaque, or maybe that original twist ending of Twin Peaks, deliberately wrong for modern screen resolutions. After an asthma/panic attack at his job at a children’s party center, Owen vomits what looks like soil and a mystical substance from The Pink Opaque into the bathroom sink, and cuts himself open to see what’s inside.
The light in Owen’s chest is blue-white, not the saturated pink used in the rest of the movie, and it doesn’t sound the way The Pink Opaque sounds. My understanding is that it’s not The Pink Opaque in there. But at least it’s not the void he’s been so afraid of his whole life.
Curiosity is the only way to know yourself and survive. He doesn’t need to be able to recognize what’s inside of him right away. What matters is that he looks.
NEXT MONTH
Thank you, everyone, for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know they’re very welcome here at the Cosmic Mystery Club.
Next month, we’re continuing the conversation about life, death, and what happens when someone tells you you’re special, in a very different scenario: Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s graphic novel The Wicked + The Divine. It’s a world like ours, except that the gods keep coming back, shining brilliantly before they burn out—and Lucifer’s been framed for murder. See you then.