I Saw The TV Glow – a film about fandom and retrospection ... or maybe something deeper? (Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 1 August)

Is there a series of books or a TV show that really gripped you as a child? It didn’t just entertain you, but it fuelled your imagination. You connected with a character and dreamt of being them. You imagined being dropped into the world that unfolded on the page or on the screen, able to interact with the people and situations.

As a child, I loved the character of Bruno Martelli in the television series FAME. The virtuoso keyboard player with an impatience to experiment with electronic forms over the classical repertoire preferred by the oft-frustrated Professor Shorofsky. The series’ accompanying magazines at the time expanded Bruno’s fictional world with their introduction to the real-life talent of actor Lee Curreri, who had composing credits on some of the songs like Be My Music, and whose own life experience had parallels with his character. (Is there any better commendation than this quote from Hans Zimmer: “Lee Curreri is the reason I got my first keyboard”!)

We didn’t have a video recorder at home until the 1990s. (The remote control for the TV was deemed to be an unnecessary and frivolous accessory, deliberately consigned to a cupboard and without batteries.) So I taped the shows by setting a cassette recorder – the one would ultimately load games onto my ZX Spectrum – under the TV. Later, I could listen back to the episodes, recalling the visuals on top of the poor recording of the music and dialogue. I remember being discouraged from continuing this practice on the basis that it verged on obsession. But that’s precisely what it was. A window into another world where a nerdy creator was valued as part of a diverse bunch who weren’t so under the thumb of their school system that they couldn’t break out and impress the world with their talent before tripping up on their difficult home circumstances and poverty.

Having been somewhat disappointed with stage versions of the musical loosely based on the original 1980 film, I revisited the first two series of the TV show a few years ago. Much of it had aged well. Nearly 40 years on, parts of the drama felt juvenile. Yet away from the classroom, the pressures faced by the characters were much darker than I’d appreciated – or remembered – as a child. Acting student Doris Schwartz (played by Valerie Landsburg) no longer felt like a background character but stood out as one of the most diverse perspectives in the series. And the teachers’ backstories felt much more interesting than back in the 1980s.

All of that is a long introduction to the new film I Saw The TV Glow which is released today. Two students, who are a couple of years apart in school, bond over their late-night viewing of a young adult supernatural show The Pink Opaque with its monsters of the week and Mr. Melancholy up in the Moon. When Owen isn’t able to sneak around to Maddy’s house to be able to see the show live – telling his parents that’s he’s on a sleepover with a more boring classmate – Maddy lends him VHS recordings, allowing him to catch up on all the episodes he missed out before becoming obsessed.

Justice Smith plays Owen, a quiet, introverted and hesitant seventh grader. Later Smith impresses with his depiction of Owen’s declining health. Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) is an intense ninth grader who is completely unphased by her platonic relationship with a lad who she allows to sleep on her living room floor as long as he’s up and away before dawn. Both Owen and Maddy have oppressive home lives, ranging from the need to escape outright abuse to ill-tempered parenting, disrespect, neglect and disinterest.

As well as underscoring that their friendship revolves around their love of The Pink Opaque’s surreal plotlines, mood and world building, the pair’s stilted conversations reveal that to different degrees they are uncomfortable in their own skin, or at least in the skin that almost everyone around wants them to wear. “I don't even have my learner's permit yet; how can I have a destiny?” remarks Maddy in the most quotable line of the film. Maddy tells Owen that she’s a lesbian. His hesitation to define his sexuality when asked – Do you like girls? / I don’t know / Boys? / I (stutters) I think that, I like TV shows – feels like it’s coming out of an ignorance there’s anything to discuss rather than knowledge of his inner self.

Maddy’s disappearance and a series of time jumps gives Owen opportunity to revisit his childhood love of The Pink Opaque. The monsters have lost any semblance of believability and the acting seems childish. But the show proves to have a deeper connection to both Owen and a reappearing Maddy.

I Saw The TV Glow has a lot to say about fandom, the experience of mutual fandom – not sure I knew anyone who admitted being as ‘into’ FAME as I was, but there must have been many of them about given the dearth of TV channels back in the 1980s! – and how places and people and cultural icons of our youth change with time. The moment of magic as the teenage pair fall asleep on the floor (for the last time) hints at something supernatural … but what happens over the rest of the film feels very different.

There’s a reading of I Saw The TV Glow that views Maddy’s experiences and engagement with The Pink Opaque through a trans lens. Screenwriter and director Jane Schoenbrun talks about being born into one existence and feeling like you should be living a different one. Watching the film on a Tuesday morning, that didn’t jump out of the screen at me. The notions of cultural ageing and retrospection felt much stronger. Though the trans angle makes (some) more sense of the blurring between Maddy and Owen’s teenage lives and the characters that might be playing inside the TV series, so I introduce it here as a useful spoiler!

The film has a great soundtrack: watch out for the appearance of Phoebe Bridgers. I Saw The TV Glow is being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 1 August.

 

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