I really didn’t enjoy this film. It felt like a drama camp improv piece with funding. Having spoken to a queer friend afterward though, they have given me lots of links to articles on how it is a trans metaphor and groundbreaking in a lot of ways.
As a cisgendered person, this went completely over my head. If you would like to read more about this film from a trans person’s perspective, here are some links:
Vulture: I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be
Wussy: A Trans with a Movie Camera – the Directors of Contemporary Trans Cinema
The plot is both simple and convoluted. Owen (Justice Smith) likes to watch TV but his strict mum (Danielle Deadwyler) and dad (Fred Durst) won’t let him watch anything past his 10 o’clock bedtime. He meets the older and sullenly enigmatic Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Payne) who is obsessed with the TV show The Pink Opaque. It’s a bit Buffy and about crime fighting psychics Tara (Lindsey Jordan) and Isabel (Helena Howard). Maddy gets Owen into the show by sneaking him home taped VHS copies – it’s 1996 after all – and then the line between reality and TV fiction blurs.
It is perhaps deliberately a bit of a mess, with long flat-toned speeches to camera about motivations and TV shows, and the gradual realisation that maybe we have been in a TV show the whole time. There are time slips and Owen talking to camera and some metaphors about being buried alive. I can see the trans themes now, about being stuck in an identity that just doesn’t feel right, where a TV show character might seem more real than the life you were living now.
There are a couple of good band performances, some deliberately hammy animations that raise a laugh but I found the pace dragged. And although it probably goes against the whole point of the film, I really wanted to follow Maddy, or Tara as I think they really were, on their adventures.
fillums 