‘I Saw the TV Glow’: The Deadly Illusion of Escapism
By Genavive Rutter
“What if I really was someone else? Someone beautiful and powerful. Someone buried alive and suffocating to death. Very far away on the other side of a television screen.”
Escapism is defined as the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy, but what happens when you let yourself settle into that comfort zone or convince yourself that you can outrun it and never address your current state of being? Furthermore, what happens when that current reality is suffocating you, killing you slowly, and eating you alive from the inside out? That is the exact story the 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow tells and urges viewers to address, driving home the message that “There is still time”.
Our film opens in 1996 on election night where we meet our protagonist Owen, a reserved seventh grader, who is at the school after hours to vote with his mother. As Owen strays around the school he sees Maddy, an odd girl in the ninth grade, sitting alone reading a book titled “The Pink Oquque the Official Episode Guide.” Having heard of the television show, he approaches her starting a conversation about the program. We watch as Owen and Maddy form an unlikely friendship built off their mutual feelings of isolation and love for the fictional television show “The Pink Opaque”.
Later that week Owen sneaks out to Maddy's house to watch “The Pink Opaque” for the first time, as it comes on from 10:30-11 pm and Owen's parents won't let him stay up that late. As they watch the show we see that “The Pink Opaque” follows two young girls with psychic powers named Tara and Isabelle, clearly meant to be parallels to Maddy and Owen. Each week on “The Pink Opaque” the girls fight a new bad guy of the week sent by Mr. Melancholy, the universe's big bad force. After the episode is over Owen settles into his sleeping bag on the floor and Maddy heads to her bedroom but before she leaves she tells Owen “Sometimes the Pink Opaque feels more real than real life… you know?”
Two Years Pass…
We meet Owen again, no longer as a quiet little boy, but as an intrinsically insecure freshman in high school. Life hasn't been the kindest to him as his mother has late-stage cancer and his father is still implied to be abusive and quick to anger. Over these two years, Maddy and Owen never spoke, but she left him tapes of “The Pink Opaque” every week so he could still watch it, even though it came on past his bedtime. Finally, Owen gets the courage to approach Maddy again, and they have a conversation that gives the audience a look into both their internal worlds. Owen asks if he can watch the pink Opaque with her again on Saturday night to which she says “You know I like girls right, I’m not into boys.” Owen stutters, this clearly not his intention in asking her to hang out; when Maddy poses the question back to him, saying “What about you, do you like girls? Boys?” His response foreshadows everything we will soon know about our protagonist. He says
“I… I don't know I think I just like TV shows. When I think about that stuff it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides and I know there's nothing in there. But I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check. I know there's something wrong with me, my parents know it too even if they don’t say anything,” to which Maddy replies, “Maybe you're like Isabelle… afraid of what's inside.”
At this point, it’s evident that Owen is grappling with something internal. He knows he's different from those around him, yet he consistently chooses to ignore it, pretending the heavy, constant weight on his chest doesn't exist. As Maddy implied he is just like Isabelle… in more ways than just one. That weekend, they get together to watch their beloved “Pink Opaque” once more. As Maddy talks to Owen about running away, she confesses that she’s convinced she would die if she stayed in that town, and she was certain of it. Owen decides not to go with her, and by that August, she vanishes without a trace, leaving behind only her burning TV set in the backyard.
Maddy and Owen both live in their shared fantasy world of “The Pink Opaque” feeling seen by the characters and the show giving them a much-needed escape from their respective lives. However, Maddy and Owen are opposites when it comes to addressing their real problems and their deteriorating internal worlds. Maddy is a bolter, she runs from the things that scare her rather than facing them. She operates from a place of fear, believing that things will be different somewhere else, but everywhere she goes she will always take herself, which is something she cannot accept to be true. In the same breath, Owen knows he is lying to himself about who he is, but rather than running, he stays sedentary. Living the same life he has always lived, avoiding the thing that resides inside him, but this life could never be enough… because it was never truthfully his in the first place. Ignoring the monster in his chest is easier than welcoming it. As Maddy runs he lays down, both escaping to the same fantasy that is killing them slowly in different ways.
Eight Years Pass…
Owen is working a dead-end job at the movie theatre, lonely and invisible in his own life. Maddy is still missing, presumed dead. When one fateful evening shopping late at the grocery store he sees Maddy again, she appears like a ghost back from the dead, a little bit cold, somehow stranger, but still Maddy. She babbles on about how it isn’t safe to talk there and takes him to a dive bar on the edge of town. There she tells Owen where she has been all these years…she went back to her real life, where she lived as her true self… she went back to “The Pink Opaque”. This is the point in the film where it becomes an entirely different movie depending on who is watching, which is what I think is so charmingly unique about I Saw The TV Glow. You can believe Maddy when she says she has been inside “The Pink Opaque”, and this turns into a black-and-white Sci-Fi thriller, which I think is a valid interpretation on its own.
However, the other way to look at this is to not believe Maddy, and look at what eight years of a dissociative episode rooted in familiar childhood escapism has done to her. It is important to note that however you look at Maddy’s last eight years, it is clear that Owens is the same. As Maddy is going on about where she has been, her dialogue is intersliced with memories that Owen has blocked out from their time watching “The Pink Opaque” together. Memories of Owen cross-dressing, wearing a floor-length pink prom dress, memories in which we see Owen smile for the first time in the film, although small, it is still a smile. Owen is trans, and he buries it so deeply and ignores it so greatly, that it takes Maddy coming back from the presumed dead for him to even remember that he ever entertained this very big part of himself in the first place.
Maddy tells him that if he wants to return to their true world with her, he should meet her at the high school the next day at midnight. There, they will bury themselves to journey back to “The Pink Opaque” and defeat Mr. Melancholy once and for all, the one who is holding their real bodies captive underground. This delusion of being held underground coincides with how “The Pink Opaque” ended, with Tara and Isabelle succumbing to Mr.Meloncholy, unable to defeat him. Owen shows up to find Maddy under a rainbow parachute, like the ones from elementary school gym class. Here, Maddy breaks the fourth wall monologuing to Owen and the audience, where she gives us more of an in-depth explanation of the last eight years, and how she got into “The Pink Opaque”. We learn that she went to Phoenix when she ran away all those years ago and that it didn't solve a single problem she was running from. Maddy was just moving through life on autopilot saying “Time wasn't right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. And then I was 20. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over in a DVD”.
Watching someone so easily speak about being checked out of your own body and feeling like a backseat driver in your own life was something I had never seen put into words so raw and eloquently. When you thought running would make it better and you get to the end of that marathon only to find everything is the same, just with a different coat of paint, life can feel hopeless. With that feeling in the pit of her stomach, Maddy says she paid a mall burnout guy $50 to bury her alive, where she died and woke up in her real life, as Tara in “The Pink Opaque”. When she was there and saw what Mr. Meloncoly had done to both of them, she knew she had to come back to save Owen or rather her real name… Isabelle. Post monologue she leads Owen to the football field where she has two holes dug for them, to return to “The Pink Opaque”… to their true self. Owen freaks out and runs away leaving Maddy there alone. Maddy is never heard from again.
I like to think that she got to return to her fantasy world of “The Pink Opaque” where she and Isabelle fought monsters of the week for all eternity, or perhaps she crawled out of that hole and turned her life around. Maybe she went somewhere the trees looked different and things felt different. Where she got to live out a whole life, one that felt real and tangible. Complete with a house she could call home and a partner that felt safe. But I fear Maddy laid down in that hole and never got up, she ran and ran and ran until there was no ground left to cover… until she became one with it. Maddy represents the parts of ourselves that are so fearful of our own backstories, the less-than-savory places we come from, and the need to not recognize ourselves.
Escapism is an easy thing to settle into, the illusion that things are better than they are is comforting when life feels like a constant uphill battle. But that illusion only lasts so long, and when the pink dust fades and you see it has just been dirt this whole time, it can be debilitating.
As hard as you may try you can’t outrun yourself, those places you come from and the ghosts that reside in your soul are there to stay. It is better to befriend those ghosts, sooner rather than later, or else they will eat you alive.
Twenty Years Pass…
Over the years Owen thinks about Maddy, wondering if he made the right choice. In moments he lets himself think about his true self, someone beautiful and powerful, but chalks those thoughts up to fantasy. On a walk home, Owen passes chalk on the sidewalk that spells out “There is still time.” The most blatant sign from the universe that he can still open himself up and address what's been there all along, he can still live a warm and fulfilling life as the person he is supposed to be this entire time. He looks back for a moment…but he keeps walking. Perhaps once he leaves the frame the message is not for Owen any longer, but for the viewer. To remind you to address the things inside, to remind you that there is still time, you just have to choose to not keep walking as you have been.
The movie theatre closes, but Owen’s manager takes him along to the new family fun center where he works restocking the ball pit. He stays in his childhood house. Raises a family of his own there. Even upgrades to a flatscreen TV. Becomes a productive member of society. Living the same life he had been living twenty years ago, settled in good enough, scared to want for anything more in fear of addressing what's inside. It's easy to live the same life for forty-three years, but it was a life that was never meant to be his. We see Owen as he is now, forty-three years old, although he looks to be in his sixties, living a lie has not been kind to him. His breathing is heavy and labored, wheezing with every breath… he is quite literally suffocating under it all. While working a birthday party at the family fun zone all this pressure comes to a head causing Owen to have an unprecedented panic attack. In one sudden moment, it all caught up to him. The lying, the passiveness, the fear, the questions, the confusion, he realizes what he's done.
It cuts to him lying shirtless in the bathroom recovering from the attack with a switchblade in his hand. He cuts his chest open but what comes out is not blood, it's TV static, a beautiful pink TV glow. He stares in the mirror wearing an ear-to-ear smile, his breathing slows, he's standing up straight for the first time in the film, he looks relieved, genuinely happy. In a fleeting moment, he sees himself for what he really is, he did what he said he was too scared to do all those years ago with Maddy on the bleachers… he opened himself up and checked. However, Owen puts his shirt back on and walks outside. Apologizing to everyone he walks by without a single person addressing him.
It is an open, bleak ending, but there is no binary ending because this is not a binary story. It can be interpreted as a pivotal moment of self-reflection for Owen where he realizes what he needs to do. Or you see him go right back into the cycle of denial unable to accept his true identity. The beautiful thing is that you have the choice, just as you have the choice in your own life. No matter how you interpret Owen’s fate, the way he was living was killing him. He chose to settle into the familiar comfort of escapism, saying he didn't like to think about himself, he just liked TV shows. This comfort zone made it easy for him to keep pushing it down further and further, suffocating him, just as it had Maddy all those years ago. He hid as best as he could but it always found him, in little moments and in grand panic. In the end, he always saw the TV glow but chose to just watch the show instead.
I Saw the TV Glow is a deeply personal film that can be interpreted entirely differently from person to person, and even from watch to watch depending on where you're at in your own life. You can believe there really was an alternate reality where Maddy and Owen were Tara and Isabelle from “The Pink Opaque”. Or you can believe Maddy dug herself out of the ground and lead a beautiful life. Or you can believe Owen fell back into familiar patterns. But one thing remains in every ending and in every timeline… there is still time.
There is still time for you…
