I Saw the TV Glow (May 18)

There are a lot of feelings I associate with being universally felt by all awkward, introverted, slightly-too-online millennials in their middle school years: the feeling of alienation, of not fitting in, of being misunderstood and disappointed with the options you have in terms of music and art and culture, but also the rules you’re forced to comply with socially, imposed by protective parents who want to make sure that you are focusing on school at a time when you’re hormonal and liable to act out for attention, but also imposed by your peer group and by individuals who have a better (or at least faster) grasp of the social rules than you do, of seeking out like-minded people and that feeling of relief when you find them and that feeling of betrayal when they let you down. I remember being walked out of my first middle school dance by my dad after lying to him about needing to stay at school late for some kind of study session and having him come to get me when I lost track of time. I remember the sense of relief I felt having him come get me because of how inadequate I felt about participating in that level of social interaction, not being able to get up and dance and having absolutely no interest in doing so but feeling like if I were able to conjure up that want that it would correct all sorts of things that felt wrong and misplaced inside of me.

I remember my first cell phone and my first cell phone bill, back when you would pay a nickel per text without the proper plan (looking back on it that was–holy shit–such highway robbery and how did anyone tolerate that business practice) and running up my parent’s bill to $400 one night when a friend at school texted me that she wanted to kill herself and I stayed up late trying to convince her that she shouldn’t. I remember the horror of that first, bill enclosed in a thick envelope and the sheer terror when the next envelope for the following pay period arrived as a second night’s burst of texts rolled over into another $400. In retrospect now, I wonder if it would have even mattered if I had explained the context of those texts, or if I knew intimately that it didn’t really matter what the excuse was because I had fucked up so soundly that I was unable to redeem myself, but I don’t think I ever told my parents. I remember it taking a year to repay that bill, because $800 in terms of a child’s finances might as well be the equivalent of Bear Sterns’s collapse, but without bankruptcy protections. It was in that miasma of anxiety and self-hatred that I met this person who I assume everyone meets at that age, who understands you completely and makes you feel whole and perfect.

I remember doing this toxic thing that I like to think was pretty common among tweens at the time, where we would share diaries with each other as a mark of intimacy. I remember being intrigued by the way that she had gone back and censored entire days of her life, how ruthless and unsentimental she seemed to have extracted or blacked out an entire entry with no interest in returning to that day or feeling, wondering if it was too personal or just something about me, and every now and again you would get the thrill of reading your own name, of having her address me directly, because, she said, I was the voice inside her head she heard when she wanted to talk to someone–and of course, eventually, because this was the practice, you would exchange journals frequently enough that you would start to cross over into the time period in which you were writing about reading the other person’s journal, the absolute embodiment of middle school angsty ouroboros behavior, the head eating the tail of negative self talk, rumination, and self-obsession, reflecting on how it feels to read someone else’s reflecting, knowing that person would read about your take on their most intimate thoughts in another week or so.

For the life of me, I don’t remember this ever being an especially therapeutic practice beyond the first time, and it seems obvious now that after releasing the genie from the bottle we should have never been allowed to continue exchanging diaries past a certain point because we were all but guaranteeing our reader’s eventual disappointment at the ricochet, as Anne Carson puts it, the recognition of the lack of reciprocal feeling, the inadequacy of the writer to fulfill their reader’s emotional request because of their own incompatible, tragically untranslatable, incommensurable needs and desires.

I remember during that period of time, maybe before my first cell phone, back when schools would publish a “phone book” of student’s family’s phone numbers so that you could call when you got home from school in case there was a group project you had to finish or a horrible crush you wanted to call. I remember messaging friends on AOL messenger about wanting to call someone on the phone or just having done so and not knowing if I would actually do it. I remember the irritation in my friend’s voice when she picked up the phone: “My mom doesn’t like when boys call” or something to that effect, or finding the right moment in an evening to call when she would pick up without going through an adult intermediary. I remember the feeling, which I assume everyone has who might have grown up in this time period, of hanging up after a sharp word and then wanting then needing to call back to know if it cut or, just as often, receiving a cutting observation about myself and hanging up but needing to get in a last word after a staircase thought. I remember calling one evening after one of these volleys of accusations of disinterest or unfairness in the way I had characterized her or vice versa, of promising that we would love each other as friends no matter what and I remember the relief I felt when she sighed and said “Oh [don’t you know?] I will always love you,” before she hung up and I had that promise ringing in my ears. I remember that promise ringing in my ears for the months after when she started to date my best friend and even after that when in the summer of my first year of high school we accidentally ended up taking the same four week course in black and white photography together and found ourselves in dark rooms, disassembling Kodak film in cramped black boxes and washing photo paper in silver nitrate. I remember brief but significant-feeling conversations between the two of us waiting outside of class in the morning while I read some sci-fi fantasy novel that we both liked, the pulse of fear and anticipation every day on the walk from drop off, wondering if we would have time together before we went inside. I took photography the following year I think in part because I was so attracted to the glow of that feeling, the possibility that this halo of good feeling could persist or attract more feeling beyond the strange Saturnalia of the summer.

Our classes diverged a fair bit in high school, but we still crossed paths–she became my editor on the newspaper, one of her life-long goals, the two of us had been hand-picked by our school to be “The Writers,” which meant something based on the legacy of alum who had been produced by our school. High school was when this friend, along with a lot of the people I hung out with, came out as gay. Our school was religious, but Episcopalian, so not as restrictive and conservative as we felt at the time, I think. Looking back, the school was perfectly happy to let boys cross dress for spirit days and wasn’t so condemning of same sex relationships as it was condemning of all relationships on campus of any kind. And the language we had at our disposal then was so inadequate to the task of explaining how we felt about sexuality. We had no tools to talk about being asexual or queer or trans, terms that would later describe her, but wouldn’t quite explain everything for me, because I had been there before those words could slot in to cover the profound sense of loneliness that typified feeling completely inadequate and unsatisfied with the romantic relationships we were engaging in, and the relief we felt when we could interact with one another and note the shared suffering and emptiness in one another, which made everything feel just a little easier because you were doing it with a witness, someone who could say you were seeing things clearly.

I remember one of the last times we interacted in high school in an informal way–this was years after exchanging diaries, those angsty, sentimental phone calls when she would talk about feeling responsible for protecting her younger siblings, making sure they could grow up without being crushed by her parents’ overbearing nature. As seniors we were loaded onto planes to go to a neighbor island for a few days to compete as a class in a series of contests which even now remembering it fills me with existential dread and the most sublime form of embarrassment that I was ever considered capable of inspiring others to participate in any sort of event (I was terrible at it and should never have been asked). I remember us finding ourselves one evening in the main dining hall of this camp sitting next to each other when the power went out for a few minutes at dusk and hundreds of seventeen and eighteen year olds reveled in the liminal space of being cloaked in darkness while also all being crushed together in the same space, and feeling our hands touch and aching for that contact to reignite some semblance of our former closeness as we prepared to go off to college on the East Coast, she to NYC (her dream) and me to some rural school in New England (someone else’s dream), unsure of if we’d ever see each other again.

We did. Through a mutual friend or maybe in the midst of some correspondence we’d struck up in the first semester away from home, she’d offered to have me spend Thanksgiving together, since none of us could afford to go home and, looking back on it now, I think we probably still liked each other a lot and needed someone familiar when everything else seemed so unfamiliar, or maybe she was just being nice in the face of my moodiness and poor coping skills with being homesick. I remember renting a little hotel room I could barely afford, the room was as wide as I was, with a bathroom that was shared on the floor and felt about as spacious as an airplane stall in economy. I remember my best friend, her ex finding a way to negotiate staying with her in her dorm room–in her bed–until her boyfriend had returned for the holiday and requested he leave, so he ended up staying in my room because he had no money.

On Thanksgiving morning, he cut himself making a pie for Friendsgiving and she took him to the ER for hours while I sat awkwardly in the student kitchen with no social understanding of how to leave or where I would even go without my two friends I had intended to spend my holiday with. I have spent years thinking about how I could’ve spent that time instead of moping, feeling abandoned and like a third wheel for that morning, but at the time I think it was just about the worst feeling I had ever experienced. I remember having brought a manuscript of a novel I had been writing to show her, thinking if she read it, it might indicate we were still connected, that we understood each other, but I don’t remember if she ever read it or if I ever asked. I know now that manuscripts don’t rekindle intimacy. It never goes away, just gets replaced with aching if you’re doing it right. After that trip I think my best friend and I had a fight because I had resented him so much for finding it so much easier to talk to her, for how unselfconscious their interactions were, how close, and he visited me at school one more time with a girlfriend when he was passing through a year later, always the bigger man and more generous, and then we never spoke again. I never spoke to either of them again, even though I live approximately half an hour away from one of them and have for the last ten years.

I assumed and assume that this is pretty common occurrence. That it’s the norm if not the rule that we all live within thirty minutes of our middle school guardian angel whom we can’t talk to even if we wanted to, estranged and made strange by time and circumstance. That we are all living out a little bit of our childhood in nostalgia tours of Pete and Pete and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is to say that I Saw the TV Glow really doesn’t need a preamble for me to feel like I understand where Owen (Justice Smith) is coming from.

So much of the discourse around this movie during its festival debut had to do with the way it articulated the trans experience so perfectly, and so thinking about the film as trans allegory was primary in my viewing, while also paying close attention to the send ups of 90s young adult television, that weird and amorphous punk rock shapeshifting media demographic that had its feet planted in childhood and adulthood at the same time.

So much of this film is rooted in the absurdity of childhood, the complete lack of psychic armor children are given to protect themselves from the pain of losing friends and parents, and the psychic balm that television, unsanitized and weird television, could provide. The kind of stuff that would sneak deliriously good music into your ears, whether it was by hiding it in the background at the club the protagonist and the gang frequented in every episode or by secreting pop stars in cameos as anodyne tertiary characters.

The opening sequence has a young Owen staring at an advertisement for the central show featured in ISTG, The Pink Opaque, while behind him a picture of a brush fire hangs on the wall, space where a family photo would surely occupy in any other story. Their high school is called Void.

The tech in this setting is delightfully analog, VHS tapes and cathode ray tube TVs in lieu of streaming and on demand television viewing means that Owen and Maddy’s relationship exists in the exchange of materials not the clandestine “twilight realm” of texting on smartphones. The age gap between them, as Wife puts its, is noticed by both parties, but you can see the ways in which they try to push past it in their opening meeting, Maddy gamely trying to include the younger Owen in a conspiracy of like-minded souls. And though there is no romantic spark, there is a thick cloud of intimacy between the two, especially in the scene when Maddy declares her intentions to leave town and Owen expresses regret. The way her hands trace over his shoulders and neck as she draws a tattoo from the show onto his skin is the encapsulation of the way that intimacy at that age magnifies because of its novelty–the direct corollary to Owen’s later discovery of his imperfect memory of the episodes of The Pink Opaque, their inability to live up to the image he had built up of it in his mind.

In Phoebe Bridgers’s collaboration with Haley Dahl “Claw Machine” (featured as a live performance in the film), the two express Carson’s expression of erotic ache in her chapter on Sappho: “But my heart is like a claw machine / Its only function is to reach / It can’t hold on to anything.” That act of reaching without grasping is true of so much of ISTG, the way that Owen is trying to touch Maddy by becoming interested in her favorite show, the way that he returns to the show when she disappears, the way she returns, the reaching for one’s childhood and the reaching for intimacy that you can’t have, the reaching for an identity that you’ve buried or a feeling you can’t access. “I think I was born bored / I think I was born blue / I think I was born wanting more / I think I was born already missing you,” another verse goes, as Owen and Maddy try to piece together what made their time together as kids so significant and special, each one not quite articulating what it meant to them for fear of saying too much or the wrong thing.

Because, after all, Maddy comes back thinking that Owen understands her perfectly, maybe is the same as her. She quotes what he said to her on the bleachers in high school, when she reminds him that she isn’t interested in dating boys and instead of being able to explain who he’s attracted to, he says it feels like someone’s taken a shovel and dug out the part of him that’s supposed to feel that sort of thing. And in that expression of his emptiness, Owen’s been (maybe) misunderstood by the person he wants to be with most. It’s the interplay between the Drain Lords and the Moon Juice, the one that stops attacking you when you stop thinking about them and the other that makes you think there’s nothing attacking you in the first place.