8 minute read
I Saw the TV Glow and It Terrified Me | Julia Kozłowska
“Do they see me staring?” the thought penetrated my mind, making my skin crawl. The people did not notice my sudden distress, but maybe they were just pretending out of politeness. I slowly stood up and started backing away, almost knocking over my plate of cut fruits. Apples were always my favorite, even though they made my lips feel a little bit itchy. That’s what intrigued me about them, I think. Delicious, comforting in their familiarity, and yet, paradoxically causing physical discomfort. One, two, three steps. I could feel my tiny spine bumping directly into grandma’s coffee table. I was petrified, but never shifted my gaze away from the silver screen. The concept of actors, directors, and camera operators was still foreign to me. I will never forget the feeling of accidentally violating someone’s privacy, and even worse, being watched myself.
Another time, my insomniac child self set on a journey to the kitchen to get a glass of cold water as a pitiful, final attempt at raising my chances of falling asleep. Walking through the dark hallway as fast as I could, I noticed a faint light coming from the living room. My dad was asleep on the couch, snoring like a bear mid-hibernation, when my ears picked up something else. A soft murmur coming out of the TV. It was mesmerizing. In that moment I felt like I could watch the screen for hours, listening to its peculiar melody. But at the same time, I could not banish one thought from my mind: “I shouldn’t be seeing this.” There was something awfully wrong about the addictive properties of TV static. Both the sound and the snowy visuals seemed to threaten me with the ability to either suck me into another realm or let out something (or someone) dangerous into my family home.
Those random thoughts of an anxious preschooler with a wild imagination happen to correlate with Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott’s observations about the portrayal of TV in horror. In the book TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen, Jowett and Abbott demonstrate how TV horror infiltrates our homes, our safe spaces, and continues to push the limits of socially acceptable content in popular media. There even is an established horror trope of characterizing the television as a portal to another realm, some of the most famous examples being Poltergeist and both the Japanese and American versions of The Ring. Nostalgic aesthetics of television snow and crunchy VHS tape recordings are used as visual shorthand for understanding the TV as a conduit between the spiritual and the material world. Why? Because of white noise.
Static would appear on old TV screens whenever there would be no signal from the broadcaster. It was like a hidden realm existing in the liminal space in-between TV channels or specific transmissions. This liminality is a perfect setup for horror scenarios because it can create a new threat lurking on the other side of the screen. In Poltergeist and The Ring, the viewer recognizes the TV as a portal because of the way it is stylized even before ghosts start coming out of the screen and threatening the characters’ fragile sense of security.
According to Jowett and Abbott, Poltergeist’s TV has the properties of “both a wondrous and a frightening presence in the home.” Most people look at the family television through a practical lens. They know that it works but not precisely how it works. Poltergeist’s Freeling family believe their TV to be safe despite knowing very little about it. For instance, they treat the fact that the same remote control affects their TV as well as their next-door neighbor’s as a minor inconvenience, not as an opportunity to broaden their knowledge and find a solution to this problem. To many people the technology making TV transmissions possible is more akin to magic. No matter how mundane inventions like the TV set or the internet might seem to us, to some they are still shrouded in mystery, and, as Jowett and Abbott point out, mystery can trigger wonder as well as fright. I could say the same about my love for apples. There is some special irony in my comfort food routinely causing me discomfort.
TVs in horror are not restricted to just being conduits between the land of the living and the dead. As Jowett and Abbott highlight, memory can also be a haunting. Films such as The Ring or Sinister, which play into the cursed tapes trope, highlight TV’s time-morphing properties. The recorded memories gradually destroy the people exposed to the tapes once their obsession with analyzing the past devours them.
TVs disrupt the linear flow of time. They allow the viewer to stop, rewind, and replay specific moments, focus on the most minute details, and find hidden faces in the shadows, encouraging the watcher to pay close attention. Traditional rules of time and space do not apply here. Even outside of horror cinema, television screens can be windows into the past. You can watch old family home videos to reminisce about the good old days, switch to 80s sitcoms with canned laughter of people from the 60s, or watch early films of baby-faced award-winning actors forever frozen in time. You can also see those who are long gone. It is a bit cliché to mention, but watching Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting still feels like being stabbed in the heart with hundreds of needles. In a way, the viewer can be seen as a time traveler who is given the opportunity to watch famous creatives in their prime, and they can do it as many times as they please. The viewer can stop, rewind, replay, and… spiral.
Jane Schoenbrun’s most recent film I Saw the TV Glow takes the idea of characterizing the television screen as a conduit even further, making it a link between alternate realities. I Saw the TV Glow tells the story of Owen and Maddie, two teenagers obsessed with the supernatural teen drama The Pink Opaque. Owen and Maddie feel overwhelmed by family problems, the growing discomfort in their own bodies, and the societal pressure to conform to gender norms, which causes them to seek escapism in their favorite TV show. They begin to identify themselves so deeply with its protagonists, Isabel and Tara, that they start to dissociate from real life and their own bodies more and more often.
The TV lures the viewer with the promise of finding comfort in the fictional world and creates a mental separation between body and mind. When Owen and Maddie watch The Pink Opaque, they are hunched over, trying to be as close to the screen as possible, mouths slightly opened. Once again, TV is the cause of dissociation. Mentally sucked into the show where they feel at home, they leave their numb bodies stuck on the couch. When Maddie and Owen are interacting in the real world, they look stiff, uncomfortable, and not fully aware of their reality. Subtle static in the background contributes to Schoenbrun’s signature surreal aesthetics, hinting at a possible plot twist straight out of The Truman Show.
The lines between the real and the unreal are blurred: Owen goes to Void High School (VHS for short) and talks with Maddie at a queer-friendly bar Double Lunch (referenced in the show). Maddie starts to pick up on these subtle, uncanny details and attempts to convince her friend that they are living in a simulation. She even comes up with a plan for her and Owen to die and be reborn in their real bodies. Sounds like complete insanity, but the twist is, Maddie turns out to be right; their lives are fake, staged by the villain of The Pink Opaque – Mr. Melancholy. Hints of this fakeness become increasingly frequent as Owen tries to deny them and repress his identity as Isabel, his physical health worsening as a result. He repeats a line from the show – “they can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them” – like a religious mantra. By the end, the references to The Pink Opaque become overt, with arcade machines literally spelling it out to the viewer: “Mr. Melancholy’s Midnight Dash. The Race for Your Life,” and the most obvious one, “YOU ARE DYING.” This is where the horror of I Saw the TV Glow lies: being aware that your life is killing you, having the universe scream at you to get out, and yet being deathly afraid of starting anew. The first step will always be the hardest one to take, especially when you no longer trust yourself to distinguish reality from fiction.
