(SPOILER ALERT FOR ENDING!!!)
Wearing clothes that we usually don’t wear can sometimes make us feel uncomfortable. Sometimes making us feel like we are the center of attention for all of the wrong reasons. If we wear something that someone else forces us into, we feel weird, we don’t feel like ourselves.
So imagine if you were born in the wrong body or were conformed to being someone you don’t want to be.
I Saw the TV Glow takes place in a small town in New Jersey. It follows two teenagers, Owen and Maddy, and the friendship they form through a supernatural tv show called the ‘Pink Opaque’
From the get go it is somewhat obvious that Maddy and Owen, especially Owen, don’t exactly fit in. They are considered the “weird” kids at school, but in reality they are just figuring out who they are, just like any other teenager. They grow an odd comfort to the tv show and it starts to become the only thing where they feel seen.
The ‘Pink Opaque’ gets cancelled and soon after that Maddy goes missing.
Towards the end of the movie Owen is still stuck. He is living as someone who he doesn’t want to be but continues to be in order to fit in. When Owen sees Maddy after years they are entirely different. Their hair is short, they dress differently, but most of all they look more free. Owen, on the other hand dresses the way people expect him to dress, acts the way people expect him to act, he doesn’t do anything for him. Maddy pushes him to embrace his true self but he refuses.
At the end of the movie Owen snaps. He is working at a kid entertainment place and they are singing happy birthday to a child. Owen looks sickly, his skin is dry and frail and his lips are incredibly chapped. He can barely sing along, he continuously crouches over and struggles but no one pays attention to him. Then suddenly, Owen screams. Everyone freezes, not in a shocked kind of way, but in a way that feels like time itself just stopped completely. Owen screams “I’m dying right now!” Then after he calms down he whispers “I’m sorry” then collapses onto the floor.
I feel like the ending symbolizes how Owen feels like he wasted his entire life being someone that he isn’t. He spent the entire time focused on how others would perceive him, trying to fit into this “standard” that society has instead of being his true authentic self. The ending where he is shown to have frail skin and dry lips, can be seen as him dying. He is dying because the regret of conforming into someone he doesn’t want to be has caught up to him. The lie he was displaying to everyone, including himself, started to feel useless, and it was too late to do anything about it.
In an interview with Jane Schoenbrun, the writer / director of I Saw the TV Glow who also identifies as a nonbinary person, they say that while they were writing the movie they were just beginning to transition. They explain how the movie comes from a place where “half of life sort of knowing that something was wrong subliminally and looking for the language to explain why.” This ties in with the movie in the sense that Owen spent half of his life pretending to be someone that he isn’t just to end up feeling like he wasted so much of his time not truly living for himself.
Every teenager who identifies as LGBTQ+ or who are discovering themselves should watch I Saw the TV Glow, it teaches us how we should always embrace our true selves and never pretend to be someone we aren’t in order to please others or to fit in. At the end of the day it’s our life and we deserve to live for ourselves, not for anyone else.
