Allow me to set the scene:
There once was a boy. He didn’t have many friends and that he moved a lot didn’t help that cause. He wasn’t very good at sports, to put a finer point on it, he was downright awful. He was shy, awkward, uncomfortable in his body, all the things that mark your usual brand of pre-teen outcast. To say he was sad a lot of the time would be an understatement. It wasn’t anything his family did that caused the overwhelming sense of melancholy that overtook him on many a day, it was just how his brain worked. A few synapses fire off the wrong way and boom! you get one depressed kid.
It happens, sometimes boys like this become more confident men, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they become something way worse. But one of the bright spots that started to arrive in the monotonous humdrum of this adolescent’s existence was when his father happened to leave the tv going after a Braves-Cubs game on WGN. The pater familias in question asked the son, “have you seen this show? It’s pretty good.” The television program that followed the latest Braves drubbing of the pathetic Cubs was a small-screen spinoff of the flop Fran Rubel Kuzui (a name he did not know) film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He mostly remembered the movie for both not being very good and as an early comeback vehicle for a then rehabilitating Paul Reubens (a name he very much knew). This kid was dubious, but he did like monsters, and his dad rarely went in for this kind of thing with him. So, he put the comic books down for an hour and watched Sarah Michelle Gellar try to revive something that had no business being zombified.
Within that hour, it became his favorite show. Granted, the previous holder of that title was Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and that bar was so low you could trip over it on your way to another destination. But all the same, it was the first time the boy had found something that he was as into as some people are into Star Trek or Star Wars. When it became available, he picked up the first season on DVD and got as caught up as he could. Then, as the series was currently in its third season, he went and ordered VHS bootlegs of the second season (with dvd menus included). He started posting in forums dedicated to the series, and visiting websites like the long-defunct Whedonesque. Once he was finally up to date, he started watching the show weekly, and then its spinoff. And books set in that same world. To say he was obsessed is burying the lede.
In retrospect, and viewed through much older eyes, it was a series with a lot of flaws and the less said about its creator, the better. But in that moment, that boy who was slowly maturing into the man he was going to become, found something that spoke to his interests and sparked his imagination. It gave him something to look forward to, which was in short supply when you can’t drive, are painfully shy, and your parents don’t have a lot of money. And if the man that boy turned into could add all of this up, what he would say is that that might have been the nexus point of how he found himself through art. Or at least, he could argue, that art brought him the kind of satisfaction that most other people got through other things in life. To him, engaging with art was like watching your favorite team win the Superbowl, or minding a beautiful garden, or fixing a problem with a car. Those kinds of everyday interests held minimal attraction to him, and instead it was the realms of the imaginary that he could not escape the pull of. It’s what led him to stage acting, and then music, and then film criticism, and most recently fiction.
When that now-adult saw I Saw The TV Glow, the new film from Jane Schoenbrun, he knew there was a specific kind of message being parlayed from filmmaker to audience about the journey that introspective teen Owen (Justice Smith) embarks upon. From his own discovery of the Buffy-like (though with a dash of The Secret World of Alex Mack) late night tv program called “The Pink Opaque”, to his friendship with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) which turns metaphysical over time, to the longing he has based on the idea that he may have made the wrong choice at some point along the road, it seems relatively clear that the film is intended as a queer allegory. But artists being artists, we see what we see, and what stuck just as strongly with that viewer is the power art can hold over our lives and our joy. It hit that viewer* hard and has only grown in the succeeding weeks since he saw it.
And well, if that doesn’t sell you on it, how about this? It’s a Vaporwave take on Videodrome. There, I went for the cheap pull quote instead. Happy? Good. Hope to hear from you about it someday. Fred Durst is in it too, in a small but pivotal role. Talk about a different generational touchstone.
*That viewer is me. Surprise! Now tell me what the best season of Buffy was.