the tv is haunted
I Saw The TV Glow & Mister Magic
Major spoilers for I Saw The TV Glow & Mister Magic
Regan very generously got us tickets to the UK premier of I Saw The TV Glow. I knew very little about the plot of the film, but knew that it had struck a chord with trans people who like sad music - a demographic I’m very compatible with.
I Saw The TV Glow follows Owen, uncertain of himself, timid and quiet. He meets Maddy, who has embraced being an outcast, angry and daring. The two bond over a Buffy style girls sci-fi show called The Pink Opaque.
The Pink Opaque is about two teenage girls, Isabel and Tara, who met at summer camp many years ago. They use their psychic connection to battle the big bad Mr Melancholy - a villain who wants to send the girls to the Midnight Realm. Owen and Maddy see themselves in the show, on their first night hanging out together Maddy says “sometimes… The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life”.
The Pink Opaque gets cancelled with a cliffhanger ending, and soon after Maddy disappears. In the show, the girls have been separated, sent individually to the Midnight Realm. Years in the future, a fraught adult Maddy tells Owen that she’s there to save him, that he is actually Isabel from The Pink Opaque, and that he’s been in the Midnight Realm all along. In order to return to The Pink Opaque, Owen must be buried alive - just as Isabel was in the series finale.
On the surface ISTTVG is about fandom, and the dangers of becoming so engulfed in a piece of media. More than that, it looks at what happens if you don’t transition, if you stay somewhere that will never understand you. It’s the dangers of the suburbs, and the lifelong malaise that accompany them.
Mister Magic
As I said in my last email, I’ve been really into reading. Mister Magic is the kind of book I would have struggled with a few months ago. There is a point in the book where we must suspend all disbelief. The world that we recognise is fading away, fantasy must be embraced. I found this hard to do, I think my imagination has been in the back seat for a long time. It was exciting to understand this book, to lean into the unbelievable.
Mister Magic exists in a world adjacent to ours. There was a cult children’s tv show called Mister Magic, it stopped running in the 90s. It was beloved, it’s fondly remembered - but there are no remnants of the show. There are no existing episodes. There are rumours that something awful happened, but nothing is concrete.
The more we hear recollections of this joyous, imagination filled show, the more sinister it seems. Its cast of 6 children were all criticised for their ‘flaws’. Mister Magic, the character & tv show, taught them to be “good” - obedient, quiet, docile. The children learnt rhymes “tidy and clean / that’s the way / it’ll keep the darkness at bay”.
“Clean hearts and clean minds, cleanliness at all times! Nothing dirty, nothing bad, always happy, never sad!” They were sent to the show by their parents, who wanted Mister Magic to ‘fix’ them.
When we join the characters, they are adults. Val, the protagonist, remembers nothing of her life with Mister Magic - her father extricated her from the show at 8 years old & hid her past from her. She finds out that she had a sister, Kitty, who couldn’t be saved from the magic realm. Her father had hidden everything from Val, to keep her safe.
These two stories overlap and converge. The Pink Opaque is an escape, a salvation, for the characters in I Saw The TV Glow. The TV show in Mister Magic is a gamified correction facility.
There is a physical place where the film between our world and the other world wears thin. In Mister Magic, the thin place is the basement of the house the parents lived in during production: the magic opens a door into the show. Val goes to the magic realm to save Kitty, but when she gets there realises Kitty is too weak to return to the real world. Ultimately, Val decided to stay in the magic realm, becoming her own Mister Magic. As Mister Magic she allows children to be themselves, teaching them they are good as they are. She gives up her life to save future generations from trauma.
The thin place in ISTTVG is a bar called Double Lunch, where a double bill of bands play during every Pink Opaque episode. This is where adult Maddy brings Owen, to tell him that they have been living in the Midnight Realm. This conversation is interspersed with a double bill of bands playing. Afterwards I realised that this implies we were watching an episode of The Pink Opaque.
Ultimately, Owen is too scared to be buried alive, too scared of the risk to find out if what Maddy said is true. We see him get older, feel the claustrophobia. One day, years later, Owen breaks down at work. He takes himself to the toilet and cuts his chest open. Inside him, he sees the static of a TV glow. The film finishes with him returning to work, ignoring what he has found.
The tv shows, in both cases, symbolise something far harder to talk about. Mister Magic, and its manipulative authoritarianism, stand in for the Mormon church. The acknowledgments open: Yes, I was Mormon. No, I am not anymore.
The book explores what happens after you leave religion, and how isolating it can be when other people you love are still in it. Kitty was left in the magic realm, and was then no longer able to live in the real world. Val reconnects with her mother and finds out her mum had chosen to send her in. That she didn’t want Val as a daughter if she wasn’t brainwashed. It was upsetting to read, even before I realised its relation to Mormonism.
The Pink Opaque, I think, stands for many things: a trans reality, feeling understood for the first time. Director Jane Schoenbrun is non-binary, and talked about how puberty and coming of age can be so dysphoric for trans people. That makes media more important: “this experience of identifying with fiction… to have a taste of something that could feel like coming of age in the right way was a means of survival almost”. In their teenage years Maddy asks Owen if he likes boys or girls, he answers “I like TV shows”.
A lot has been written about the end of ISTTVG. The whole film has a lightness of touch, it’s the opposite of Saltburn. Schroenbrun spoke about their directing style, saying “light touch makes films linger in ways that are more generative and evocative and long-lasting”. Regan and I left the cinema with completely different interpretations. There’s a richness to the openness, you can see it in the public response. It’s why I have thought about it all month, my interpretation has continued to grow and change.
I’ve found it really interesting to reflect on these pieces of media. I hope we’ll get more deep, thoughtful horrors around TV. I have summarised and picked from both, but the original texts are greater than my descriptions. I would recommend reading Mister Magic if you’re intrigued by the concept. I cannot emphasise enough how much I recommend seeing I Saw The TV Glow in the cinema. It’s a deeply troubling film, the most impactful I’ve seen in a long time.