Remember that TV show you were completely obsessed with as a teenager? Remember its total governance over your time on whatever night it came out, its indefatigable grip on your imagination afterwards? That's what I Saw the TV Glow is all about. Well, not ‘all’..
. It follows teenagers Owen and Maddie, who bond through an obsession with a TV show – The Pink Opaque – about two girls who embark on weekly quests to defeat supernatural foes. The show offers them a common language and a refuge from their lives, but in doing so it also threatens to envelop them entirely.
We spoke to writer and director Jane Schoenbrun about creating The Pink Opaque and how they feel about the cultish following it's been developing. The Pink Opaque – the TV show within the film – has a very specific look. How did you come up with that? One of the founding ideas writing this movie was that there wouldn't be much distinction between the look of the movie and the look of the show within the movie.
I wanted them both to feel like it felt when you're watching Nickelodeon in the early 90s as a five-year-old and seeing these bright colours and magical worlds – you're not like, 'oh, that's cheap, and that monster is in latex.' You're just like, ‘Oh my God.’ So it's not necessarily how those shows actually looked.
So much of what the movie is emotionally reflecting on is that experience of seeing something magical through the screen in childhood and then trying to recapture or honour that fe.
