In Theaters: As you have no doubt noticed if you live in Ithaca, the “collegers” (as my girls call them) are back and that means so is Cornell Cinema! They kick off their fall lineup with a new 4k restoration of Thelma & Louise this evening in honor of its 35th anniversary. I’m going to catch the final screening of The Wrong Girls at Cinemapolis before it closes myself, though, then follow it up with Buddy and/or It Ends at the Regal Ithaca Mall later in the week. We’re also hoping to see Coyote vs. Acme as a family there or at Cinemapolis but not until after next Thursday.
Jason Statham in non-mythological mode. The film takes advantage of the agoraphobic/claustrophobic contrasts afforded by a cargo ship on the high seas: an open-air showdown in the former register lets us feel the full heft of a fire axe, and while the close-quarters fight choreography typical of the latter might not be flashy, it does rank among the year’s best. I don’t know if Mutiny will still be on my top ten list come Oscar night, but Adrian Lester’s U.S. Navy captain who leads by looking away is the excuse I’ve been waiting for to write about the lessons I learned as a manager from Damian Lewis’s Major Dick Winters in Band of Brothers, so stay tuned to ye olde blog around then for more!
I also enjoyed The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Tony, which wisely leans into the hagiography inherent in most biopics. All three movies likewise remain at both Cinemapolis and the Regal. I wasn’t as keen on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which continues its run at the same two theaters, but it does feature some beautiful matte paintings.
Home Video Recommendation: Speaking of films from 1991, even with the fall semester in full swing, now is a fine time to watch A Brighter Summer Day. Here’s what I said about it on Letterboxd earlier this month:
Perhaps the shortest four-hour-long movie ever made. Every single scene contains an object or a line of dialogue that anticipates a later event and/or echoes an earlier one, but like the works of Hawks and Tolstoy that we are explicitly invited to compare it to, Brighter Summer Day‘s construction feels organic, not mechanical.
Great art might also follow a blueprint, but it can’t be taken apart and put back together again the way Chi-tsan Wang’s Cat does with the radio that belongs to his friend Xiao Si’r (Chang Chen). Take the advice that Si’r is given by his father (Kuo-Chu Chang), for instance: “a person who’ll apologize for wrongs he didn’t commit is capable of all sorts of terrible things.” It indicts the state he works for when it demands this very thing of him later and resonates with Honey’s (Hung-Ming Lin) observation that Shandong (Alex Yang) doesn’t “seem the type that’s not afraid to die.” But look how far these insights get each of them!
Director Edward Yang clearly hopes that *we* will be able to make more out of his grand design than Honey took away from War and Peace, but it’s hardly as if he fancies himself Lao Tzu at the Han-ku Pass. While he knows the flashlight he wields is better than a knife and while he hopes the path he’s lighting leads to a better world than the one he’s depicting, the burden is on us to follow it and find out.
The Nitrate Picture Show was on my radar for a number of years before it finally dawned on me that I lived close enough to actually go to it. Despite being more than a decade older and located almost exactly the same distance from my home in Ithaca, Capitolfest somehow flew under it until just a few months ago when someone I met at NPS recommended that I attend. The festival focuses on “rarely-seen silent and early talking movies,” and when I realized that well over 90% of the films that played there the past few years would have been completely new to me, I immediately secured lodging and registered for the 23rd edition. And so it was that I came to spend last weekend in The Capitol Theatre, a nearly hundred-year-old movie palace in Rome, New York, switching back and forth between these two front-row views of the red velvet curtains behind its original Möller theater organ, which was kept busy by some of the world’s best silent film accompanists:
Capitol Arts Complex Director Art Pierce joked that the lineup consisted of “too many films” in his introduction. While it definitely did look overwhelming on paper, the generally short runtimes associated with movies from this era (Captain Blood, the longest one in the program, was still less than two hours), intermissions built into the sessions, and ample breaks between them all combined to create an atmosphere that, as Capitolfest’s slogan says, was more akin to “a vacation, not a marathon.” Another relevant factor for me as someone trying to “cover” the event was that because these titles screen so infrequently, very little has been written about them, so the cursory research I typically do before logging something on Letterboxd never took very long, making it gratifyingly easy to keep up with everything.
Such was the case with two British features from the 1930s given their belated U.S. premieres on the second day, Raise the Roof and Mr. Satan, which were both shown on 35mm prints from the BFI National Archive that looked pristine. This perhaps shouldn’t be surprising considering that the program notes for Roof quote BFI’s Hannah Prouse as saying that it “has screened a couple of times in the UK, but otherwise has only been accessed for research purposes.” That film, the first foray into talkies by Betty Balfour (who per Pierce “is generally considered to be Britain’s most popular star of the 1920s”), doesn’t really come to life until the final reel when the down-and-out theater troupe she’s part of pulls a whole new show together in one day by turning their missing costumes and sets into a delightfully risqué theme, but Mr. Satan is a blast right from the start. It stars James Stephenson and festival tribute star “Skeets” Gallagher as the suavely unflappable journalist Tim Garnett and his American photographer, who are basically 007 and Felix avant la lettre. It also features Chili Bouchier as a woman far too intelligent and resourceful to simply fall into Garnett’s arms, but who of course proceeds to do just that, and Franklin Dyall as a character with the perfect Bond villain name “Zubova” and a plan for world domination that he naturally reveals to our hero in a monologue. Which: his goal is essentially to start World War II! Satan lacks the globe-trotting locations that are, admittedly, a big part of what makes the superspy genre so fun, and the action sequences are rudimentary aside from an impressive plane crash, but it’s remarkable how much of the now-familiar template was already in place as early as 1938.
The two aptly named Rob’s Rarities programs curated and introduced by film historian Rob Stone were even more obscure. The first consisted of comedies from the 1910s accompanied on organ by Ben Model, including Babe’s School Days, Oliver Hardy’s last surviving appearance for the East Coast-based Lubin Manufacturing Company; Gravy, which looks like something the sketch comedy troupe The State might have come up with had they worked for Metro Pictures in 1915 instead of MTV in 1995; and the Larry Semon vehicle Plans and Pajamas, during which I unfortunately spaced out. Such are the perils of the film festival firehose! The second was a tribute to Jerry Lewis in honor of his centenary highlighted by a hilarious “screen test” for Milton Berle and footage of Dean Martin MC-ing the “premiere” of one of Lewis’s Gar-Ron Productions. My only complaint is that I wish we could have seen the movie itself to provide a point of comparison for the Gallagher two-reeler The Finishing Touch that screened the following day because, as I said on Letterboxd, it “feels like a more polished version of what I imagine they might look like.” Other shorts shown throughout the weekend included the fourth reel of The Majesty of the Law, an otherwise lost silent (which was accompanied on organ by David Peckham) that contains a nifty portrayal of a sophisticated holdout device (although in classic cinematic fashion the cheater inefficiently uses it to save a seven of all cards until he can make four of a kind and defeat aces full); a très bizarre Terrytoon called French Fried; and informative documentaries about Gallagher and his fellow tribute star Charles Ruggles directed by the Capitol’s AJ Parker.
Speaking of Gallagher, the film he shined brightest in was The Perfect Clue: even though Pierce’s program notes explain that he was brought in only two days before shooting started, his performance as a blotto playboy besotted with female lead Dorothy Libaire’s Mona Stewart really is the best thing about it. Meanwhile, my favorite Ruggles performance was his star turn as a callow socialite in The Girl Habit, which starts out like a feature-length version of the shopping scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and ends up like a comedic version of The Shawshank Redemption. Both halves work better than you might think because Ruggles and the supporting cast featuring some of the best character actors in Hollywood history (including Margaret Dumont, Allen Jenkins, and Donald Meek) are terrific. My personal applause-o-meter seemed to indicate that my fellow attendees preferred him as a contentedly middle-class older gentleman happily–and realistically!–married to Mary Boland’s Jessie Todd in Mama Loves Papa, though. Regardless of which one you like better, as my fellow NPS vet Joshua said on Letterboxd, this duo and Mind Your Own Business (all of which were presented on 35mm, as was Perfect Clue) were “arguably the most enjoyable films of the festival.”
These movies all benefitted from being shown at an event organized around one of their best elements. The flip side of this coin is trying to decide what to say about an elegant masterpiece like Trouble in Paradise and getting hung up on the fact that it might not even represent one of Ruggles’ three best performances in the festival! The literature on director Ernst Lubitsch and his “touch” is vast, so suffice to say that the only film I had already seen going into Capitolfest 23 made for a perfect nightcap, and I can’t think of a better place to have finally experienced it on the big screen than a theater where, according to Pierce’s program notes, it played in January 1933 during its original theatrical run.
Another highlight was the 35mm print of Vitagraph’s 1924 adaptation of Captain Blood that screened on Saturday. It was preceded by an equally epic tale of film preservation by Library of Congress Nitrate Vault Leader George Willeman, who described starting with a nitrate print that Warner Bros. (which bought Vitagraph in 1925) struck from the original negative in 1935. As quoted in William Remmers’ excellent program notes:
We believe it was made to see if the action/battle scenes could be reused for the remake. Most of the model shots and big explosions are missing from the nitrate we hold; removed and slugged with blank film. Long story short, none of the shots save one was used in the remake.
To replace the missing footage, we acquired three elements: A partial-tinted show print from UCLA and two 9.5mm prints: one from the EYE Institute and the other from Kevin Brownlow. It took several months, but we were able to place all the missing shots back in. Our lab created a 2K digital master from our work from which the new print was struck. Now, it is obvious where the 9.5 shots were interpolated, and we were a bit concerned about how that would be accepted, but they are all short and happen at the height of action. Hopefully the audience is fully invested in the picture and won’t dwell on that.
He need not have worried: when the boat blew up, the crowd went wild! Willeman was also responsible for bringing Brett Miller to Rome to accompany the film with the knockout score he reconstructed from the original cue sheets. But while this was perhaps its most extraordinary screening, the biggest revelation of the weekend was The Home Maker, which David Peckham accompanied on organ the previous evening. This handsome tale of an unhappy bread-winner (Clive Brook) married to a miserable housewife (Alice Joyce) who change places in the aftermath of an accident proved to be a fascinating companion to the Mikio Naruse late silents I’ve been enjoying on the Criterion Channel recently, particularly the similarly flip-flopped gender roles in Every-Night Dreams. But while the families in both movies are clearly better off with mom working and dad taking care of the kids, here everyone is unequivocally happier as well. This is enough to render the outrageous “double ending” (to use Matt Strohl’s term) absurd to the point of being legible as parody, which is a testament to how much more progressive audiences of the time were than we sometimes give them credit for.
Believe it or not, the titles mentioned above constitute barely half the total number I watched and omit three more 35mm presentations and four movies accompanied on organ, including a soufflé starring Constance Talmadge called Breakfast at Sunrise that was given even more lift by the great Dr. Philip C. Carli. While these screenings weren’t quite as memorable, the experience as a whole is one I won’t soon forget. Next year’s tribute stars Marian Nixon and Jack Oakie are nearly completely unknown to me, which carries with it the tantalizing prospect of additional discoveries; I’d also like to explore the town more and maybe try some local delicacies like chicken riggies and Utica greens, which I failed to do this time around in part because I proceeded straight from the final movie of session #7 (Paris Green accompanied on organ by Ben Model) to pick My Loving Wife and our dog up from a week at the family cottage in Ontario. Last but not least, it occurs to me that Capitolfest represents a better opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to film culture than NPS since it covers less-well-trodden ground. So I’ll be back, in other words, and probably sooner rather than later!
Previous film festival dispatches canbe found here.
Home Video Recommendation: I’m normally wary of biopics, especially when they’re about people whose work I’m familiar with like Anthony Bourdain, but I’m cautiously optimistic about Tony because it’s directed by Matt Johnson, whose Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is probably my favorite comedy of 2026. I’m already angry that it isn’t going to get nominated for a Best Film Editing Oscar, and this bottle of Orbitz, a load-bearing element in the time travel plot, is headed for my personal Movie Prop Hall of Fame:
In Theaters: I will be in Rome, New York tomorrow until Sunday to attend Capitolfest 23, my very first time at this event–stay tuned for a “dispatch” blog post in a couple/few weeks! I’m going to Canada for a couple of days after that, but am hoping to catch The End of Oak Street at the Regal Ithaca Mall after I return. My Loving Wife is a big Matthew McConaughey fan and we’re planning a date night outing to see The Rivals of Amziah King at Cinemapolis as well, but ideally we’ll have the luxury of waiting until next week.
The Odyssey, which continues its run at both theaters, remains my favorite holdover for a third week in a row. I also enjoyed I Want Your Sex (Cinemapolis), Spider-Man: Brand New Day (Cinemapolis & Regal), and Toy Story 5 (Regal). Finally, your special events/repertory highlight is definitely the two screenings of Mulholland Drive at Cinemapolis on Tuesday because all David Lynch fans should experience it on the big screen at least once.
Home Video Recommendation: I recently caught up with Bellissima after missing it at this year’s Nitrate Picture Show (which I only attended for one day) and it’s great! I marked my Letterboxd movie diary entry for it as “contains spoilers,” but those don’t start until the second paragraph. Here’s the first:
Reminds me of French Cancan, except here the film director Alessandro Blasetti (playing himself) is helpless in the face of humanity as a force of nature–not just the stage mothers shouting “mine is bellissima!” which Pauline Kael says inspired it, but also his braying colleagues–instead of able to harness it. Except, of course, that the true analog for Jean Gabin’s Henri Danglard is Anna Magnani’s streetwise I-will-survivor Maddalena Cecconi.
Read the rest after you see it, then drop me a line in the comments if you can think of a more misleading DVD cover than this one for the Entertainment One release I recently bought on Amazon, which gives no hint whatsoever that the film is a lively comedy:
Bellissima is also available for rental on Prime Video.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
The holdover highlight is once again The Odyssey, which continues its run at both Cinemapolis and the Regal, but if your plans include more than just a trip to the cinema, consider seeing I Want Your Sex at the former instead. Here’s what I recently said about it on Letterboxd:
Olivia Wilde is spending 2026 crusading against the “fertility crisis” by making date night movies that actually do increase the chances that dinner and a movie are followed by enjoyable consensual sex! This one is more adventurous than The Invite but as aphrodisiacs, it’s a draw.
There’s not much happening on the special events front this week, but noteworthy repertory options include screenings of family favorite The Sandlot at the Regal Monday-Wednesday and two showings of Love & Basketball, another excellent sports movie, at Cinemapolis on Tuesday.
Home Video Recommendation:Obsession recently concluded an eight-week run as my favorite new film in Ithaca theaters, which will likely be the longest of Movie Year 2026. While that hardly guarantees an appearance on my annual Top Ten (Percent) list–The Phoenician Scheme missed the cut last year despite holding this honor–I do find myself thinking about it fairly often. Like this shot, for instance:
Which corresponds to the first moment Michael Johnston’s Bear says anything that could be construed as an apology. In other words, he’s saying “I’m sorry” to his own reflection! This is a hard film to talk about without verging into “spoiler” territory, so I don’t want to say much more here, but check out my Letterboxd movie diary entries here and here for further thoughts after you watch it. Obsession is now streaming on Peacock with a subscription and is available from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment via a variety of other rental and purchase options, including physical media.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts canbe found here.A running list ofall of my “Home Video” recommendations can be found here.
“It was raining last night and I couldn’t sleep, so I started my favorite TV show again, The Pink Opaque.”
So says Justice Smith’s Owen in voiceover in the first scene which follows I Saw The TV Glow‘s title card. The film is nearly four minutes old at that point, and we already know a little something about TPO because it’s there right from the start, appearing first in the form of a younger version of Owen (Ian Foreman) watching a television in his living room that suddenly goes the color of Manic Panic Fuschia Shock in the movie’s second shot:
Then takes over the screen in the third shot with a promo for this week’s episode that features one of its two heroes Isabel (Helena Howard) striding confidently across a football field with an axe:
In a gesture you’d never notice if you weren’t looking for it, she seems to wave at Owen from under the show’s title:
But he isn’t looking for it and doesn’t react. There’s a dissolve from his face to a group of school children that includes him playing parachute games in the gym:
Then that title card, and then we’re off. The shot of adult Owen staring into a campfire above cuts to one set on election night 1996 (as we’re informed by another set of handwritten pink titles), where under the light of a Fruitopia machine older kid Maddy (Jack Haven) will properly introduce him to the television program which will (not) change his life. “It’s a kid’s show, right?” he asks:
“No, no way. Who told you that?” Maddy says incredulously, putting down the episode guide she’s been reading. “I mean, yeah, technically it’s on the Young Adult Network, but it’s way too scary and the mythology is way too complicated for most kids.”
She deems his reply (“I see commercials for it all the time–it looks amazing!”) sufficiently respectful, and the scene continues with her lending him the episode guide:
And ends with a plan being hatched when Owen admits that his early bedtime doesn’t permit him to watch it when it comes on Saturdays at 10:30pm as “the last show in the block before they switch to black-and-white reruns for old people.” Thus it is that a couple of scenes later when Owen’s mom (Danielle Deadwyler) drops him off at a friend’s house for a sleepover, he only pretends to ring the bell:
And instead scurries off to Maddy’s to watch The Pink Opaque with her and her friend Amanda (Emma Portner). The episode that airs that night features an opening-credits font instantly recognizable to all fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
And a terrifying incredible melting ice cream man that appears to be about to devour a child in their own bedroom, who as William Hughes noted in an article for the AV Club is basically “a horror-movie version of ice cream mascot Mr. Tastee” from the classic Nickelodeon television program The Adventures of Pete & Pete:
The sequence ends with Maddy saying that she identifies more closely with the series’ other protagonist Tara (Lindsey Jordan) than Isabel, who she describes as “kind of a drip,” and confessing that “sometimes The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life”:
And a dissolve first from Owen to Isabel as he walks back to his friend’s house the following morning:
Then from a carefree, sunlit Isabel back to Owen (now played by Smith) at a carnival two years later:
With Owen’s change in orientation toward Isabel seeming significant even if it isn’t yet clear why. We learn more about what actually happens on The Pink Opaque in this sequence than any other courtesy graphics representing the tape recordings Maddy has been making Owen, who still isn’t allowed to stay up late enough to watch the show live, which accompany a long shot of him walking through their school as a song Caroline Polachek created for the film called “Starburned and Unkissed” plays in the background:
And excerpts from a re-run of the pilot episode where we meet the demons Marco and Polo and the “big bad” Mr. Melancholy (all also played by Emma Portner) for the first time:
And in which Tara replies to Isabel’s question “am I going crazy?” by portentously admonishing her, “never let anyone convince you of that.”
The following scene contains what must be TV Glow‘s most oft-quoted line. Owen spots Maddy eating lunch alone on the bleachers and, mustering up the courage to actually TALK to her again, says that he’d like to come over again to watch The Pink Opaque live. “I like girls,” she says. “You know that, right?” She asks if he likes girls. Or boys. His reply: “I think that I like TV shows.”
The following Saturday Maddy tells Owen that she’s leaving town because she’ll die if she stays. “I don’t know how, exactly, but I know it’s true,” she says.
“If you leave, I won’t have anyone to watch The Pink Opaque with,” he replies.
She tattoos his neck with a pink marker:
But the next morning he furiously scrubs it off:
And instead of running away with her, he asks a woman played by the actress who portrayed Tara Maclay on Buffy to help him:
Maddy disappears without a trace the next summer the same month The Pink Opaque is cancelled, leaving behind only a burning TV:
But returns eight years later and asks Owen to join her at “a place on the edge of town” where they can talk. Even though her first question for him is about The Pink Opaque, which he identifies as his “favorite TV show of all time” in his reply, he completely fails to notice that they are, impossibly, sitting in the Double Lunch, its answer to Buffy‘s Bronze:
“When you think back on watching The Pink Opaque,” Maddy asks, “how do you remember it?” The movie cuts to a glimpse of an eight-years-younger Owen trying on a pink dress in Maddy’s bathroom as she goes on, “do you remember it as just a TV show?”
As she continues to press, this is followed by a reaction shot which reveals that the previous image was from her POV:
Then there’s a cut to a close-up of Owen wearing a faint but (for perhaps the only time in the whole film) genuine smile:
“Listen,” Maddy says, “I know this might sound crazy, but when you think back on The Pink Opaque, when you remember watching it in my basement on Saturday nights from 10:30 to 11:00pm, do you ever get confused? Like, maybe the memory isn’t quite right?” As Owen shakes his head and replies, “what do you mean ‘not quite right’?” there’s another cut to his younger self, still wearing the dress, following Maddy through the night as the ghost tattoo on the back of his neck suddenly glows pink:
“Does time ever feel like it’s not moving normally?” Maddy clarifies. “Like it’s all out of whack? Do you ever feel like you’re narrating your own life, watching it play in front of you like an episode of television? Or do you ever have a hard time distinguishing between what happened in the show and what happened in real life? Like somehow the memories got jumbled around?” As Owen struggles to comprehend, there’s a cut to the same shot of Isabel with an axe that we saw before, only now it’s in a widescreen aspect ratio:
Which is replaced moments later by Maddy and Owen, who we now realize if we haven’t already is wearing Isabel’s dress, on the same football field:
“I’m trying to go slow,” Maddy says as Mr. Melancholy appears overhead in the flashback, “I don’t want to alarm you.”
Then, finally coming to the point, “I’ve been there. Inside the show. Inside The Pink Opaque.” Cue cathartic scream by musical guest King Woman:
Owen rushes home and dumps out a bag where he’s been keeping all the VHS tapes Maddy made for him, one of which contains the final episode of The Pink Opaque ever broadcast.
He explains that he received this one in the mail after she disappeared and describes watching it then. As Caetlin Benson-Allott notes in a Film Quarterly column called “Life-Affirming Horror and the Films of Jane Schoenbrun,” the portions of it we see through his eyes are initially shown “in Academy aspect ratio, as befits a 1998 television program.”
Isabel follows a voice that she thinks belongs to Tara, but Tara has already been buried alive by Marco and Polo and it’s a trap:
They cut out her heart and feed her Luna Juice:
And then sit back to await the arrival of their boss. As Benson-Allott observes, “Owen narrates these developments until the arrival of Mr. Melancholy, a demonic man in the moon whose face resembles an ever-fluctuating caseous mask that quickly fills the entire frame.”
She continues:
His image is based on the pockmarked moon face from the Smashing Pumpkins’ music video “Tonight, Tonight” (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 1996), which was itself based on the moon man of Georges Méliès’s Le voyage dans la lune (1902). Mr. Melancholy’s ominous visage pulsates as he tells Isabel, “Don’t fight it. Let my poison work its magic. Soon you won’t remember anything: your real name, your superpowers, your heart. You won’t even remember that you’re dying!” Isabel gasps for air, as Owen gasps for air during their many asthma attacks. Mr. Melancholy is indeed speaking to Owen as well, for as he talks the frame expands into the wide-screen aspect ratio that denotes Owen’s reality. Owen and Isabel’s mutual pulmonary distress confirms their connection even as it also manifests the stress of staying in the closet for Owen. Owen’s asthma indicates that they are dying within their male socialization, just as Isabel is asphyxiating underground.
This scene ends with Owen apparently attempting to commit suicide by thrusting his head into his television set, then being rescued by his father (Fred Durst) who holds his head under the shower until he vomits up something blue which is depicted first via a prop and then a celluloid scratch effect:
And the next one begins back in the “present day” with Owen stepping out his front door to encounter two ghostly figures played by Pete & Pete themselves, Michael C. Maronna and Danny Tamberelli:
Maddy tells Owen the tale of how leaving town didn’t help because “the trees were different, but everything else was the same” in a tour de force monologue delivered inside an inflatable planetarium that concludes with her describing how she escaped her prison in Mr. Melancholy’s Midnight Realm by paying a “burnout kid” to bury her alive, a harrowing experience she woke up from as Tara:
“I haven’t told you anything tonight that you don’t already know,” Maddy/Tara tells him, but although Owen allows himself to be led to the football field behind which she has dug him a grave, he pushes her down and runs away in an extreme long shot:
She leaves him a final message in chalk:
But never returns, and this turns out to be where we came in. “Anyway, like I was saying, it was raining the other night and I couldn’t sleep, so I started The Pink Opaque again,” Owen says addressing the camera:
But this time “the whole thing felt cheesy and cheap; dated, and not scary at all.”
That framework informed how I crafted TV Glow, which is so much about memory and the way that a television show can feel one way when you’re a kid and another when you revisit it later in life. But it’s also the ways in which life can feel both magical and utterly devoid of magic at times. With Owen, what’s tragic about that moment at the end of the film when he’s watching this weird, shitty kids show version of The Pink Opaque on Netflix is how he describes his feelings. It’s not just, “This was lame, and I’ve outgrown it.” He says he feels embarrassed, and what he’s actually dealing with there is shame.
Which would seem to pretty comprehensively refute the way I read it my first couple of times around. As I said on Letterboxd two years ago, “I don’t think we can write this off as ‘you can’t go home again’ because, 1) he has ostensibly seen it a million times, and 2) we’ve seen clips from the show, too, and this isn’t the same program!” Except that as Schoenbrun has also said in a fun interview with fellow director Gregg Araki for Filmmaker Magazine, this is all deceptively straightforward from a narrative perspective:
To me, the movie is not ambiguous in the way that, at the end of the movie, you’re presented with this question, is his reality real or was Maddy telling the truth when she told him that everything in his life was actually the fever dream of a dying TV character? To me, there’s no ambiguity there. He is absolutely in a grave somewhere far away, suffocating.
One of Mr. Melancholy’s tricks, per Maddy/Tara, is that he speeds up time in the Midnight Realm and makes seconds bleed into days, days into months, and months into years. But that’s not his only one. See also the way Owen’s manager Dave (Conner O’Malley) doesn’t seem to age at all between the sections of I Saw the TV Glow marked “eight years later” and “twenty years later” even as Owen is afflicted with a hunch, limp, and the worst case of chapped lips ever:
Or the way all of his co-workers go limp during his “I’m dying right now!” freak out since there’s no way to reconcile it with the fiction he’s inhabiting:
TV Glow acknowledges that at their worst television, movies, and music function in our lives just to pass time, but it also celebrates them as a way to freeze it in place while we consider who we really are. I was gratified to see Jeanne Thornton mention the film Seconds in her essay “An Act of Faith” included in A24’s bound edition of TV Glow‘s screenplay because I thought of it, too. That film ends with the sound of a drill, indicating that the clock has run out on John Randolph and Rock Hudson’s Tony Wilson; this one concludes with the nearly as ominous sound of Owen’s asthmatic wheezing. But if you can wheeze, you’re still breathing, and that means there is still time.
HOMER: Golf course? Did I dream that whole thing? Maybe the desert was just this sand trap. Oh! And I bet that crazy pyramid was just the pro shop! And that talking coyote was really just a talking dog.
All of the Duncan Idahos, original and the serial gholas flowed into his mind. They were like bursting seedpods denying all other existence except themselves. He saw himself crushed beneath a great worm with a human face.
“Damn you, Leto!”
Crushed and crushed and crushed . . . time and again.
“Damn you! Damn you! Damn you! . . .”
He died under a Sardaukar sword. Pain exploded into a bright glare swallowed by darkness.
He died in a ’thopter crash. He died under the knife of a Fish Speaker assassin. He died and died and died.
The Prodigal Cinephile 
