The Prodigal Cinephile

“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 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.”

Then: “when I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. And I now there’s nothing in there, but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check.” 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 away:

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.”

Director Jane Schoenbrun described this scene in an interview with Charles Pulliam-Moore from The Verge as “maybe one of the deepest expressions of dysphoria in the film,” explaining:

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, for instance, 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.

The Equalizer 2 ends with an homage to one of the most iconic moments in American cinema, the final shot of my November, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection The Searchers:

Writing for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis was typical of contemporaneous reviewers in being unimpressed: “the allusion is more ritualistic nod than anything else,” she argued, “and there’s little otherwise in ‘The Equalizer 2’ that connects it to ‘The Searchers’ other than the bluntly obvious: the near-mythic status of its stars and our very American love of violence.” With all due respect to one of my must-read critics, I beg to differ. By picking up where that film and another one of director John Ford’s masterpieces, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, leave off, the Equalizer franchise actually answers a question which has long vexed me: just what the hell did John Wayne’s character in the latter film do with himself during the decades that separate its main flashback narrative from the framing device scenes that begin and end it?

This mystery doesn’t really exist in the Dorothy M. Johnson short story that Liberty Valance is based on, which begins with the following lines:

Bert Barricune died in 1910. Not more than a dozen persons showed up for his funeral. Among them was an earnest young reporter who hoped for a human-interest story; there were legends that the old man had been something of a gunfighter in the early days. A few aging men tiptoed in, singly or in pairs, scowling and edgy, clutching their battered hats–men who had been Bert’s companions at drinking or penny ante while the world passed them by. One woman came, wearing a heavy veil that concealed her face. White and yellow streaks showed in her black-dyed hair. The reporter made a mental note: Old friend from the old District. But no story there–can’t mention that.

A mystery is exactly what Ford deliberately and very effectively creates when he replaces Johnson’s funeral with a rough-hewn box that the county was about to bury without ceremony:

Has the editor of the Shinbone Star Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) declare that there’s no mention whatsoever of the man whose remains it houses, whose name is significantly now the Irish-sounding Tom Doniphon, in his newspaper’s backfiles while demanding to know what brought the famous Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) all the way from Washington to bury him:

Then dramatizes Stoddard’s answer in the form of a flashback to Shinbone’s infancy which lasts most of the rest of the movie’s runtime and establishes within a few minutes that Doniphon (John Wayne) was basically the most popular and highly-respected guy in town.

Watching Liberty Valance for the first time, My Loving Wife actually paused it to demand an explanation! Part of the problem is undoubtedly that the actors are portraying younger versions of themselves without the benefit of today’s totally uncontroversial de-aging technology, initially suggesting that much less time has passed than the 20+ years implied by the list of offices Stoddard will go on to hold which Scott rattles off near the end of the film: “three terms as governor, two terms in the Senate, Ambassador to the Court of St James, back again to the Senate.” Regardless of how long we’re talking about exactly, it’s shocking that such a prominent man could be forgotten so entirely.

* * *

The first The Equalizer works with a different palette of visual references than its successor:

And it would be a stretch to connect Denzel Washington’s titular protagonist Robert McCall to Ford’s heroes based on this movie alone. Details begin to emerge right from the start, though, which will take on significance in the sequel. Just as Stoddard describes himself as going west with “a bag full of lawbooks and my father’s watch,” which he is relieved of by the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) moments after his younger self appears onscreen:

So too does our introduction to McCall include shots of first an alarm clock, then a digital watch, establishing both men as “right on time” cogs in a clockwork design bigger than themselves.

McCall works in a big-box store in the first Equalizer movie and as a Lyft driver in the second, which also makes him professionally adaptable like Stoddard, who as David Coursen observes “is shown or referred to as a lawyer, dishwasher, waiter, reporter, schoolteacher, election official, gunman and convention delegate-elect.” Like Ethan Edwards from The Searchers, we learn in The Equalizer 2 that McCall is a decorated former soldier:

Although unlike him McCall doesn’t care who women in his life sleep with as long as their partners treat them well. Meanwhile, a big difference between McCall and Doniphon is that whereas Robert B. Pippin notes in his book From Hollywood Westerns and American Myth that “we get some indication later that it is precisely because [the latter] feels so self-sufficient and independent that he sees no need for adopting a civic role,” McCall uses his “very particular set of skills” (to borrow a quote from another revenge/rescue fantasy) to help a co-worker train for a security guard test and serves as a mentor to young people in his community even before he confides to a colleague from his former life (Melissa Leo) that he has embarked on a vendetta against the men who nearly killed one of those women he cares for because “one day somebody does something unspeakable to someone else to . . . someone you hardly knew, and you . . . do something about it because you can.”

Finally, like Doniphon he loses his one true love, although in his case to death instead of another man, and instead of wallowing, it ultimately sets him to “wandering” like Edwards. Which just about brings us back to our first image, but first here’s the last shot from Liberty Valance‘s flashback, which binds that film more tightly to The Searchers by showing how Doniphon lets the door close on any future he might have in politics in much the same way that Edwards decides to “turn his back on home” in the song by Stan Jones that this post’s title comes from:

* * *

Joshua Foa Dienstag writes in an article for the journal Political Theory called “A Storied Shooting: Liberty Valance and the Paradox of Sovereignty” that the people of Shinbone were faced with a “Hobbesian” dilemma. Tom Doniphon had the ability to dispose of Valance on their behalf any time he pleased, but in doing so “he would be taking it under his protection, putting it under his own rule,” and this “is a responsibility he has no desire for”; Stoddard, on the other hand, had the desire “to bring democratic law to the town,” but lacked the power to do so. “What,” Dienstag asks rhetorically, “is it that combines law and power? And can they combine in some way that is not arbitrary or despotic?” The answer he proposes is Hallie, who “articulates the active desires of the demos” and “is not (as she might be in other films) a token passed between the two men but a live participant in a three-pointed relationship that endures even after her ultimate marriage to Stoddard.”

Robert McCall represents an attempt to unite all this in a single character. With his late wife as his conscience, he has both the power and the desire to stand up for the little guy, and the check on his would-be despotism is Pippin’s observation that “a civilized order must view itself as founded by heroic and unproblematic violence,” which necessitates that upon exercising his power, he must move on lest facts emerge to cast a shadow on his legend. If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is, and to its credit The Equalizer 2 acknowledges this by turning McCall into a “superhero character” created by the aspiring artist he steered away from the corners:

And THAT, at long last, brings us back to the final days of Tom Doniphon. Liberty Valance gestures at a descent into alcoholism, but the math doesn’t add up. He drinks five shots in quick succession in the aftermath of Valance’s demise, then dispenses with the glassware and goes straight for the bottle:

After busting up a saloon and drunk driving his buckboard back to his ranch:

He proceeds to set it on fire in a suicide attempt thwarted by his “boy” Pompey (Woody Strode):

Continuing to carry on like this he would have killed long before the year of 1910 when Johnson’s play begins and Ford’s movie probably does too because there aren’t any indications that it doesn’t. Nor do I think a man with this much Ethan Edwards in him could have just stayed in Shinbone and moldered away regardless.

“What makes a man to wander,” to answer Stan Jones, is other people, “the living and the dead.” The ones who would make of you an idol, and the ones whose memories you can’t shake. If you’re a good man at heart–and troubled though some of them may be, I think the heroes of these films all are–you stay and try to help as long as you can stand it, and when you can’t any more you move on. But then you come back and the cycle repeats. And each time it does there are less around who remember you, until one day there’s nothing left to run from and you quit, no matter what kind of critter you are.