‘I Saw the TV Show’: The Green Opaque [Video]

Editor’s Note:

This Pride Month, Dread Central is releasing the three-part video series I Saw the TV Show, inspired by Jane Shoenbrun’s queer horror fantasia, I Saw the TV Glow, from studio A24.

Over three weeks, Dread Central’s queer staff will team up to discuss their own versions of “The Pink Opaque,” the life-altering teen genre TV shows which they were obsessed with as young queer kids in the 90s/2000s, a time when otherness was all the more isolating and dangerous. They’ll share their personal relationship with a horror TV series that changed their young lives and unpack how escapism, monstrous allegories, and social isolation shaped them creatively.

Dread Central staff writer Chad Collins is featured first on I Saw the TV Show. Check out his episode, The Green Opaque: Supernatural, right here, and then make sure to check out his accompanying essay below.

I Saw the TV Show: Part I – Supernatural

Dread Central Presents
I SAW THE TV SHOW Part I
The Green Opaque: Supernatural
by Chad Collins

I saw my own TV glow. Every year, it was a different screen, though like The Pink Opaque central to Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, I couldn’t let it go. It possessed me, rendered me ill. It was refuge and curse, static and life all the same. First, it was the Supernatural, originally on the WB, then the rebranded CW. Jared Padalecki’s Sam Winchester was my first crush—at least the first I could remember—but it was something more than that drawing me to the show. I liked monsters and scary things, and Supernatural had plenty of that, but that wasn’t just it. Plenty of shows had weekly monsters. I’d tried The X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer before, though neither resonated in quite the same way. Maybe it was just the crush. My parents bought the first season on DVD. When no one was home, I would watch, rewind, and watch a beat from Episode 17, Hell House, on repeat. In it, Sam Winchester emerges from the bathroom in just a towel, and Padalecki (knowing his audience), briefly flexes.

Padalecki did a lot of flexing in Supernatural. Jensen Ackles did too. That was a gateway, I think, to seeing the kind of people I was attracted to and having a space to explore it. There was no accessible internet (dial-up, yay), no personal devices. Instead, I had weekly watches of an, at the time, episodic, monster-of-the-week soap where two hunks battled witches and demons. As the show went on, Supernatural leaned into its WB heteronormativity. Both Sam and Dean, more regularly in later seasons, had sex with a rotating cast of female characters. Some of whom, I should note, were monsters themselves (literal monsters, like werewolves and demons). I kept watching, but I could sense that it, like so many other worlds, was one where someone like me didn’t belong.

I saw the TV glow again in eighth grade. I finally had my own personal (portable) DVD player and a Netflix subscription for my birthday. I thought I was a burgeoning cinephile, but really I was just lonely. I worked tirelessly to get through the IMDB Watchlist I’d been building since I first got internet access years before. Freaks. Lost Highway. Eraserhead (a lot of Lynch, really). I don’t know if anyone was checking my queue, and no one else was really using it. I got Stand by Me right before my freshman year of high school. It broke my heart, but I couldn’t at the time figure out why, because the kind of ache it caused me wasn’t just narrative. River Phoenix’s Chris Chambers broke my heart—and I’d known about the actor’s death before watching it—but there was something gnawing at me that Stand by Me maybe wasn’t trying to convey. I think I wanted to have a group of friends just like that. I think I didn’t want to feel like an outcast.

I saw another TV glow in high school, I wasn’t an outcast, but I still was. I had plenty of friends. I was in plenty of clubs. My grades were good (I had my eyes set on Stanford). I was on homecoming court twice and prom court twice. I was even Prom King. But the entire time, I had a small, private television glowing, one just for me. Leo Giamani. Corbin Fisher. Frequent searches on my phone’s web app. Featured in I Saw the TV Glow is a song titled “Claw Machine.” During the bridge, Haley Dahl & Phoebe Bridgers sing, “I think I was born bored/I think I was born blue/I think I was born wanting more/I think I was born already missing you.”

I missed someone, but I didn’t know who. I was happy, but I wasn’t. Earlier in the song, during the first verse, Dahl and Bridgers sing, “I’m in the eighth grade/Sending grown men grainy photos/Of my ribcage.” I was in twelfth grade. I had a Tumblr account where I posted grainy photos of my own body for notes. I got lots. With the right combination of keywords, you could still find them. Everything on the internet lasts forever. I wish I could turn that TV off. Scrub the tape. Snap the antenna. Make sure no one else could ever tune into that broadcast. But like I said, someone probably still could.

I Saw the TV Glow is a masterpiece. Jane Schoenbrun is an auteur in the truest sense. They don’t just target a very distinct, adolescent vein of suburban nihilism and ennui, but probe. They dig, scooping out worms and muck, unearthing a fidelity I’ve never seen so painfully realized and authentic reflected on screens. It is also, at its core, a story of trans identity. I don’t wish for what I’ve taken away from it to undermine the very specific story Schoenbrun is telling, rendering it some kind of “it’s for everyone” coming-of-age pastiche because it assuredly isn’t. There’s a kind of narrative static, a longing for lost youth, I can see, however, and I can resonate with it.

2024 is not 2012, and that’s pretty regularly hard to forget. Do I want that back? How do I even go about getting it back? Is it better, stronger, and wiser to just let it go? That’s a meme, yeah. Queer persons do this and that because their youth was stolen from them. It’s quotidian, often the subject of ridicule, often originating from members of that same community. Earnestness is cheesy. Feeling can be uncomfortable. The static is better. Detached. Identify but never get involved. I want a glowing ghost tattoo like the characters in The Pink Opaque, but maybe I don’t? Do I want to tell someone how I feel, dockside, my insides on the outside—metaphorically speaking—letting them know how I feel? What I want? What I used to want and fear I can never get again.

Is it lost? Gone forever? Still somewhere within my grasp? Twenty-nine isn’t ancient. It’s far from it. I used to think it was—and sometimes, in fairness, I still do—but I don’t just exist in screens, glowing TVs. But it is still exciting. Like Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), maybe I want to go back. Sit in a dark basement encased in fiberglass, sobbing in front of the television set when my favorite character appears on the screen. Maybe I’d glow like the TV then, too.

It would be indirect, a way to feel and project without having to feel and project. Maybe then, like Owen (Justice Smith), I could amble through my day. Go to work. Pretend it’s not there. Pretend the beating heart in my chest isn’t analog, isn’t ready to blow. Fuses and tuners and tubes, delicate, cutting straight through me, pouring out for just a moment until I could scoop them all back in. I wouldn’t need to talk to anyone about it. No one would ask about it. I could go straight back to my day, the glint from the static dissolving from my eyes the longer I pretended, the longer I told myself everything was okay.

Queer horror is at the heart of I Saw the TV Glow. It has affected me more than any movie this year—any movie in the past few years, really. Movies can stabilize us, bring us back to ourselves. That’s what all art does, really, or at least the best of it. It’s centering, a kind of equalizing force we retreat to, seek solace in, when the rest of the world—the reality of it all—is just a bit too much to bear. And I Saw the TV Glow is often paradoxical in that regard. There’s comfort in its suburban ennui, recognition in its nostalgia for cable procedurals and Fruitopia vending machines, but there’s also an interrogation, a rejection, of that enduringly wistful lens.

Retreating into nostalgia, the movie contends, is dangerous. The soundtrack, composed of original tracks, conceptualizes that, as does The Pink Opaque being not just one thing, but many different things at once. Recognizable without being an explicit thing millennials as an audience would know. Semiotically, Schoenbrun texturizes I Saw the TV Glow with just enough to feel real without tipping over into rose-tinted overdrive. That criticism is centered, then, in Owen’s life, in the movie’s damning and heartbreaking conclusion. These things you remembered might have been as great as you recall them being, or they might not have been. In either case, they’re gone now. Forever. You can retain those memories, or you can drown in them, gasping for air until it feels like your lungs are on fire and your world is collapsing. Nostalgia is five minutes of salvation in what is otherwise eternal damnation.

Was Supernatural giving me anything? Strange as it might sound, it was almost like a breakup. As I got older and, thus, had access to more forms of media, I stopped watching. It was right around the time Castiel (Misha Collins) was introduced. Later seasons, I hear, would confirm Castiel’s attraction to Ackles’ Dean. That confirmation, like so many queer confirmations, is principally metatextual. It’s present in the show, but not really. A seminal show, as it wrapped, needed several cast and crew interviews to unpack a romance that, reasonably, should have been clear from the start.

When I caught I Saw the TV Glow for the first time out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, I wondered what I was getting out of it. It enveloped me, felt like it was made for me, but also felt so distinctly personal to both Owen and, by extension, Schoenbrun, that internalizing it, feeling it, breathing it in until it burned within me, felt wrong. Was I Saw the TV Glow retribution or remembrance? If it was either, what was I supposed to remember? For what was I supposed to redeem myself?

The me in in here and now, who really was he? If I asked myself—what do you want to be, where do you want to go—I might respond, “The little gay horror guy.” Last year, I was a member of Sundance’s Press Inclusion Initiative. That felt good. I got to watch a lot of horror movies. This year, I did the same. But all the while, with every success, there was mourning. Mourning for myself. The parts of myself I’d lost, could never get back. They were long gone, and smiles and press lines, catapulting myself into art that meant something me– could that be enough to make it okay? Could I ever forgive myself for lost youth, now nothing but white noise?

How am I supposed to let that go if not by sharing it? I won’t ever get those moments back, those feigned memories of not who I was, but who I wish I could have been. Someone who asked a boy to prom. Someone who didn’t mind the locker room jabs. This was the early 2000s, not 2024. Locker rooms for queer kids might still be awful, but they were decidedly more so then.

I’d departed from myself, separated, and every moment of every day since then has been an effort to put it all back together. To reconcile the person I wish I’d been with the person I am now. And to do that, I can’t poison myself with theories, the wish to have simply done things differently. That time feels special and lost because it’s not what I remembered. I Saw the TV Glow is seductive in its basement hues and pastel slumber parties, but it knows that programming is dangerous and noxious—so noxious, it’ll eat away at the life you built in the present for a version that could never live in the past. If I’d kept on with Supernatural and the shows just like it, maybe I’d be eaten, too.

Like Owen, I liked TV shows. I liked Supernatural. And it wasn’t shallow. I was there for the attractive men, yes. It seems forever ago, but those feelings at such a young age, especially in the early aughts, weren’t clear. No one talked about it, especially on the kind of cable television I had access to in suburbia. I’m not even sure when I first heard the word gay, but I do know the first time I felt it. Really, really felt it. It was in Supernatural’s pilot as the Winchester brothers tracked down a woman in white. I wanted to know who the monster was, yes, but I wanted to know more about the two of them just as much. Maybe even more so. Who they were. What they thought. Why I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I Saw the TV Glow is the horror of reruns. Queer persons especially, it’s safer—understandably so—to rewind the tape. Watch it again. Rewind it. Watch it again. But it’ll break you down, keep you from where you are. And it’s hard to turn the television off, but when you do, it won’t glow with reels of what you wanted. It’ll glow with the reflection of you, right now, in the present. And that’s the most powerful light of all.

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