I saw I Saw the TV Glow. I really want to say something pithy like “Excellent documentary of being a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, five stars.” However, I literally couldn’t fall asleep thanks to thinking about the damn thing, so I’m going to throw some words at it.
Note that this article contains spoilers for I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 1997 television franchise. There is a very deliberate reason for the connection, but that is a spoiler. So go and watch I Saw the TV Glow, and then get back here. It is less important to watch seven seasons of a series from the late 90’s, but that couldn’t hurt, either. If you were born in the 80’s, you can also consider that having qualified the prerequisites.
Let’s begin with the beating heart of the matter: the two things I knew going into I Saw the TV Glow was that it was an oblique horror movie (i.e. not a slasher, but something that might make you wriggle in your seat), and that it was a significant trans allegory. I heard the latter not only from trans viewers and critics who noted the personal parallels, but also The Internet’s Seanbaby. Seanbaby is a cis male and plainly stated on 1-900-HOTDOG that he would not have immediately understood that metaphor without someone pointing it out. I am also a cis male, and I assumed I would be in the same boat: I may be sensitive to trans issues, but “oh, this is a trans allegory” is rarely my first thought when enjoying fiction. In fact, I am often pretty dense on damn near any empathetic allegory when initially enjoying a piece of media. This is because I have been brain-poisoned by years of “mystery box”-style plotting, and I am prone to analyzing the “science” of any given mystery over its real-world parallels. The friggen’ logo of Final Fantasy 13 is two lesbians locked in an eternal, crystalline embrace, but it took me months to figure out there might be similarities to the persecution of real-world sexual minorities in that game’s overall plot. Conversely, I figured out the “double agent” character in Final Fantasy 13 about seven seconds after their introduction. It is how my brain works. It is how my brain has worked for years.
So it is from the cis male, analyze-the-movie-like-it-is-never-a-metaphor perspective that I say this: if I Saw the TV Glow is a trans metaphor, being trans must be horrifying.
Once again, spoiler warning, because I genuinely feel you should see this film on its own terms, and a random summary will not do it justice (more on that concept later!), but I will provide a synopsis to affirm what I saw. Actually, scratch that, I just checked IMDB to see their description, and it is delightful in its ambiguity: “Two teenagers bond over their love of a supernatural TV show, but it is mysteriously cancelled.” That works! It does, however, fail to mention that the main character and narrator, Owen, notes that his favorite show was cancelled at the same point in the movie that he casually mentions his best friend went missing under mysterious circumstances, and his own mother died shortly thereafter. I think I’m going to start there.
The fictional show that Owen loves is a thinly veiled expy for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are some other notable shows tossed in this soup (and the fact that Michael Aronna and Danny Tamberelli, the original Pete & Pete, have cameos confirms at least one of those sources) but (fictional) The Pink Opaque bites on (too real) Buffy the Vampire Slayer so hard, the show-within-a-show even uses the exact same font for its familiar opening credits sequence. The spirit of the WB Network is alive and well! And the writer/director of I Saw the TV Glow absolutely nails the early days of watching that young-adult show. Here is a unique story with complicated mythology and characters that feel ways about stuff all the time, and… am I the only person watching this? I can’t be… right? Oh! There’s someone over there reading the official episode guide! I bet she will be my friend! Let’s talk about our favorite show and discuss what we think is going to happen and maybe we can watch episodes together and tape it for later and…
Eh, screw it, I’m just going to talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a bit here.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran for seven continuous seasons across two different networks. It premiered when I was a freshman in high school. There was never going to be a universe where I did anything but clutch onto it like a baby rhesus macaque grabbing the cloth-mother. Yet, when it premiered, I was alone in my love for the show. This was a dramedy that was such a hit, it practically launched an entire network. Twice! But I did not know anyone that was particularly into it, so I felt isolated. I distinctly recall attempting to talk to one of my friends who tangentially mentioned it, and he pulled some macho bullshit and claimed he was “only in it for the blonde’s tits”. As the years went on, I did find other people who watched the show. In fact, shortly after the second season finale, I first talked to a woman a year my junior because she was loudly proclaiming that she knew exactly how the third season would start. And she was wrong. So I immediately started an argument with her, because she was evidently an idiot, and had no real understanding of the mythos. We were dating all of three weeks later. And, for the record, when we watched that third season premiere together, her guesses were proven incorrect (so were mine, though, but let’s not dwell on that). But even by the time I literally had a girlfriend because of the show, I thought I was alone in my fandom. This was the era of media like South Park and Austin Powers, and they were firmly establishing the culture. I am not certain I knew a single person my age that didn’t use that “yeah baby” line (with perfect, terrible intonation), and somehow South Park’s “oh my God, you killed Kenny” was distinctly quoted over and over even though Comedy Central was patently not part of the local cable package. Was Cartman beamed directly into our brains? Regardless, the proof was in the pudding: those shows were what was popular, and never mind singers and sports stars that everybody knew. Sarah Michelle Gellar was no Deion Sanders.
And I’m focusing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer because it is so front and center in I Saw the TV Glow, but this was true of a number of different shows. Anything anime slotted into this same sort of cultural ghetto, and I remember the sheer insanity that could occur when game recognized game in that sphere. I had a younger coworker when I was 16 that found out that I liked Dragon Ball Z, and as part of some sort of friendship initiation test, he straight up wrote a three-page DBZ trivia quiz that I flunked immediately. No, I do not remember where Android 18 has her Red Ribbon Army logo! I spent a hundred years in the Namek mines! I cannot remember every little thing about what happened after that! And on a completely separate occasion with an entirely separate person, a friendly verbal argument somehow turned into an essay on why a Gundam would indisputably kick an Eva’s ass. I am still friends with the author of that one, and I can say with perfect clarity that they never finished college, but that giant robot report involved more research than a doctorate thesis. And this was before the internet was what we knew today! How the heck was anyone supposed to quantify sharls back then!?
And, yes, this means we must look at our beloved internet and its influence on fandoms. By complete coincidence, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered, I was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, aka Amish Country. I watched a resort’s TV glow when The Scoobies first took the stage, but I was in an area that was notably against technology. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer reached its final episode about seven years later, the internet was an integral part of the process. Like a boiling frog, I cannot distinctly remember when it happened, but somewhere in there, I found communities online. I learned that it wasn’t just a random coworker or my sophomore girlfriend that liked this show, it was thousands of people. And there were fanatics that were more dedicated than me! They taped the shows, and rewatched every frame for future clues. They uploaded MPEGs so those of us relying on reruns would never miss a beat. They somehow learned about the exact details of the final episode, and posted a description of exactly what happened before the rest of us peons ever got a chance to see it. And I’ll always remember being obsessed with the finale of a show I had watched since I was in high school, and finding that “last episode description”. I was inordinately disappointed! Whatever fan had a preview copy wrote a description that must have been penned by a moron. It was proven to be completely accurate, but it made my beloved fixation sound like a show for dumb teenagers. It began with “Buffy kills Caleb by cutting him in half, starting with the penis”. What? This is a serious drama, people, don’t make this sound like a silly Mortal Kombat fatality! Yes, I am glad that I am now sharing this show with more people than my monkey sphere could have ever contained, but could we not make it sound so… puerile?
Of course, Owen never finds this online community. “His” Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets cancelled at season 5, and his best friend goes missing at the same time. It is distinctly noted that The Pink Opaque is his junior high/high school show… and that’s that. It’s over.
Until Maddy, that missing best friend, comes back a few years later. That’s when things get complicated.
So Maddy returns with a message for Owen: Owen’s entire life is a delusion created by the big bad (do we ever acknowledge how Joss Whedon permanently changed how we speak?) of The Pink Opaque, and Owen is really supposed to be Brenda, the show’s Buffy parallel. Maddy is really Tara, Brenda’s psychic sidekick/soulmate. Maddy and Owen are supposed to be Tara and Brenda, and they are supposed to live in a magical world where they are superheroes that beat back ice cream monsters and experience more sapphic longing than a revolutionary girl. Sadly, they are trapped in a mundane universe where moms die and you have to live with Fred Durst. Owen, who already once had an opportunity to run away with Maddy and chickened out, is faced with a choice: follow Maddy into the fantasy world of The Pink Opaque, or keep living in the real world where the best thing that can ever happen is buying a bigger TV. Despite the obvious appeal of entering the fantasy world, Owen decides to ignore Maddy’s alternate universe, and Owen goes on being Owen. Maddy is distinctly noted as never seen again.
So here’s where the trans thing gets scary for cis Goggle Bob: I have no idea what Owen was supposed to do.
What Owen does is stay in reality. It is noted that his father dies sometime after that, he gains a family that he “loves more than anything”, and he continues to work menial jobs. By the end of the movie, he is moving like he is 12,000 years old, and still works at a Chuck E. Cheese. He has not even attained the rank of manager. The finale of the film is him having a nervous breakdown during a child’s birthday party, but he (socially) recovers, and tells everyone his outburst is just the result of a new medication. Literally nobody cares.
This is what happens in the film, and, were it a videogame, the words “Bad End” would float up on the screen. This is Hell, Owen made the wrong choice.
So if this is a trans allegory, Maddy was the correct choice, right? Owen never fits into this world, and while he is some definition of successful (he has a home, family, and reliable job), he is clearly miserable. He is supposed to be in another world. He is supposed to be another person. Separated from the reality of The Pink Opaque, he withers and dies in despair.
But death is kind of the thing here. When Maddy meets Owen again, she explains how she got back to the world of The Pink Opaque. She died. She paid a dude to bury her alive (!), and she was able to successfully claw her way out of her grave and into Season 6. She would have stayed in that other world, but she knew she had to retrieve Owen/Brenda, and is now here to help Owen take the same journey. Like Orpheus, Owen must venture to the underworld to see his dreams fulfilled, and they are told all will be well on the other side. This is the person you are meant to be! Take the red pill!
But Maddy is not Morpheus. Maddy is not presented as an all-knowing mentor to Owen’s Neo. She is undoubtedly Owen’s guide, as she is the one that introduces him to The Pink Opaque back in junior high, and she is the one that returns years later to explain the “truth” of reality. But she is also unhinged. She is presented as wholly human, and many of her actions seem to stem from an abusive home life and struggles with her own sexuality and society’s acceptance thereof. She is Gandalf if Gandalf showed up at the shire bitching about his ex-girlfriend and then puking all over Frodo’s second breakfast. This is a woman who comes off as infinitely unreliable, and her sales pitch involves something that looks about 90% like suicide. Adventure! If you survive!
And let’s be real here: that adventure doesn’t look all that great, either. What we see of The Pink Opaque is a horror world where celestial bodies are out to destroy teenagers. Marco & Polo are crescent moon-based henchmen that are inordinately creepy, and this is established as a place where new monsters appear weekly, and they are exceedingly malevolent. If you can’t trust the ice cream man to not be a serial killer, where will you ever find a Sonic the Hedgehog Ice Pop? Is that really a life worth living?! And filling in the blanks of The Pink Opaque with Buffy the Vampire Slayer lore, well, what is the appeal of Sunnydale? It is a literal gateway to Hell. Even the main cast of that tale only has a 70% survival rate. If Maddy’s suicidal route to that world really works, would you want to live there? Could you live there? And this is all ignoring the important fact that the unique part of the The Pink Opaque plot is that its two protagonists appear to be trapped in a narrative hell where they are not allowed to be in the same room except “one week at sleep away camp”. Owen! Be the person you were always meant to be! Which is apparently going to be equally traumatizing, but in a different way!
Owen made the wrong choice, but the right choice ain’t no great shakes.
I am a cis male. I am going to state plainly what I have said multiple times in the past: I am very comfortable with my body. I feel this is an accident. Thanks to genetics and societal norms, my life and environment has worked out in my favor, and without any level of “trying”, I am comfortable with myself. I am generally accepted by my peers and society, and I genuinely like what I see in the mirror. Outside of a few times in my teenage years where I really wanted to impress a crush, I have never wanted to significantly change any part of myself. I like me, and I’ll reiterate that that is not because I carefully honed myself into a glorious Adonis of a man, but simply because I have never faced internal/external resistance to who or what I am. I’m coasting on easy mode here. It is how I like it.
And I note this because there is one part of I Saw the TV Glow that resonated with me more than any other. And, as a cis male, I am vaguely ashamed of this fact. This film is an amazing trans allegory. And the part that sticks with my cis ass the most is when the film implies that things you thought were cool as a teenager were actually for babies.
After Owen chooses a mundane life, we see time move forward. At some point, Owen is an adult, and The Pink Opaque is now available instantly on streaming. No tapes or discs needed! And Owen rewatches the “first episode” he initially saw with Maddy years prior. But things are different. The main characters are not presented as mature teenagers, but children. The “monster of the week” was previously a horrifying caricature of a familiar face but is now just some dumb guy in a mask. The threat of the episode is solved with… soup. No action or emotional conflict, just soup. The past is a different country. For babies.
This is a familiar problem for anyone that has revisited the media they loved as a child. What was once big and important is now dumb and silly. Plotlines and characters that were once imagined to be larger than life are just silly actors wearing outdated costumes. And, try as you might, you can no longer understand why you ever had a crush on the deputy mayor of Megakat City.
Yet I never experienced that with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Give or take judging slang/wardrobe choices of the era, I have never looked back on Buffy as some dumb kids show I watched when I was 14. I am not leaping to publicly defend it at the slightest provocation, but my own internal inventory does not lump it in with the same “why did I think this was serious” as Pirates of Dark Water or caring about the ozone. I acknowledge that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a teenager show for teenagers, but I am not ashamed to say that I will occasionally happily rewatch it as an adult.
And I think it is because I watched the internet grow.
Owen only ever has Maddy. He has loving parents (well, he gets along well with his mom. His dad smells like hotdog water), and he eventually has a loving “family of his own” (that is never seen). But in his love of The Pink Opaque, he only ever has Maddy. By the recounting of I Saw the TV Glow, Owen never has another single friend that is into The Pink Opaque. He spends his school days walking through the halls daydreaming about the show, but he never has a contemporary beyond Maddy. And Maddy has got problems! He refutes her fantastical advances of running away twice, and absolutely no one can blame him for that decision. She’s a weirdo! There is strong evidence she is suicidal! She’s going to get you hurt, Owen! One way or another, your fellow fan almost certainly does not have your best interest at heart. She wants Owen to be Brenda because she wants Brenda. Owen is secondary in what could be the greatest decision of their life.
And this all leads me to one final thought on I Saw the TV Glow: the central choice of this plot was crap. Owen could not make a good choice with the options he was offered. What Owen needed was help.
I’m a cis man. But I identify with Owen, because he’s a recognizable weirdo that has difficulty interacting with “normal” people. Hell, for all the times that I have trashed Maddy across this article, I probably even identify with her more. You better believe I was the nerdy fan buying those episode guides and making my friends tapes so I could share my fandom. And if I’m being completely honest, I’m Maddy in other ways, too. There were points in my life where I wanted more than anything to live in a fantasy world where my greatest concern wasn’t a prom date, but a prom overrun by hellhounds. Would I have killed my whole identity to get there? I like to think I have never been at that point in my life… But maybe. Maybe if I had a Maddy whispering in my ear that this was a path to happiness. The idea of stocking a ball pit from now until my grandkids are yelling at me is frightening, and spending the rest of my life psychically battling ice cream monsters is more enticing
But I found people that made life bearable through the bad times. I had friends that shared this fandom. I had lovers that shared a love of singing witches. I had people that supported me, and, incidentally, also wanted to talk about vampires. As the internet grew, I found people that shared my interests. Has this caused permanent brain damage to the point that I now think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the same way a Benedictine Monk thinks of the Bible? Probably! But it also means I have had people to talk to when things got rough. I have had support from friends throughout my life, and I can trace some of those friends straight back to “thinks Spike is hot”.
And if there is some moral here, I believe it is this: get help. Even if you are doing it by accident, get help. I cannot relate to being trans. But I can relate to being a loner. I can relate to feeling like you are the only person in this world facing this specific problem. And even at times in my life I have not had problems, guess what? I eventually had problems again! And I have been thankful every time for having friends at my lowest points. Whether or not Owen would have been happier as a different person is a question for the ages, but I can confirm that they would have been happier if they had more than Maddy in their life.
What I learned from I Saw the TV Glow is that being trans is scary. What I learned from my own experiences is that fellow fans can make life a lot less scary.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help, even if it is from unlikely sources.
FGC #672 Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds
- System: Today we are looking at the only Buffy the Vampire Slayer game that was ported through multiple systems. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds appeared on the Nintendo Gamecube, Playstation 2, and (original) Xbox. Note that this one is a sequel to the previous game, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that was an Xbox exclusive.
- Number of players: Story mode is strictly one player, but there are “party game” multiplayer modes. You can catch bunnies! Or fight random mooks! Regrettably, it is not worth digging up fellow fans to play.
- Maybe actually talk about the game for a second: Today’s article was obviously an excuse to talk about a movie that is normally outside the scope of this website, but it is appropriate to hang this Buffy game on the movie. It’s about dimensions (chaos) bleeding into each other! And Big Bads ruining lives! And it’s mostly just a mediocre beat ‘em up with sub-Resident Evil style puzzles (“puzzles”), but it’s relevant! I swear!
Further Connections: Buffy and Willow’s actual actresses did not feel like being voice actresses for this one (or they just had better contracts than everyone else in the cast). However, Giles, Xander, Spike, Faith, and Tara all have their attendant actors reprising their usual roles. And Tara is played by Amber Benson, who also appears in I Saw the TV Glow. See? It’s all coming together!- Story Time: Alright, Buffy-fans, be aware that this game takes place somewhere in about the middle of Season 5, and could possibly wedge itself into “real” continuity with a few minor blips (Spike notes in Season 7 that he never met Faith in her own body before; Faith and Spike interact randomly in this game). The concept here is that The First is responsible for their own Evil Dimension, and every random monster and evil doppelgänger is still alive there, so we have a fine excuse for a player to fight through Buffy’s greatest hits across the previous seasons. And since a healthy chunk of this game takes place in an alternate dimension, it doesn’t have to have any impact on the “real” Slayer-verse. On the other side of the coin, this was released shortly before the seventh season, and distinctly ends with a teaser for Season 7 (“From beneath you, it devours”), but also claims The First has been banished for a thousand years (and is vulnerable to a magic dagger that will never be seen again), despite the fact that they will be handy and menacing for the entirety of Season 7. In summary, Sunnydale is a land of contrasts.
- The Key to Everything: Dawn Summers does not appear. She is not even mentioned. Presumably, the Xbox-verse of Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes place in a dimension where she never showed up. Or she was back at home the whole time. Whatever.
- But is the game any good? No. The fighting of various demonic minions is the focal point here. And that seems like a good idea for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game! Buffy is prone to jump kicks as much as any videogame protagonist. However, there are asinine puzzles every three feet, and tromping around a cleared area over and over again just to find the right pixel that represents a chunk of sundial gets old fast. You will learn to hate locked doors before the third level is out…
- Favorite Character: Willow the Witch gets magic attacks that can be triggered with precise button combinations. The sequences are kind of annoying, and her later levels always feature vampires that are miraculously good at dodging, but at least she gets more variety in her moveset than the entire rest of the cast. Buffy, Faith, and Spike are all remarkably boring. Weirdly, this makes Xander’s stages more appealing, as at least he is frequently gifted a variety of weapons by his environments. The dummy is not worth mentioning.
- But there is a playable ventriloquist dummy again, right? Oh, most certainly.
- Further complaints: Weapon durability is a constant threat. It is understandable that a powerful pitchfork or flamethrower cannot last forever, but you also must continually find new stakes to keep vampires in the realm of the dead-dead. And you never start a level with any stakes, so your first act in any given stage is running around like an idiot until you can find the one slab of wood that is going to allow you to actually defeat your enemies. Where’s Mr. Pointy when you need him?
- Last Known Photo: It is likely just another Whedon in-joke, but…
This may be the last surviving media out there that remembers Titan AE was ever a thing. - Say something nice: The “dusting” effect for defeated vampires is cool.
- Now Hush: Appropriate to a Joss Whedon game, the characters are constantly making personalized “quips”. Apt to his function on the show, Xander seems to get the best one-liners. Conversely, Buffy should never speak again. It may just be a side effect of her starring in the most levels, but her canned comments about “Just what a girl needs. A nice, long shaft. Wait… that didn’t come out right,” get exhausting fast.
- Did you know? You fight a Vampire Tara and Ripper-Giles. Both battles are conceptually the best ideas ever, and it is amazing such designs did not appear in the show proper. However, if you need more dark side fights in your young-adult stories, please check out the Arrow-verse, where literally every character got to play their own evil twin at least once.
- Would I play again: I will watch I Saw the TV Glow again, possibly every year when Halloween rolls around. I am unlikely to play Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds again. Gonna watch Buffy again, though! Because I am a slave to that universe.
What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Astro Bot! Just like Twitter, this place is going to be crowded with bots! Please look forward to it!
