Apocalypse
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If I could explain myself in easy colors, I would. Instead, my interior is made of butterfly hues that my human eyes fail to see, and my spirit eyes can hold between fingertips. Whatever darkness lives in me has no name, intention, or direction. All I can do is sit with the shadow and know that the shadow is dark in the way outerspace is dark, silent in the way outerspace is silent. My mind is an old camcorder unable to capture 4K living. How do I interpret myself for you when I can only find half-phrases?
Instead, follow my mystic footing.
It took four viewings for I Saw the TV Glow to break me. This shouldn’t have been surprising. I’m in a period of numerological domination—1111, 222, over and over until my psyche is dizzy—and I am a life path number 4. 4 has become the number of destiny. When 4 enters the picture, I know whatever message revealed is truly serious, not a playful wink from the universe that the veil is thin, and life is not as flat as it seems.
The first time I watched Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 flick, I Saw the TV Glow, was the Tuesday morning after it had been released. I needed an excuse to leave the house, and a movie before lunch always felt like an accomplishment. It was the perfect adventure; the theater was spotty in attendance, leaving space for me to energetically sprawl. I had spoiled the movie to hell for myself, saving my sensitivity to modern horror movies with their jump scares and flashy, grotesque violence. It did not keep me from being unmoored and stirred as I left the theater.
The next time I brought friends along, delighted to pull them through the phantasmagoric portal. We went to the downtown Alamo Drafthouse, known for its labyrinthine parking structure. The ride home was a tangle of red strings, Marina’s “Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land” playing through the car speakers with eerie relevance.
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By the third time, the film was a comfort. I watched it on a plane, its brilliance a pillow for my sleep-deprived brain. I felt understood by it, and that was enough. Two years since then, many things have shifted in my life in rapid succession, enough to forget the pieces that once mattered the most. Sometime last week, after a few days of floating in the universe of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, I decided I needed to return home. My body was at war with itself, and I had sedated it with every painkiller in my arsenal. Sprawled on my bed, I clicked open the movie and let its first line hit me like a wave.
It was raining last night, and I couldn’t sleep. So I put on my favorite TV show again.
There’s something that happens when you stop being yourself. You become two, the mask growing arms, legs, and a torso that looks like you, but not quite. When the mask cracks—which it will—the waves of subconscious and conscious brain flow into each other. A new split reality is created, similar to the reality of dreams. Truth loses objectivity, and all that is left to ground you is feeling. Otherwise, the projected self walks while you watch, yourself floating above it or thrashing around inside of it, the skin itchy.
The worlds of Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy live in this midnight realm. Reality is vaguely suggested, but the rules, aesthetics, and engineering of their worlds operate around the inner worlds of our main characters. For Araki, this is most obvious in Nowhere and The Doom Generation, both famed for their stylized execution. Even the bedrooms in Nowhere embody this dream-adjacent quality, purposely curated to reflect the inner lives of the characters they belong to. The films are edgy and bare their teeth at the system without flinching. It’s less rage against the machine and more straight-up f**k the machine. F**k it long and hard and with way too much eye contact.
While Nowhere was the movie that led me down the Araki wormhole, The Doom Generation was the one to dial up my fixation around it. I’d like to pause and say that I cannot in good faith recommend this movie, but of the three, it is my favorite in execution. Without it, I wouldn’t have rewatched I Saw the TV Glow. The last ten minutes were so intense that I needed its softer kindred spirit. The trio of Araki movies themed around queerness, nihilism, and youth culture felt eerily familiar, despite being very different in tone. I soon learned Schoenbrun was also an Araki fan, and Araki a fan of Schoenbrun’s work, so naturally I had to put my sixth sense to the test and compare the two.
Neither Araki nor Schoenbrun tends to make feel-good films. Typically, I avoid this kind of work like the plague. My general barometer for what media I can ingest is how soothing it is on my nervous system. Most action films are too much for me, the fast-paced exhilaration sending my brain into hyperdrive. Dramas tear into the soft tissue of my heart with the ease of a steak knife. There are very few intense movies or shows that I’ve welcomed with even remotely open arms. What draws me to work like The Doom Generation and I Saw the TV Glow is how they mirror the latent intensity that rests inside of me. I try to avoid overindulging the way I did as a teenager, but the comfort in seeing your anxieties about existing in the world be portrayed and then heightened to mirror the feeling of experiencing it cannot be understated.
The hyperbolic nature of Araki’s work is often read as pure camp and style, but this approach is the most adept at capturing the realities of how we experience our lives. Living through this current era of tedious realism only makes this distinction in filmmaking more obvious. Media that looks like my life doesn’t speak to me. I need movies that feel like my life, that feel like the insides of myself have been disemboweled and displayed for a gallery exhibition. That feeling was shaken up in me as I finished The Doom Generation; its ending was famously intense and hit something in my subconscious that I wasn’t privy to. Returning to I Saw the TV Glow seemed to dislodge the disturbed part.
Both The Doom Generation and I Saw the TV Glow bring into question how we cope with a world that is actively trying to destroy us. The Doom Generation handles this idea very literally, with our protagonists facing off a series of foes in increasingly gratuitous ways. Our trio escapes their horror through violence and sex, a proxy for the bond that forms between the three of them. However, the effectiveness of this strategy is limited. This makes all escape futile, resulting in their inevitable doom.
I Saw the TV Glow adds more complexity to this cannibalistic space our characters inhabit. External forces still actively terrorize and constrain our protagonists. However, their escape entirely depends on their willingness not only to combat those forces head-on, but to combat them by facing themselves first. Self-sacrifice—or more accurately, sacrificing the idea of who we are—is required to be free. This process is hard and scary and entirely in our hands and no one else’s.
Our world has always been totally fucked and continues to be so. The question becomes, how do we face it? Are we willing to face it? And do we understand that to fight back against the world, we will also have to destroy the version of this world that exists within ourselves?
Queer media lives in this existential space because that is the resounding weight of why queerness is so terrifying to people. To have an entire faction of people who have looked inside of themselves, realized they were something deviant, and decided to exist as such anyway. Sacrifices be damned. The proposed reality wobbles, disintegrating into phantasmagoria.
I cannot be myself for the life of me, and I cannot keep up the dance either. One part of me clings to this so-called good life with every fiber of energy I still have left. It’s my glass sculpture I’ve been perfecting for years. How dare I threaten to smash it just to start something new?
The other side of me is dying. She is dying and unmotivated at the thought. There is no future and no hope, so I might as well stop trying.
Then there is this third side of me toiling in the background. The fire to keep going and to change. She denies these two separate selves their desire to be still and stay steady. She knows when a lie is being told. She’s strong and sexy and hopeful. I’ve lost sight of her for a moment, but she continues to speak. I can follow her voice until we reunite again.
My mother faced a similar bout of depression when she was my age, not long before having me. I hug my insides with that connection, not of generational wounding but this larger human phenomenon of figuring out how to keep trying to live our lives, even while the world wants to burn or wants to kill you or wants you to help kill yourself. I must find it in me to refuse to die. I must find it in me to refuse to take this lying still. I must find it in me to live.
Added March 22, 2025
Naturally, writing and publishing this didn’t shake this movie out of my bones, so I made an old-school fan edit. This does spoil the movie a little, but I love it with my whole heart.
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