Through the TV Glow: Reality and Nightmare in I Saw the TV Glow and Dream Warriors
The glow of a television late at night, to delay a certain truth: Television has long been associated with escape, allowing us to live through fictional characters and distract ourselves from our own realities.
In both I Saw the TV Glow and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the television becomes something more than a source of entertainment. It becomes a portal between worlds, Worlds where main characters, Owen and Jennifer, belong.
Yet the two films arrive at opposite conclusions about what lies on the other side of the screen.
In I Saw the TV Glow, the television represents truth. For Owen, played by Justice Smith, the world beyond the screen is not fantasy but reality itself. Growing up isolated, with a dying mother and a neglectful father who is also transfixed by television, Owen escapes into his favourite show, ‘The Pink Opaque’.
It’s how the film starts, with him watching the show from the beginning once again.
As the film progresses, ‘The Pink Opaque’ is revealed to be more than a television show; Owen’s life is the illusion. The world he inhabits is a nightmare reality constructed to imprison him, while the world of the show is where he truly belongs.
Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors flips this idea. Freddy Krueger’s nightmare realm exists alongside the waking world, bleeding into it through dreams. Jennifer, one of the patients at Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital, fights desperately to stay awake, knowing that sleep leaves her vulnerable to Freddy.
To her, television is not an escape into another life but a means of survival. The glow of the screen keeps her conscious and anchors her to reality, but ultimately is what lulls her to sleep.
When Jennifer eventually falls asleep, the television turns to static. Freddy emerges from the set and drags her into the screen, killing her. The television ceases to be a protective barrier and instead becomes a threshold through which she crosses into an unavoidable death and her true destiny.
There’s a similar scene in I Saw the TV Glow. Owen watches the finale of ‘The Pink Opaque’, seeing Isabelle, or rather, his true self, be defeated by Mr Melancholy, who buries her and traps her in a nightmare reality, the one Owen is currently living.
There’s a cut to Owen’s house, quiet, engulfed in penumbra, background noises among which you can faintly hear TV static, and then the scene changes again, to Owen, head through the TV, sparks flying everywhere.
A crucial distinction, unlike Jennifer, who is pulled into the television, Owen is attempting to force his way through it.
Maybe he is trying to end his life, maybe he is trying to escape from this faux reality he is stuck in. But before he can succeed in either, he is pulled away. It is by his father, who never speaks in the film, who has been neglecting Owen throughout his whole life.
His father pulls him away as Owen clings to the TV, a clear contrast to Jennifer’s death scene, as she is dragged into the screen.
He pulls him away and back to the nightmare reality, away from where he is supposed to be, just like Jennifer falls asleep by the TV glow, and is pulled into the screen by Freddy Krueger, as she was always supposed to.
Both films show television as a space between worlds, lit by an eerie glow. One film sees destruction on the other side of the screen, while the other sees freedom.
The same can be said for human beings: television is escapism, a distraction from our ordinary lives. We can get lost in films and TV series and still chase the high of the show once the credits roll, from behind the closed doors of our bedrooms.
But it can be addictive, while exciting, it cannot replace real life beyond the screen and beyond the four walls of our houses, and it’s starting to, on a societal level.
Whether you are using it to escape your reality, like Jennifer, or as a representation of everything you want in your current life but do not yet have, like Owen, we must remember to turn it off while we still can.