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I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be
There’s a way to read the end of Jane Schoenbrun’s masterful new movie as grim, even nihilistic. But you must actively choose to see it that way.
That divide perhaps explains why many cis critics, professional and amateur, have taken issue with TV Glow ’s third act, wondering if it either bit off more than it could chew, disappeared up its own navel, or (in the words of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast) “embraced nihilism.” It is here where the need to engage with the film’s transness becomes most apparent and where the reluctance to do so becomes most glaring. The Pink Opaque is canceled, ending on a devastating cliffhanger in which its two teen heroines, Tara and Isabel, are buried alive and trapped in “the midnight realm” by Mr. Melancholy, the series Big Bad. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.
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