Is "I Saw the TV Glow" in the Buffyverse?
This has to be on purpose, right?
I went into I Saw the TV Glow knowing very little about it. The description mentioned two high school friends and a television show, and the trailer showed that it had a pretty awesome neon pink aesthetic. So hopefully you can understand why I thought I was getting a Candle Cove/Don’t Touch Me, I’m Scared type-movie for the big screen.
Not even close! I Saw the TV Glow might not be terrifying in the tradition of Candle Cove, but it packs a colossal dose of existential dread. The horror lies in spending your entire life not being true to yourself because you’re too afraid.
(The fact that some people did not pick up on the trans metaphor is mind-boggling. Honestly, it kind of explains how easily some people are able to demonize the trans community. How can people who can’t even clock the extremely obvious body dysmorphia narrative be expected to sympathize with the trans experience of feeling that your own body is alien to you? They don’t even seem to understand it’s possible. But that’s a digression for another day!)
I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen and Maddy, two high schoolers who are obsessed with an in-universe show titled The Pink Opaque. Now, if you came of age in the late 90’s/early 2000’s, as I did, The Pink Opaque is extremely familiar. It’s a purposefully obvious pastiche of the late-night children’s television programming from that era. It initially reminded me most of Are You Afraid of the Dark and So Weird.
But the font used for the credit sequences niggled at me. I knew I recognized it from somewhere, but where?
It wasn’t until Amber Benson appeared on screen that it hit me: Buffy.
Though I didn’t watch it while it aired live, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a huge part of my youth. I first watched it after I moved across the country from my childhood home. I had no friends in my new city, and I turned to the world of Sunnydale to fill that void.
(I guess you can say I related to Maddy’s sentiment that The Pink Opaque often felt more real than her “real” life.)
It wasn’t until much later that I realized something else about the Amber Benson cameo: it reveals a possible in-world connection between I Saw the TV Glow and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You see, Amber Benson is most well-known for playing the character Tara on Buffy.
Now, for the non-Buffy nerds among us, this might just seem like a cool cameo. I Saw the TV Glow is paying homage to that era of television. Including a popular and recognizable actor from one of those shows is just another neat Easter egg.
Or is it? I argue it goes deeper.
In the Buffyverse, there are several mentions of alternate planes of existence referred to as “Hell dimensions.” In the finale of the second season, Buffy is forced to kill her boyfriend-turned-villain, Angel, and send him to one such hell dimension. In the finale of season five, Buffy sacrifices herself to save her sister. Her friends believe she is in a hell dimension, which is the motivation for resurrecting her in the first episode of season six.
Buffy later says she did go somewhere else when she died, a place she referred to as heaven, confirming that other planes exist, and they’re not all fire-and-brimstone hellscapes.
Let’s pivot for a moment to I Saw the TV Glow. As the movie goes on, it’s heavily implied that both Owen and Maddy are actually the main characters of The Pink Opaque (one of whom is named Tara, by the by), who have been trapped in the world where they currently reside by The Pink Opaque’s arch-villain, Mr. Melancholy. (we’ll call this the “real” world for simplicity’s sake.)
The “real” world of I Saw the TV Glow sounds an awful lot like a hell dimension, doesn’t it? Wait, there’s more. You might think this is just another cool homage, that maybe the reason it’s Amber Benson who does the cameo and not Alison Hannigan or any of the other familiar faces from Buffy is that she was the first one who said yes. Just happenstance.
Except that Tara’s character didn’t make it to the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s run. She was killed off in season six. And what happens to characters who are killed in Buffy? Well, we know that at least some of them go to hell dimensions.
The “real” world of I Saw the TV Glow is not only a hell dimension of The Pink Opaque, it is a direct hell dimension of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because it’s the hell dimension Tara goes to when she dies.
Still sounds far fetched? Get this: Jane Schoenbrun, the writer and director of I Saw the TV Glow even said that she originally wanted to dress Amber Benson in the same clothing that she wore when she got killed on Buffy:
“At one point — we didn’t actually do this, but I wanted to dress her in the same clothing that she was wearing when she got killed off on Buffy. It’s just really important to me, just personally as a fan, to see that she’s alive.”
To see that she’s alive in a hell dimension, perhaps? I rest my case!
What do you think about this theory? Let me know in the comments! I want to hear from you!
H. H. Duke is a writer, author, and podcaster. Most importantly she loves horror! For scary book recommendations, horror movie reviews, and other spooky things, subscribe to H. is for Horror now!
What I’m Reading
The Wager by David Grann