My personal theory is that Mr. Melancholy is fucking with Owen. On a metaphorical level, I think the show turning out to be garbage is a commentary about how even if you're using a coping method, it will eventually stop working. You do eventually need to face the thing that you're coping about.
On a less metaphorical level - I feel like Mr. Melancholy was fucking with it & changing things. Maybe something about how, since Owen had refused Maddy when she told him how to get back to the Pink Opaque, it stopped needing to tell the actual story?
Ya, that was a moment I started to think that he really was in the show. Cause I get a drop in quality due to perception as you get older. But that show he streams was so drastically unlike the pink opaque. Like it had changed SOOO much that I figured he just be trapped
Owen repressed those feelings so hard that removed the original feelings towards Pink Opaque, hence why it was super cheesy upon rewatching it. He’s been telling himself lies like when he mentioned all those stereotypical masculine things he did with his father and how much he enjoyed them (sports, fishing, etc).
Judging by the easter egg that was revealed over the past couple days there might also be a Matrix-y thing going on but idk
On a surface level, it’s about how revisiting media from childhood doesn’t always hold up. Beyond that, I see it as Owen growing further disconnected from the Isobel part of himself as he chooses to ignore and repress it. Kind of like how he hoped Tara would come back and save him from himself, he hoped that simply watching the show again would help deal with the dysphoria we had feeling. But because he has no intention to do anything about his situation, the coping mechanism doesn’t bring any comfort anymore. That’s why he has the reaction he does when seeing the “new” Pink Opaque. It’s a realization that there’s no out of this but through, and he doesn’t want to go through, so he’s trapped.
In the context of the storyline of the movie, I think 100% that Mr. Melancholy (I keep wanting to call him Moon Man) exerted influence to change the series in its digital format in order to alienate Owen (Isabel) from it.\\
However, I think there is also a theme here of how digital media has changed the way we experience watching shows and films. Youtuber Hbomberguy has a [short](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=7s) [series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6OT77T7YlE) of videos called "Scanline" which addresses this shift in experience. Especially as the way we used to watch media has effectively disappeared: who watches DVDs or Blu Rays, or even has a DVD or Blu Ray player anymore, much less a VCR? (I mean I do, because I'm a sad Gen X/Millennial cusper, and you can pry the physical media from my cold dead hands. But anyway.)
Matrix Resurrections touches on it very briefly (and this is a film I think has a lot of thematic similarities with I Saw The TV Glow - especially what happens when the "Egg Crack" happens early on, gets suppressed, and then happens again later in life. "There Is Still Time.")
Also: a version of what happened to Owen happened to me.
I've posted here in this subreddit before that my two equivalents of The Pink Opaque as a teen where the 90s X Men cartoon, and the 1984 film The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension. Or just Buckaroo Banzai, for short.
Buckaroo Banzai is a cult film that a lot of younger people may not have ever heard of unless they read Buckaroo Banzai superfan Ernest Cline's (aka Blue Blaze Irregular Rafterman) book Ready Player One, or watched the film. Whether or not it has aged well is up for debate, though I'll say it was progressive for its time in some ways, but not in others. It was heavily influenced by the old 1940s Doc Savage series, and the Crying Of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.
Our school's computer science teacher gave me a VHS copy in 1993 when I was 16, and I showed it to all my friends. We watched it at every sleepover for months. The movie became a part of our group mythology. It was common practice for the fandom as a whole to pretend that the characters and situations depicted in the film were real and factual and had actually happened. And, well - as a group of teens with a grab bag of psychological disorders and a tenuous grasp on reality, we kind of went overboard with this aspect of the fandom.
Expanded media for the film was really hard to find, as this was the absolute dawn of the internet. We got what we could from fandom conventions, and filled in the blanks with our own group headcanons.
For example: Buckaroo's ultimate nemesis, a shadowy figure named Hanoi Xan (our equivalent of Mr. Melancholy) was lifted by the author Earl Mac Rauch from the victorian-era thriller anthology [Warped In The Making: Crimes Of Love And Hate.](https://archive.org/details/warpedinmakingcr00ashtuoft) But at the time, we envisioned Xan as a [Colonel Kurtz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Kurtz)-type figure with formidable psychic powers and an army of cultishly devoted minions, whose villain origin story was tied up with the European and American invasion/occupation/colonization of Vietnam and the recent horrors of the Vietnam war. And as a group of teens who were somewhat disconnected from reality, it was easy for us to imagine the sinister Hand Of Xan influencing real-world events.
Our group eventually imploded under the weight of our collective psychological issues. But I carried my love of Buckaroo Banzai with me for years. Until a fateful movie watching party in 2010 (which is ironically when Owen tried to watch The Pink Opaque on streaming, I think.)
I showed it to my current group of friends, nearly bursting with an enthusiasm that wilted as I watched for their reactions - and witnessed their bewildered, bored, deadpan faces, as nearly every joke, quip, and quirky plot twist completely and utterly failed to land with any of them. They just sat in stony silence for a few minutes as the credits rolled.
I was mortified. This movie, which I had promised my friends was funny and brilliant, seemed so *stupid* all of a sudden, its quirkiness just silly and tryhard. I couldn't believe I'd shown it to my friends. I think I actually apologized to them when it was over.
The comics, and the distressing "Sequel Novel" released in 2021 did not help matters. Several times, I've asked "were these even written by the same guy?"
I'm starting to wonder if everything we liked about Buckaroo Banzai did not come from Earl Mac Rauch himself, but from the pool of influences he was drawing from, as well as his collaboration with writer/director W.D. Richter (the director of the film, and the script doctor who worked on Big Trouble In Little China - a movie that many of the fans feel is Buckaroo Banzai's true "spiritual sequel.")
I'm sorry this comment is so long: but yeah, I really felt for Owen in that moment.
IN MY OPINION the rewatching of the show means "Thinking about starting to look inside (again)" aka comforting his/her own identity. But as it's been years, thoughts that people have a long time ago get foggy, or sound cheesy and dated as Owen mentions in the scene.
Metaphorically speaking I think its about a ton of things.
Number One, I think it is about Owen's distance from Isabel after the time skip. Very often, us trans people can get bogged down by the obligations set upon us from society. Owen says that they have a family, and very often people who transition in family figures are treated as selfish and wrong for prioritizing their true self over their fake self.
Number Two, I think it is also commentary on the deteriorating importance of television with the death of cable TV. Less about the trans metaphor or the story itself, but I think it is about how the bonding that came out of having to watch a show at a specific time or having to go through the effort of recording it on something else made something particularly special, and so when streaming came out it took away from that.
Number Three, in the plot sense, it relates to Owen's connection with Maddy. The Pink Opaque as a show represented the psychological connection between Owen and Maddy. Previously, everything about the Pink Opaque had to do with Owen and Maddy in some way, either through Maddy putting it on VHS or them watching it together. Through this connection to one another, they were able to see the true version of themselves and connect through that. However, when Maddy leaves the midnight realm and Owen watches it on the streaming service, it loses that connection with Maddy, and thus is subject to the manipulation and bastardization from Mr Melancholy.
This is just my interpretation tho :)
Plotwise, I'm not sure what to think. Thematically, though, the childish Pink Opaque at the end of the movie is super important.
And that theme is this: nostalgia is a cheat. C. S. Lewis made this point while critiquing Wordsworth. The poem we call "Tintern Abbey" begins, "Five years have past, five summers..." That is, the poem begins by looking backward fondly. ISTVG begins the same way with the gym parachute scene. The problem is that if we could go back to the wondrous gym parachute, we'd just find a parachute in a gym, not the feeling we had when we were 10, and it's the feeling that matters. Nostalgia is a cheat.
Any Buffy fan who watches the show for the 5th time will experience disappointment. Certainly, any adult who goes back to Are You Afraid of the Dark will. What scared us as kids will read as silliness to us now, not only having grown up but having grown up as CG has developed.
The scene where Owen streams Pink Opaque as an adult is sad but so obviously truthful. We can't go back to these places. There will never be another Saturday night in 1996 because we are not the same people we were in 1996.
I think it’s a metaphor for internalized transphobia. I think it represents how society and our environment instill shame for who we are, we’re told it’s childish, and fantasy. And when you repress who you are, you internalize all those messages and begin to believe them yourself.
I also read a theory about how the VHS tapes were different because the shared connection between Owen and maddy. Which I think is also a good interpretation, and to add onto the interpretation, I think that sometimes it takes community or another person *seeing* and validating your experience, to come back to yourself and see things for how they are.
But, when you are repressed and are isolated from other people like you, it can be so much easier to internalize and believe that you were childish and transitioning is a shameful fantasy that never can actually be.
There are tons of interpretations that can be made, whether they’re are trans related or not tho which is super cool about this film :)
i think its a visual representation of owens world slowly collapsing (and him slowly dying) we see this later in the movie to when no one responds to him screaming and how hes almost entirely detached from this reality. it could also be him loseing/repressing memories of his life as a coping mechanism.
on a more positive note though it could show owen and isabel no longer being two separate people but one, as he cant watch her from a far anymore all his memories of the show are just his memories, and the detachment from reality near the end of the movie could be a kind of purgatory in between both worlds because of his inability to make a decision or it could repersent him slowly transitioning to the pink opaque.
Honestly I don't think the show ever really existed in the first place. I think it's all a metaphor. It was different when Owen was with Madi because they were validated. It was canceled the month Madi disappeared because that validation went away too. When they tried to watch it as an adult, it wasn't the same, because they never validated themselves and the one who did validate them wasn't there to lift them.
This scene hit me pretty hard as someone who used to present femme when I was younger and then repressed for years before actually transitioning.
It felt very much like the difference between presenting while young, and then attempting to present prior to and early into HRT. The years of wrong ouberty changed me, and the experience was uncomfortable and uncanny compared to when I was younger.
It took a great deal of stubbornness and follow through to stick through this awkard period until the hormones could show effect.
In terms of the literal plot of the movie, it’s obvious IMO that the show itself was actually changed. I mean we (as viewers of the movie itself) can literally just rewind the movie to see that the streaming version is an entirely different show. It basically removes all doubt that The Pink Opaque is real (again, I’m just talking about the literal plot of the film, there are definitely larger implication in terms of meaning and social commentary)
I was convinced that it was always a scary show but thinking of the symbol that is just a cute ghost with glasses.... that would make more sense for a kids show...
My personal theory is that Mr. Melancholy is fucking with Owen. On a metaphorical level, I think the show turning out to be garbage is a commentary about how even if you're using a coping method, it will eventually stop working. You do eventually need to face the thing that you're coping about. On a less metaphorical level - I feel like Mr. Melancholy was fucking with it & changing things. Maybe something about how, since Owen had refused Maddy when she told him how to get back to the Pink Opaque, it stopped needing to tell the actual story?
Ya, that was a moment I started to think that he really was in the show. Cause I get a drop in quality due to perception as you get older. But that show he streams was so drastically unlike the pink opaque. Like it had changed SOOO much that I figured he just be trapped
Owen repressed those feelings so hard that removed the original feelings towards Pink Opaque, hence why it was super cheesy upon rewatching it. He’s been telling himself lies like when he mentioned all those stereotypical masculine things he did with his father and how much he enjoyed them (sports, fishing, etc). Judging by the easter egg that was revealed over the past couple days there might also be a Matrix-y thing going on but idk
On a surface level, it’s about how revisiting media from childhood doesn’t always hold up. Beyond that, I see it as Owen growing further disconnected from the Isobel part of himself as he chooses to ignore and repress it. Kind of like how he hoped Tara would come back and save him from himself, he hoped that simply watching the show again would help deal with the dysphoria we had feeling. But because he has no intention to do anything about his situation, the coping mechanism doesn’t bring any comfort anymore. That’s why he has the reaction he does when seeing the “new” Pink Opaque. It’s a realization that there’s no out of this but through, and he doesn’t want to go through, so he’s trapped.
In the context of the storyline of the movie, I think 100% that Mr. Melancholy (I keep wanting to call him Moon Man) exerted influence to change the series in its digital format in order to alienate Owen (Isabel) from it.\\ However, I think there is also a theme here of how digital media has changed the way we experience watching shows and films. Youtuber Hbomberguy has a [short](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=7s) [series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6OT77T7YlE) of videos called "Scanline" which addresses this shift in experience. Especially as the way we used to watch media has effectively disappeared: who watches DVDs or Blu Rays, or even has a DVD or Blu Ray player anymore, much less a VCR? (I mean I do, because I'm a sad Gen X/Millennial cusper, and you can pry the physical media from my cold dead hands. But anyway.) Matrix Resurrections touches on it very briefly (and this is a film I think has a lot of thematic similarities with I Saw The TV Glow - especially what happens when the "Egg Crack" happens early on, gets suppressed, and then happens again later in life. "There Is Still Time.") Also: a version of what happened to Owen happened to me. I've posted here in this subreddit before that my two equivalents of The Pink Opaque as a teen where the 90s X Men cartoon, and the 1984 film The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension. Or just Buckaroo Banzai, for short. Buckaroo Banzai is a cult film that a lot of younger people may not have ever heard of unless they read Buckaroo Banzai superfan Ernest Cline's (aka Blue Blaze Irregular Rafterman) book Ready Player One, or watched the film. Whether or not it has aged well is up for debate, though I'll say it was progressive for its time in some ways, but not in others. It was heavily influenced by the old 1940s Doc Savage series, and the Crying Of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. Our school's computer science teacher gave me a VHS copy in 1993 when I was 16, and I showed it to all my friends. We watched it at every sleepover for months. The movie became a part of our group mythology. It was common practice for the fandom as a whole to pretend that the characters and situations depicted in the film were real and factual and had actually happened. And, well - as a group of teens with a grab bag of psychological disorders and a tenuous grasp on reality, we kind of went overboard with this aspect of the fandom. Expanded media for the film was really hard to find, as this was the absolute dawn of the internet. We got what we could from fandom conventions, and filled in the blanks with our own group headcanons. For example: Buckaroo's ultimate nemesis, a shadowy figure named Hanoi Xan (our equivalent of Mr. Melancholy) was lifted by the author Earl Mac Rauch from the victorian-era thriller anthology [Warped In The Making: Crimes Of Love And Hate.](https://archive.org/details/warpedinmakingcr00ashtuoft) But at the time, we envisioned Xan as a [Colonel Kurtz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Kurtz)-type figure with formidable psychic powers and an army of cultishly devoted minions, whose villain origin story was tied up with the European and American invasion/occupation/colonization of Vietnam and the recent horrors of the Vietnam war. And as a group of teens who were somewhat disconnected from reality, it was easy for us to imagine the sinister Hand Of Xan influencing real-world events. Our group eventually imploded under the weight of our collective psychological issues. But I carried my love of Buckaroo Banzai with me for years. Until a fateful movie watching party in 2010 (which is ironically when Owen tried to watch The Pink Opaque on streaming, I think.) I showed it to my current group of friends, nearly bursting with an enthusiasm that wilted as I watched for their reactions - and witnessed their bewildered, bored, deadpan faces, as nearly every joke, quip, and quirky plot twist completely and utterly failed to land with any of them. They just sat in stony silence for a few minutes as the credits rolled. I was mortified. This movie, which I had promised my friends was funny and brilliant, seemed so *stupid* all of a sudden, its quirkiness just silly and tryhard. I couldn't believe I'd shown it to my friends. I think I actually apologized to them when it was over. The comics, and the distressing "Sequel Novel" released in 2021 did not help matters. Several times, I've asked "were these even written by the same guy?" I'm starting to wonder if everything we liked about Buckaroo Banzai did not come from Earl Mac Rauch himself, but from the pool of influences he was drawing from, as well as his collaboration with writer/director W.D. Richter (the director of the film, and the script doctor who worked on Big Trouble In Little China - a movie that many of the fans feel is Buckaroo Banzai's true "spiritual sequel.") I'm sorry this comment is so long: but yeah, I really felt for Owen in that moment.
IN MY OPINION the rewatching of the show means "Thinking about starting to look inside (again)" aka comforting his/her own identity. But as it's been years, thoughts that people have a long time ago get foggy, or sound cheesy and dated as Owen mentions in the scene.
Metaphorically speaking I think its about a ton of things. Number One, I think it is about Owen's distance from Isabel after the time skip. Very often, us trans people can get bogged down by the obligations set upon us from society. Owen says that they have a family, and very often people who transition in family figures are treated as selfish and wrong for prioritizing their true self over their fake self. Number Two, I think it is also commentary on the deteriorating importance of television with the death of cable TV. Less about the trans metaphor or the story itself, but I think it is about how the bonding that came out of having to watch a show at a specific time or having to go through the effort of recording it on something else made something particularly special, and so when streaming came out it took away from that. Number Three, in the plot sense, it relates to Owen's connection with Maddy. The Pink Opaque as a show represented the psychological connection between Owen and Maddy. Previously, everything about the Pink Opaque had to do with Owen and Maddy in some way, either through Maddy putting it on VHS or them watching it together. Through this connection to one another, they were able to see the true version of themselves and connect through that. However, when Maddy leaves the midnight realm and Owen watches it on the streaming service, it loses that connection with Maddy, and thus is subject to the manipulation and bastardization from Mr Melancholy. This is just my interpretation tho :)
Plotwise, I'm not sure what to think. Thematically, though, the childish Pink Opaque at the end of the movie is super important. And that theme is this: nostalgia is a cheat. C. S. Lewis made this point while critiquing Wordsworth. The poem we call "Tintern Abbey" begins, "Five years have past, five summers..." That is, the poem begins by looking backward fondly. ISTVG begins the same way with the gym parachute scene. The problem is that if we could go back to the wondrous gym parachute, we'd just find a parachute in a gym, not the feeling we had when we were 10, and it's the feeling that matters. Nostalgia is a cheat. Any Buffy fan who watches the show for the 5th time will experience disappointment. Certainly, any adult who goes back to Are You Afraid of the Dark will. What scared us as kids will read as silliness to us now, not only having grown up but having grown up as CG has developed. The scene where Owen streams Pink Opaque as an adult is sad but so obviously truthful. We can't go back to these places. There will never be another Saturday night in 1996 because we are not the same people we were in 1996.
Have to disagree about Buffy. Been rewatching since the DVD era.
I think it’s a metaphor for internalized transphobia. I think it represents how society and our environment instill shame for who we are, we’re told it’s childish, and fantasy. And when you repress who you are, you internalize all those messages and begin to believe them yourself. I also read a theory about how the VHS tapes were different because the shared connection between Owen and maddy. Which I think is also a good interpretation, and to add onto the interpretation, I think that sometimes it takes community or another person *seeing* and validating your experience, to come back to yourself and see things for how they are. But, when you are repressed and are isolated from other people like you, it can be so much easier to internalize and believe that you were childish and transitioning is a shameful fantasy that never can actually be. There are tons of interpretations that can be made, whether they’re are trans related or not tho which is super cool about this film :)
i think its a visual representation of owens world slowly collapsing (and him slowly dying) we see this later in the movie to when no one responds to him screaming and how hes almost entirely detached from this reality. it could also be him loseing/repressing memories of his life as a coping mechanism. on a more positive note though it could show owen and isabel no longer being two separate people but one, as he cant watch her from a far anymore all his memories of the show are just his memories, and the detachment from reality near the end of the movie could be a kind of purgatory in between both worlds because of his inability to make a decision or it could repersent him slowly transitioning to the pink opaque.
Honestly I don't think the show ever really existed in the first place. I think it's all a metaphor. It was different when Owen was with Madi because they were validated. It was canceled the month Madi disappeared because that validation went away too. When they tried to watch it as an adult, it wasn't the same, because they never validated themselves and the one who did validate them wasn't there to lift them.
This scene hit me pretty hard as someone who used to present femme when I was younger and then repressed for years before actually transitioning. It felt very much like the difference between presenting while young, and then attempting to present prior to and early into HRT. The years of wrong ouberty changed me, and the experience was uncomfortable and uncanny compared to when I was younger. It took a great deal of stubbornness and follow through to stick through this awkard period until the hormones could show effect.
In terms of the literal plot of the movie, it’s obvious IMO that the show itself was actually changed. I mean we (as viewers of the movie itself) can literally just rewind the movie to see that the streaming version is an entirely different show. It basically removes all doubt that The Pink Opaque is real (again, I’m just talking about the literal plot of the film, there are definitely larger implication in terms of meaning and social commentary)
I was convinced that it was always a scary show but thinking of the symbol that is just a cute ghost with glasses.... that would make more sense for a kids show...