Polygon Court debates: Is there any hope in the ending of I Saw the TV Glow?

polygon.com:

Once you start talking about Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, it’s hard to stop. Their eerie, tragic follow-up to the underground hit We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is endlessly layered and unpackable, from its complicated central metaphor about trans coming-out to its close links to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other media to that indelible, hard-hitting ending.

While there’s plenty to talk about throughout the movie, we keep coming back to the ending, in part because we’ve seen an interesting split in how people are interpreting it. Like the ending of Inception, like the ending of Challengers, the end of TV Glow prompts viewers to see different things in the same images and the same moments. Here at Polygon, we’re seeing the same split in our own writers… and you know what that means. It’s time for another case file at Polygon Court.

Polygon Court is where we take our divisive pop culture conflicts, as we did when we debated the alternate ending of James Cameron’s Titanic, the most important part of the Fast & Furious franchise, the problem of Spider in Avatar: The Way of Water, the song cut from The Muppet Christmas Carol, and the mysterious, maybe problematic ending of All of Us Strangers. So pull up the stenograph and get ready to take notes (and take sides), because court is in session.

[Ed. note: End spoilers ahead for I Saw the TV Glow.]

The quick summary: I Saw the TV Glow follows decades in the life of Owen (Ian Foreman as a young teenager, Justice Smith thereafter), a shy, deeply awkward, lonely young man who finds solace in a late-night cult TV show called The Pink Opaque. He’s lured into the show’s fandom by a slightly older teenager, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who considers the show “more real than real life.” Maddy desperately wants to escape their small town, and sees The Pink Opaque as a form of escape. The show centers on two girls, Isabel and Tara, who share a psychic connection, which they use to fight the sinister Mr. Melancholy and