It’s a Sunday night. I’m showing I Saw The TV Glow to a friend of mine. It’s my second time watching it.

The screen fades to black one last time, and my friend sits in silence, waiting for more. Her eyes are wide open and filled with tears. On the kitchen table: empty pizza boxes, a couple of beers and a pack of cigarettes. My computer screen reflects our faces back to us, unbothered by the silence.

Eventually, I just can’t take it. “And that’s it,” I say, barely a second before the credits start rolling.

My friend just looks at me, her face brightened by the shock. I have rarely seen her so taken, so unnerved by a story that enchanted her from beginning to end.

“I’m sorry,” she asks, “what?”

I Saw The TV Glow is a cold movie. It is asphyxiating and lonely. It drags the time it spends with you, forcing you to sit in uncomfortable places, warmed only by the visual comfort of its signature colors and delightful compositions. Its light blinds you, it keeps you on the edge of your seat even though nothing ever happens. It’s like staring at a slow-motion shot of an empty field.

The story barely fits inside a plot. A child becomes a teenager becomes an adult. The two friends at the center of the movie meet as teens and bond over a strange, intriguing TV Show. As the TV Show abruptly ends, one of them mysteriously disappears. Then, years later — she comes back.

A description like that, however accurate, doesn’t make for a satisfying pitch. Yes, this is a movie where things happen and characters grow, but the pace of the story isn’t chronological and it isn’t defined by major life events.

In a sense, the scenes read like verses of a poem. There’s no real context to its plot and very little time is spent justifying it. Like an expressionist painting, the story doesn’t depict things as they are, but as you remember them. Dream-logic muddles the water, overwhelming each frame with its surreal set of priorities.

In this movie, conversations only happen in empty rooms, gigantic super markets, poorly-lit living rooms and strange bathrooms. Pivotal moments take place in deserted football fields, at school exclusively when one is there, on the floor and underground.

Dreams – like poems – aren’t concerned with realism, because it literally gets in their way. I dream about my childhood house and the garden is all wrong, the living-room is bigger, people I only got to meet in my twenties stand at the foot of my old bed and I just lay there and wave, as if it somehow all made sense. I can only imagine dreaming about my first home through the lens of my longing, drenched in every feeling those walls carry with them.

I have always remembered my dreams very well. A blessing and a course, when most of your dreams are nightmares.

If you’d ask me about my favorite dream, however, I wouldn’t tell you about the time my great-grand-mother showed me heaven, or about the satisfaction of lucid dreaming on a pirate ship. I would bring up one of those rare nightmares that leaves you with something much more valuable than terror: hope.

I Saw The TV Glow is quite literally conceived as a nightmare, and it fits the frame perfectly. Watching it left me speechless, perhaps even a little scared.

And still, when I showed it to my friend on a Sunday night, excitedly clapping my hands before it even started, I forgot to tell her how bleak it got. I had to stop it mid-way through the first scene to warn her about it, just in case she got the wrong impression and wasn’t in the mood for a psychological horror.

Bad nightmares leave you alert for hours, exhausted for the whole day, afraid of going back to sleep. Good nightmares jolt you awake. They let you take a breath after it’s all over, but they stick with you long after the unease fades and your body goes back to normal.

Why are you scared of this? they keep asking. And why are you trying to hide it?

It’s early August, and we are walking towards a river. The sun is about to set. We have been talking for hours about all sorts of things, and now the conversation has finally circled back to the movie.

I can’t seem to stop talking about it. This was my third time seeing it and my second time showing it to someone else, and it still managed to surprise me.

“It’s so good at loneliness,” I tell Mille. “Like, it really feels isolating.”

I think about being 13 and hyperventilating in a bathroom at 3 a.m., hoping my mom would hear me and know what to say. I remember finally waking her up, and telling her I was crying because my favorite character had died. When my mother did not know what to tell me – how do you handle a perpetually desperate teenager who only ever complains about irrational fears? – I remember crying some more, till my body gave up and I fell asleep.

“I know that I like TV Shows,” I say, back to my twenty-four-year-old-self, quoting a scene from the movie where the main character is asked about their sexuality and can’t come up with a coherent answer. “Such an accurate line. That was me when I was a teen.”

“Yeah, I felt like that, too,” my friend replies. “I think it’s normal. As a kid, you just don’t know that you are not alone. You have no way to know. Someone has to teach you.”

We end up eating our pizzas drenched in darkness, sitting right on the edge of the river. We talk about our old crushes, our goals and our fears, and we talk about the people we miss and the mistakes we have made. I think about loneliness the whole time, but I don’t believe I feel it tonight. Not even once.

My favorite definition of poetry is by Jon Berger. From his book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos:

• Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
• Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.

There’s been a lot of discourse about the kind of “representation” marginalized people do or do not need, but the truth is that a good story can be about anything. It’s the framing that counts.

Are you talking about a battlefield from the perspective of a commander, looking down upon the less fortunate? Are you spying on us from a hole in the ground, safe and unseen? Are we the loser, and – if so – are you our savior?

If you have ever heard the term trauma porn, you know what I’m talking about. Stories told from the inside out often linger on pain, the same way a driver slows down on the scene of a car accident. As Susan Sontag once wrote,

• “No moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”

As far as I’m concerned, however, a good poem – one that crosses the battlefields, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful – is never entirely desperate, and it is rarely (if ever) classifiable as trauma porn.

Most poetry is personal and contextless. The act of writing down your pain, of letting it be remembered, means that there is some sense in conveying it to an audience. A kind of peace you can bring to those who are reading. Not by anesthesia (just pretend you are not in pain) or easy reassurance (it’s gonna be just fine) but by recognition. What has been experienced will not disappear as if it had never been.

I Saw The TV Glow is about loneliness. It’s about the horror of surviving and the shame of failing in silence, pained by wounds no one can see.

Some of us are lucky: after it is all over, we get to live.

Crawling out of the earth after being buried alive is no small feat, and battles are lost and won all the time.

The gravity of the situation begs some questions. What if you are outnumbered? What if the rest of the world has long abandoned you? What if you don’t have the energy or the time or the physical strength to write the poem? What if you just don’t want to?

Although I Saw The TV Glow spends much of its time examining loneliness, there are some moments of reprieve, glances into a kinder world, and they only really happen when the two friends are together.

Their connection doesn’t brighten rooms, it doesn’t make them happy, it doesn’t even really solve their problems. On top of that, their connection is difficult. It requires them to lie to their parents, it forces them to face the monsters they have been running away from. It’s a high stakes bet with a very uncertain reward.

And yet, their conversations feel real. Their affection towards one another struggles to bear the test of time, but they keep on reaching out anyway. Through cassette tapes and safe to enter dark rooms, they build a refuge; they meet through the fog, in a corner of hell where the fire burns a little less.

The warmest scene of the movie takes place when the friend who disappeared comes back. They talk to each other in a pub as various artists play on a small stage. For the one and only time in an hour and forty minutes of footage, the strangers around them seem welcoming.

The friend who came back opens up about her journey, her future away from the battlefield. She explains how difficult it was to come up for air, how painful and excruciatingly slow. She is here now, visiting hell one last time, because her friend is still stuck in the flames. I knew I needed to come back here, she tells her. I knew I needed to come back and save you.

In the background, two artists are playing a gentle, melancholic song. It goes:

• I think I was born bored


• I think I was born blue


• I think I was born wanting more


• I think I was born


• Already missing you


• But my heart is like a claw machine


• Its only function is to reach


• It can't hold on to anything


• No, I can't hold on to anything

Jon Berger’s definition of poetry has a beautiful conclusion.

Yet the promise is not of a monument, it goes. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

Regardless of outcomes, Isabel is born wanting – demanding – more. Something about her shines. It may never shine again, but it can.

Certainly a small consolation for a life of agony, but maybe that’s all that good art can do. It won’t change the world, not on its own, but it can provide shelter. It can help us remember.

For some, a small window of emotional safety can make a big difference, and it certainly seems to be the case for the audience of this movie.

I watched I Saw The TV Glow because my friends loved it. Because I saw various videos of trans people walking out of a theater in tears, speechless and shaken and profoundly moved. Because even though the film is painful and hard to digest, I saw my friends share one of its quotes over and over again and somehow that convinced me to press play.

It’s only a short sentence, written in neon chalk on an empty road. It goes:

And it’s true. For better and for worse.

There is time to try again, to win and lose, to survive and gamble what little you have left just to make it a little further, just to suffer a little less.

But what if we are hopeless, you ask. What if we are outnumbered, abandoned, what if we barely have enough strength to lay down and sleep?

Maybe there are good answers to this question, and hopefully they will go down in history. In any case, however, I doubt that they will be relayed through poems.

Can art say or do anything meaningful about those whose survival hangs on a thread? What kind of power do words have, when your quality of life only allows you to drink water once per day?

Honestly, I think it depends. Some people feel the need to write or draw or sing up until the end, even through bloodshell, and others just don’t want to, or can’t stand it, or lack the energy to even try.

I Saw The TV Glow seems to know this. The message is clear: watching a movie won’t save your life, just like a glowing screen won’t solve your problems. Fiction is only capable of echoing things you already know.

To me, that’s exactly why the last scene of the story doesn’t satisfy us. It doesn’t end, it just falls, abruptly and unceremoniously in our open hands.

It leaves us, wanting more.

It’s a Sunday night. My brain hasn’t been kind to me in the past few hours, but right now I am doing okay. My hands are steady and my eyes are open. I can see clearly even in the dim light.

My friend just asked me for an explanation, and I have a good one to give her. I decide to go about it in the most straightforward way possible.

“So, I know this feels incredibly sad. Personally, though, I expected it to end abruptly. Like, do you remember when Maddy disappears and the Pink Opaque ends on a horrible cliffhanger? On my first watch that really stuck out to me, and it instantly convinced me the movie wouldn’t end well. So, there's that. More importantly, however, the movie doesn’t just end badly: it ends at rock bottom. You know when Tara talks about crawling out of the earth, and she says she screamed and she begged for help and she started apologizing to everyone?”

My friend nods, slowly taking in my words.

“That’s what gets her to change, what pushes over the edge. It can be the same for Isabel, but who knows. You can’t control how her story ends. You only have some say over your own. So, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna acknowledge the monster that’s eating you alive?”

“And maybe you never crawl out of your grave and maybe you will never get the chance to put your heart back into your chest. Some people just don’t get what they deserve. But it’s important to remember that as long as we are alive, all our hearts are still beating.”

There are a few moments of understandable silence.

I have had a whole week to come up with a thing to say, and enough enthusiasm to embellish it a little more on every retelling. My friend, on the other end, is just now attempting to put her feelings into words.

I see in her expression the same intensity that connects us when we speak about politics. The weight of injustice, the enormity of all incoming tragedies, and finally our rage, our hunger, our desire to sit at a table with as many people as possible to figure out just what the fuck is in our power to attempt.

“I mean, yeah. I get it,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”

The rest of the conversation escapes my memory, muddled by circumstantial distractions and personal musings, but I think that what I do remember is enough.

“Yeah,” I must say, unthinkingly, just to sit in this feeling and breathe it all in. “It is.”