This essay contains spoilers for The Matrix and I Saw the TV Glow
The story begins with a quiet, moody loner. We watch them move through their dismal life with palpable unease and a powerful longing for something beyond the humdrum life they lead. But one eventful day, they are confronted with the revelation that this life is nothing more than a simulation—a holographic theater of the mind, hollow and horrific beneath its façade of desaturated normalcy.
This is the truth they have always felt at their very core, but they have either been too afraid to face it or lacked the language to describe it. Everything they have ever known has been a projection, even their memories. From here, there are only two paths: stay trapped inside the non-reality created to contain them, or take the daunting risk to escape this nothingness and finally come to terms with who they truly are.
Twenty-five years before I Saw the TV Glow (2024) pleasantly surprised and devastated me, The Matrix (1999) set the stage for Owen's journey with Neo's extraordinary exodus. It may not boast memorable, gravity-defying fight sequences and leather-clad machine gun shootouts, but I Saw the TV Glow is absolutely a descendant of The Matrix.
Both of these weird, 90s-core, sci-fi flicks—one bombastic and cerebral, the other more quiet and cryptic—offer themselves as emblems for queer identity, repression, and awakening. They each contend with the distinct horror of denying one's authentic self while existing beneath the looming presence of, and being surveilled and policed by, the ominous powers invested in that denial.
The Matrix and I Saw the TV Glow are parallel queer liminal horrors.
Liminality—the uncanniness of the in-between; the eerie sensation at the edge of consciousness; the uncertainty of a threshold not yet crossed; the spatial and temporal distortion of a limbo state—is a queer thing. Queer as in strange, peculiar, curious. Queer as in marginal, peripheral, fringe. Queer as in transformation, (re)incarnation, emancipation.
As queer liminal horrors, both films deal in the psychological dread and surreal liminality at the doorstep of queer enlightenment and renaissance. Of queer becoming.
Like a splinter in your mind
The Matrix is both culturally iconic and genre-defining, a cyber-dystopian blend of high-octane action and psychological horror. Its themes of identity and rebirth play out in a science fiction parable about bodily autonomy, techno-surveillance, and liberation within an oppressive digital apparatus.
Neo (Keanu Reeves) lives much of his life behind a screen as a solitary computer programmer and hacker. His days and nights are haunted by an unsettling notion scraping at the back of his mind. Something is not quite right with the world. He's been scouring the web in search of something called "The Matrix." Though he has no idea what it is, he knows that answers lie there.
"Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you."
The text silently appearing on his computer screen somehow startles him awake, and he's not sure whether he's truly conscious, or still dreaming, or somewhere in-between.
At his mind-numbing office job, his boss reprimands him for his most recent corporate transgression. "Every single employee understands that they are part of a whole," the boss lectures. "Thus, if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem. The time has come to make a choice, Mr. Anderson."
Conform to the established order of the system. Fall in line, or be punished.
Neo's life is upended when he is detained by the mysterious and quietly foreboding Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). "It seems you've been living two lives," Agent Smith says. "One of these lives has a future. One of them does not." Neo is a chosen name, an alias he uses in the safety of his online haven. His given name, Thomas Anderson, is one he rejects and bristles at the sound of. "Mr. Anderson," as Agent Smith so menacingly refers to him, is a constant dismissal of Neo's naming of himself.
But Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) continually and ardently affirms him as Neo.
When Neo first meets the enigmatic Morpheus, he speaks to the very thing that has long haunted Neo's imagination: "You know something. What you know, you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. There's something wrong with the world, you don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad."
What Neo has always believed to be reality is The Matrix he's been searching for.
This Matrix is a neural-interactive simulation—a virtual prison engineered by artificial intelligence. Machines have enslaved humans to harvest bioelectric energy, plugging humans into the system to keep them docile and distracted. Humans now exist in perpetual liminality, somewhere between manufactured simulacrum in the virtual world and bleak dystopian reality in the material world; their bodies in one place, their minds in another. And, in order to be plugged into this Matrix, their bodies have been modified with cybernetic interface ports, leaving them somewhere between fallible flesh and macabre machinery.
The Matrix is, in a word, control.
"As long as The Matrix exists, the human race will never be free," Morpheus tells Neo. That control is enforced by the likes of Agent Smith, a sentient program within The Matrix that acts as an arbiter of the system. "Inside The Matrix, [agents] are everyone and they are no one," Morpheus explains. "They are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors. They are holding all the keys." Along with Sentinels—killing machines that "search [for] and destroy" rebels outside The Matrix—agents surveil, police, and intimidate inside The Matrix, both forces working to keep humans under control.
Morpheus and his comrades operate in the shadows to unplug humans from The Matrix and recruit them to join the revolution against the machines. For his abolitionist work of freeing others, Morpheus has been labeled a "terrorist," and he offers that same freedom to Neo. It's a freedom that must be willingly chosen. Neo can choose to swallow the red pill and have his eyes opened to the truth of the world beyond The Matrix, or swallow the blue pill and continue in ignorance.
Neo chooses to cross that threshold.
Breaking free from The Matrix is a form of rebirth. Once awakened, Neo emerges from an egg-shaped stasis pod drenched in amniotic fluid, disoriented, terrified, and gasping for air as he looks out at a massive power plant where humans lay incubating, stacked in endless columns. Still ignorant, still plugged into the prison he has finally escaped.
The awakening is jarring and painful, but necessary for his liberation. Only then can he come into his purpose as a leading combatant in the effort to wage a war against oppression and ultimately abolish The Matrix entirely.
A wonderful, wonderful prison
Set against the backdrop of 90s "Monster of the Week" television, I Saw the TV Glow is a meandering, slow-creeping, liminal nightmare dripping in pink neon. The film is an eccentric but haunting exploration of identity, isolation, and conformity—a story of queer repression told with VHS tapes, psychic powers, and supernatural sci-fi weirdness.
Owen (Ian Foreman/Justice Smith) and Maddy (Jack Haven) form an instant bond over The Pink Opaque, a TV show that captivates them both for reasons neither can fully understand or articulate. The series follows protagonists Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan), teenagers who discovered their ability to commune on the "psychic plane" at sleepaway camp and now use their abilities to fight the nefarious Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner) and his henchmen.
"Mr. Melancholy [is] the Man in the Moon," Maddy explains. "He's always messing with time and reality. He wants to rule the world."
The thing is, Owen has never actually seen The Pink Opaque—only commercials—since it airs after his bedtime. And so, Maddy records episodes on VHS for him. He watches in secret, especially from his father, who asked, "Isn't that a show for girls?" when Owen begged permission to stay up to watch it.
Owen's overbearing father and hyperattentive mother add to the loneliness he already feels as a kid who is clearly different. Something about him simply feels out of place. It's a feeling Maddy knows well too, a feeling compounded after being outed by a former friend. Her own abusive home life exacerbates her isolation and trauma. Growing up in a small, suburban town that despises anyone or anything that doesn't fit the mold of normalcy, Owen and Maddy stitch their respective solitudes into an awkwardly intimate friendship.
"Sometimes The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life," Maddy says. She feels a deep connection to Tara, as deeply as she feels a disconnect from the world around her, and her fixation on the show informs her longing to escape into another life.
Both Owen and Maddy embody a certain kind of grief. A lament for a life unlived, but profoundly longed for. The acute and resonant pain of suffocating within the walls of a claustrophobic existence. It's excruciating and grim, and it's all they know.
Maddy eventually asks Owen to run away with her. "I'll die if I stay here," she tells him. "I don't know how exactly, but I know it's true." He originally agrees, but is ultimately overcome by his anxieties. There's safety in the familiar, even if the unfamiliar would allow for a more genuine expression of self. Sometimes, the unfamiliar unknown is so terrifying, familiar torments become a convenient dwelling.
One day, Maddy disappears. Not long after, The Pink Opaque gets canceled following the season five finale. And Owen is alone again, sleepwalking through a mundane, unfulfilled life. Stuck at a dull job, bullied by his coworkers, despised by his widowed father.
When Maddy returns years later, she returns with a world-crumbling revelation. Maddy is Tara. Owen is Isabel. The Pink Opaque is real, and what Owen knows as reality is the Midnight Realm.
In the season five finale, Mr. Melancholy and his henchmen captured Isabel and Tara. The friends were sedated and buried alive, and their minds were trapped in the Midnight Realm.
"You're going to love the Midnight Realm," Mr. Melancholy taunted. "It's a wonderful, wonderful prison."
This prison, like all prisons, is designed to torture its inmates. It contains them in a simulation so stifling they'll never know peace, yet so convincing they may never try to escape. They are split between two worlds; body in one, consciousness in another. And the longer the consciousness remains in the Midnight Realm, the more life drains from the body. If they don't find a way out of this liminal hellscape, they will suffocate to death.
Tara found a way out, and has returned to the Midnight Realm to save Isabel from a miserable existence as Owen. She tells him exactly how to escape his prison: bury himself alive, die, and wake up in his true body. Isabel's body. A body made whole, no longer disconnected from its consciousness.
"The longer you wait, the closer you get to suffocating," she warns, urging him to follow her. "I know it's scary. That's part of it."
But Owen is resistant. It's too hard to wrap his head around his old friend's story, even though he feels the truth of it in his soul. "It's not real if I don't think about it," he says.
Isabel suffocates as Owen for decades. Twenty years later, Owen continues to trudge through his days, performing normalcy. And while Isabel suffocates in her grave, Owen suffers through every pained, laborious breath. He is agonizingly aware that this life is not his own, but he is too terrified to let Owen die in order to live as Isabel.
It's not real if he doesn't think about it.
Whether Owen ever escapes the Midnight Realm, or Isabel escapes her grave, is never confirmed or denied. The film reminds us that "there is still time," but it's left up to us to finish the story in our heads. We decide if it's a triumph or a tragedy.
Allegory of the Closet
Imagine a cave where shackled prisoners have lived their entire lives. Their captors use fire and puppetry to cast dancing shadows on the walls, lulling the prisoners into compliance and keeping them ignorant to their oppressive conditions. What happens when one of the prisoners escapes the cave and stumbles into the sunlight of the real world?
Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is a seminal and timeless work of philosophy that has informed storytelling for centuries, providing a critical framework for the exploration of belief versus reality. As Plato theorizes, when one prisoner escapes the cave, their eyes must adjust to the brightness and their mind must adjust to the truth: the shadows in the cave were mere illusions and the world is far more expansive than they ever knew.
Leaving the cave is a painful experience. The brightness of the sun burns the eyes. The overwhelm is jarring. The world outside is a big, daunting unknown. The prisoner's transition from belief to reality is disorienting, an assault on the psyche. Crossing the threshold into enlightenment is a harrowing thing. The belief once held must now fall away, even as the new reality remains largely unrealized.
When the prisoner returns to share the news with the others, they are shunned and disbelieved. The others are angry at the returning prisoner for challenging what they have always known to be true. They cling to their shadows. But what of the prisoner who has already seen the light? How can they exist contently among the other prisoners now, knowing what they know?
The Matrix and I Saw the TV Glow play out as allegories of the cave—existential, liminal, metaphysical horrors in which characters are imprisoned in a sort of limbo and have the truth of their imprisonment hidden from them. Though we follow Neo and Owen to drastically different ends, their stories mirror one another.
Trapped in their respective simulations, the characters are presented with the opportunity to undergo a transformation in order to free themselves from lives of suffocating conformity; one must escape from a virtual world, while the other is beckoned toward an analog world. And it is the choice each of them must make—action or inaction, conformity or authenticity—which propels each story to its end.
Neo leaves the shadows of the cave behind. Owen clings to them.
"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth… That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind."
—Morpheus
Neo and Tara escaping The Matrix and the Midnight Realm is a fitting hyperbole for queer awakening. In this way, The Matrix and I Saw the TV Glow work as Allegories of The Closet, in which characters cross the threshold into enlightenment and deliver themselves from the carceral and punitive ideologies of a gender miasma—the social construct of gender itself; the very trappings of the proverbial closet.
A miasma is an oppressive, intangible influence or atmosphere which depletes, corrupts, and obscures. What is the gender construct if not a miasma? What is The Closet if not a prison we cannot smell or taste or touch?
This miasma haunts us all. It torments, pervades, and infests. It saturates the entire world. Like The Matrix, it is everywhere. We feel it manifest in every facet of our lives—socially, culturally, interpersonally, politically, institutionally. A subjection we were born into.
It demands that there be only two genders, both imbued with predetermined yet opposing sets of expectations, directives, and permissions. It declares gender fixed and innate. Therefore, gender must be vehemently protected from the deviation of queerness, and queer deviance from gender must be punished. Do not look beyond the gender construct. There is nothing more to understand or discover. Just watch the shadows dance.
Like The Matrix and The Midnight Realm, the gender construct is a fabrication that can only be maintained through obfuscation and force. It must employ and deploy agents to surveil and police, ensuring penalties for those who deviate from the confines of fixed, binary gender. These limits are enforced through social coercion and punishment, and fortified by legislation. Agent Smith and Mr. Melancholy appear in their respective narratives as personifications of an oppressive system and its investment in the status quo. And in our world, the Agent Smiths and Mr. Melancholies conspire to keep us from the truth they don't want us to embrace, the truth that gender is not intransigent.
Gender is malleable, its borders traversable. The Matrix and I Saw the TV Glow make these borders both tangible and nebulous in a way that exemplifies the complexities of queer existence and the magnitude of queer becoming.
Many of us know, intimately, the unease of Neo and Owen before their revelations. That feeling of knowing something is out of place in the world. An existence that feels dissonant and dysphoric, alienated from the self. We also know the visceral chill that comes after the bombshell of epiphany.
"It's actually a totally terrifying first realization, because you know that now you either have to continue hiding from yourself and not living the life you're supposed to be living, or you need to completely blow up any form of stability or belonging that you've established for yourself."
—Jane Schoenbrun, writer and director of I Saw the TV Glow
Queer revelation can be distressing. The disquieting uncertainty of what lay on the other side unsettles the nerves and curdles the blood. The mind reels with questions, apprehensions, and nightmares. This is queer liminal horror. But, like Neo's harrowing awakening and rebirth, it is necessary for our liberation. On the other side of liminal horror is liminal possibility.
Liminality evokes an unsettling state of in-betweenness and uncertainty, but it is also a space where opportunity and experimentation can flourish. In liminality, we can discover new ways of being, of knowing, of resisting. In liminality, we can welcome queerness as transformation, as (re)incarnation, as emancipation. In liminality, we find the revolutionary power of queer becoming.
In The Matrix and I Saw the TV Glow, we are shown the gender construct—and the system which upholds it—as horror, as projected shadows, as a prison constructed by powerful forces beyond our control. And we are shown that breaking free is possible.
In their own way, both films ask: When faced with your becoming, what will you choose?