‘I Saw The TV Glow’ ending explained: what happens to Owen?

Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine lead the psychological drama I Saw The TV Glow.

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun, the surrealist film follows the insecure and anxious Owen (Smith) as he navigates adolescence. When he befriends Maddy (Lundy-Paine), they bond over a TV show called The Pink Opaque, which provides an escape from their daily lives.

Schoenbrun wrote the script at the early stages of their transition – with much of the film serving as an allegory for the trans experience and self-discovery generally.

I Saw The TV Glow also features an original soundtrack with songs by Caroline Polachek, Sloppy Jane, Phoebe Bridgers and Yeule.

What happens at the end of I Saw The TV Glow?

After her disappearance, Maddy returns eight years later and reunites with Owen. In the years since, Maddy tells Owen she buried herself alive, escaped and rediscovered her identity as Tara – a character from The Pink Opaque TV show.

Maddy says the other lead character in The Pink Opaque, Isabel, is still buried – and the only way she can be reawakened is if Owen, who she believes is Isabel’s false identity, buries himself in the soil. Owen, who thinks Maddy’s story is “insane” and “couldn’t be true”, rejects this proposal and he never sees her again.

Years later, we see an older, and still repressed, Owen working at an arcade bar. After a desperate scream for help during a child’s birthday party, Owen heads to the bathroom and looks within himself quite literally – by cutting a hole in his chest – to find the static TV glow beaming inside him where his heart should be.

After seeing inside himself, a whimpering Owen returns to work and apologises to customers and colleagues about his earlier outburst, who ignore his existence.

What does the ending mean?

As explained by director Jane Schoenbrun to Entertainment Weekly, the TV glow in Owen and Maddy’s younger years acts as a “portal to a place and a reality and an identity” as they grow into adolescence, but as Owen grows older and loses his mother, Maddy and the TV show, he sinks into a repressed state and the TV glow becomes a “coping mechanism” which limits who he truly is.

Owen, however, appears to find the courage to see something is missing in his life when he prys open his chest. While this could be seen as the start of his path towards self-discovery, the film’s closing scene suggests that Owen has a long way to go before he’s free from his reserved ways.

Speaking about the end, Schoenbrun said: “After half a lifetime of resistance, when Owen finally sees that glow inside himself – and to do so, he literally has to open himself up and see the heart that’s been taken from him, and see that it’s been replaced by this signal that could be something beautiful, but also carries the ambivalence and sinister nature of the emptiness of glow; the thing that it is representing what isn’t there inside him.

“This was my attempt to capture the ambivalence and overwhelming joy and possibility, but also things that feel sinister and terrifying about an egg crack – the moment when, as a queer or trans person, you understand that you aren’t yourself and that you need to become something else to conjure that magic that was maybe there in childhood and maybe there in these other moments in life.”

They added: “The film is called I Saw The TV Glow, which is my way of saying, I saw the TV glow inside myself, and it took me almost as long as it took Owen to finally see it. And when I wrote this film, I had only just seen it not that long before.”

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