Letter from the Editor: We found each other in The Glow

Photo Courtesy of A24

Greetings dearest reader, and welcome to the pages of The Pitch’s June Pride Issue. I trust that by the time you’re holding these dead trees in hand, the weather will have turned to full swamp-ass, your neighborhood will be wafting a consistent evening layer of BBQ smoke, our municipality’s seasonal road construction/destruction rally will have you punching your steering wheel on your daily commute, and—with some amount of unearned hope—perhaps you have made peace with the plague of cicadas that have decided to be fair weather Chiefs fans and let loose on the metro.Heading into the production of this mag, a bunch of us caught the new film I Saw the TV Glow from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun in a cool dark theater. If you haven’t seen it already, hunt it down today, or… I don’t know, it’ll be on streaming sooner rather than later. You do you. Schoenbrun’s flick is part of a recent run of indie-crafted queer cinema finding footing in large theater chains this year. This coming out around T-Blockers and The People’s Joker—whose filmmaker we interviewed in our 4/20 Issue—has made for a thrilling break for the platforming of industry “outsider” perspectives to the top-tier platforms of film accessibility. This batch of motion pictures all carry the transgressive feel of art I would’ve needed to torrent a decade ago, or acquire by similar nefarious means—not catch in an AMC where Nicole Kidman prefaces the presentation by reminding me that this is the power of movies.

I Saw the TV Glow follows two young teens in 1996 who have nothing in common, besides being invisible to the world around them and knowing that they are… different. They bond over a TV show that airs on The Young Adult Network on Saturday nights, long after their bedtimes. The Pink Opaque is a series about two teen girls, their supernatural powers, and the evil monster of the week they must tackle. The show itself is meant to be a filler for Buffy or Twin Peaks or X-Files or Supernatural or whatever the equivalent show was in your life—that thing that others thought was maybe silly, but you and your ilk knew that it was actually super smart, super scary, and had a complicated world of lore that normies couldn’t even process.

This movie isn’t trying to nostalgia-trap the viewer into anything. Whatever Stranger Things does when it rolls out ‘80s reference after reference, this is the opposite. Rather, I Saw the TV Glow wants to tap into that movie, show, book, video game, YouTube channel, or bizarre little hobby that was the first time in life you found a thing made “just for you.” It wants you to travel back to that emotional memory, and then relive the private joys, terrors, and confusion when you realized you could share this love with another person.

I will never forget the day at recess when I finally met another kid at my school who didn’t think I should get an automatic noogie or a punch in the arm for bringing up Star Trek. He knew who Wesley Crusher was and also thought Locutus of Borg was the worst thing that had ever happened to his waking hour.

I’ll never forget the girl who wrote her own fanfic about a cartoon that was, apparently, erased from reality to the point I cannot find it now. But I know her name and I remember how much better her writing was than everyone else in that middle school class full of idiot kids who laughed in her face. I’m glad that I got to work for her a few decades later, and I’m glad I never laughed.

I won’t forget the woman who I met at the very end of having an existential meltdown, abandoning my adult life, and choosing to travel the country for two weeks to visit all the filming locations from Twin Peaks. I wound up marrying her. Not because a log told me to, but not not because of that.

Cult media is its own thing, but in the glow of that which you’re convinced is made only for you… that glow can reveal the people who are your real partners in this world. Pop culture isn’t make or break, but it’s one of those rare places where all other signifiers and boundaries can wash away, and you can see who Your People really are. You can see yourself, and you can be seen.

The throughline of much of this month’s issue is finding that home, that community, that place just for you (but also so many others). Our stories share a fairly common theme of heroes who were looking for their peers, and how even a location you can call home might need more work before it truly feels that way.

This issue is about who we find in the glow of what we love, and how thrilling it is to find others illuminated in a space and time where you worried it could have been just you and the void.

Pitch in, and we’ll make it through,