Funereal Plots: A Matthew M. Bartlett Double-Feature
Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews
Matthew M. Bartlett
I Saw the TV Glow
Writer/Director – Jane Schoenbrun
The Pink Opaque is a 90’s-00’s television show (think a Young Adult version of The X-Files merged with Buffy the Vampire Slayer) about two teens charged with fighting a different monster each week. Looming over the whole storyline is the ultimate villain, the Big Bad, Mr. Melancholy. This is, of course, unsubtle in its metaphor. Our main characters Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), both lonely, both troubled, bond over the show, watching it in Maddy’s house’s basement, wishing their lives had more adventure, more magic.
One day Maddy disappears, leaving behind a television in flames. When, years later, she reappears to Owen, now working in a movie theater—where the screen’s glow is a sorry replacement for the tv—she claims to have lived inside the show and urges him to revisit the videotapes she sent him, in particular the final episode.
My first thought when starting I Saw the TV Glow was, oh no, I hope this isn’t a Young Adult film. This may be closed-minded or stodgy of me, but as an adult past middle age, I have little interest in coming of age movies, and the Struggle of Disaffected Youth is a theme which holds little resonance for me—unless it’s done exceptionally well. It’s a measure of the movie’s worth that it got past my defenses.
Is it a Young Adult film? Yes and no. I Saw the TV Glow has a lot to say about aging and time, about the malleability of identity. About how when we’re young and in need of escape, from suburban monotony or from the trauma of abuse, we identify with fictional characters so strongly that our identity blurs, and how that can warp us, how it can lead to disappointment and disillusionment. In the end, the things which have a strong emotional hold on us when we’re young—movies, music, television shows—turn out, when revisited with perspective, to be cheesy, gimcrack productions of little appeal to our adult selves.
The direction and cinematography matches the melancholy moods and themes—slow, dreamlike, hypnotic; dark, but lit up with day-glo scrawls on the sidewalks and screen, and, of course, by the omnipresent titular glow of the television.
In the bleak ending, The Pink Opaque lives inside Owen, but it’s tainted, more afterglow than glow, and it cannot save him from the monotonous struggles of adulthood.
Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews
Matthew M. Bartlett
The Coffee Table (La mesita del comedor)
Director – Caye Casas
Writers – Caye Casas, Cristina Borobia
Jesús Casas (David Pareja) is under pressure. He and his wife Maria (Estafania de los Santos) are the parents of a newborn baby. His neighbor, a 13-year-old girl with a crush on him, is threatening to lie and say that he’s made untoward advances on her. At the beginning of the movie, he and Maria are in a furniture store, arguing over the titular coffee table, an affront to taste and decency, with two gold-coated angels holding up an unbreakable (according to the slimy salesman, played with relish by Eduardo Antuña) oval of glass. He wants it. Maria thinks it’s hideous.
Maria is right.
Eventually, though, despite Maria’s objections, the table comes home with them.
Jesús’s brother and his scandalously young girlfriend are on their way over for dinner. What happens when Maria leaves to go shopping…
Well, read no further and skip to the last paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers.
The glass of the coffee table breaks, killing the baby—in an extremely violent and bloody manner.
The next hour or so is as tense a time as you’ll ever spend watching a movie. Jesús, distraught, wounded himself, must clean up the mess, hide the body, or, well, most of it, and pretend like nothing’s happened…all because he can’t bear the thought of telling his wife what he’s done.
The salesman comes by with a missing part, interrupting the cleanup. To Jesús’s horror, he lingers, expressing an interest in seeing Jesús socially. Maria comes home. The guests arrive. Jesús tries not to crack, though the seams are showing. The guests want to see the baby. Maria wants to feed the baby. The baby is sleeping, claims Jesús. The demands increase, as does Jesús’s resistance…and panic. He insults his brother and his (it is revealed, pregnant) girlfriend, racheting up the tension. At times we think Jesús might crack and kill everyone in the apartment. After all, this is not the kind of movie that pulls punches—the best it can do is not show you too much of the gore.
Toward the end, Jesus’s brother finds out what’s happened. Just then, the 13-year-old neighbor comes over with her dog in tow.
And then the tension explodes.
The Coffee Table is billed as a horror-comedy. There is humor, especially at the outset, as the new parents bicker over the purchase of the fateful piece of furniture. But the darkness, the horror, swoops in hard and violent. Reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rope, though arguably more transgressive, this is a darkly enjoyable horror masterpiece. It probably doesn’t hold up to repeat viewings, unless you watch it with an unsuspecting friend.
