Two radically different readings at the end of Jane Schoenbrun's film

by Tasha Robinson and Pete Volk

Once you start talking about Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow, it's hard to stop. Their eerie, tragic follow-up to the underground hit We're All Going to the World's Fair is endlessly layered and unpackable, from its complicated central metaphor of trans coming-out to its close connections to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other mediums to the indelibly hard striking end.

While there's a lot to talk about throughout the film, we keep coming back to the ending, in part because we've seen an interesting split in how people interpret it. Like the ending of Inception, like the ending of Challengers, the ending of TV Glow invites viewers to see different things in the same images and the same moment. Here at Polygon, we see the same divide in our own writers… and you know what that means. It's time for another case file at Polygon Court.