Maddy’s in 9th grade; the two-year gap feels enormous. But she is eager to bond over the show. The next Saturday Owen asks his mother if he can sleep at a male friend’s house, but makes his way instead to Maddy’s basement. Thus begins a deep connection to the show which follows two girls who meet at sleepaway camp and learn they connect on an ancient psychic plane. They unite to destroy a new monster each week, monsters ruled by an evil Man in the Moon named Mr. Melancholy.
Mr. Melancholy wants to trap Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan, aka the musician Snail Mail) in the Midnight Realm, and that one factoid leads to some comic relief: “This isn’t the Midnight Realm,” Owen exclaims to Maddy at one point. “It’s just the suburbs!”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Two years go by and Maddy has been leaving Owen VHS tapes of The Pink Opaque in the school darkroom, annotated with observations. But he still hasn’t been able to see it at 10:30 on a Saturday. Asks his stern father: “Isn’t that a show for girls?” His parents decline his request to stay up late. (Dad, by the way, is played by Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit; also appearing in a cameo is Phoebe Bridgers.)
So Owen (Smith, in a lovely and nuanced performance) plans another stealth sleepover. They watch together, and Maddy weeps. She then tells Owen she is leaving town. He is torn about whether to join her. Years go by, and eventually The Pink Opaque is canceled.
Remember when you could touch and collect tapes, albums, that sort of thing? Somehow that seemed more of a concrete relationship with the culture we consume than the equivalent today. You don’t have to worry nowadays about remembering a show wrong: you can always find it somewhere. But you don’t feel you “own” it anymore than you “own” a song on Spotify.
Schoenbrun acknowledges this when they show an adult Owen later re-watching his beloved show on streaming and realizing, with sadness and even embarrassment, that nothing’s what it seemed.