DRAMA; 1hr 40min
STARRING: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine
Between the lines: Smith and Lundy-Paine
There are addictive TV shows — and then there are uncommonly addictive TV shows that play havoc with your self-perception. The 1996 young-adult series The Pink Opaque, in which psychic teens Isabel and Tara (Helena Howard and Lindsay Jordan) lock horns with the evil, parameter-bending Mr Melancholy (Emma Portner), is a compulsive case in point. To seventh grader Owen (Ian Foreman) and his ninth-grader friend Maddy (Lundy-Paine), who wear their solitude like a full body shield, the out-there show is everything.
Two years later, Owen (Smith) is still hooked, watching and rewatching the tapes that Maddy has made for him. Their heightened reality is a salve for his and Maddy’s chronic aloneness — an analogy that snaps into clarity with writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s description of their primary theme as the “egg crack” realisation of gender dissonance.
When Maddy runs away, Owen’s mother (Danielle Deadwyler) dies from cancer and The Pink Opaque is cancelled after five hypnotic seasons, that aloneness is set in concrete. Eight years on, Owen has all but ossified, working at the local cinema and living at home with his remote father (Fred Durst) in what has to be the most miserable existence known to man. Enter Maddy once again, claiming not only to have been living INSIDE The Pink Opaque but that she and Owen are more viscerally connected to Isabel and Tara than he can consciously accept. “This,” Owen defensively responds, “is insane.”
Nothing is more powerful than the reflex of self-denial. Years pass for Owen “like seconds.” Maddy is gone again for good, leaving him asthmatic, apathetic and apparently suicidal. But this fantastic passage was never about stating the obvious, and appearances are just one facet of its crazy state of grace.
