Few movie-watching experiences of late have been as transportive as I Saw the TV Glow. Jane Schoenbrun’s second film several steps up from We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022), which played like an partially realized idea about our media habits. This one by contrast, with its blues and violets and edge-of-midnight ambience and dearth of laugh lines and plenty of stricken closeups, evokes David Lynch’s Inland Empire and, better, Twin Peaks: The Return. Directors from Nicholas Ray to David Cronenberg, among others, have made films about dysphoria; Schoenbrun’s is the most fully realized, an immersion in which Owen (played by Ian Foreman as a young man and as an adult with tremulous precision by Justice Smith) develop, thanks to a ninth grader named Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a relationship with a ’90s TV show called The Pink Opaque that triggers varying responses to how their gender breaks open — what Schoenbrun has called the “egg crack.”
The first line in The Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” is “I’ve come to hate my body.” I Saw the TV Glow captures that anxiety and self-loathing with unusual grace and vigor. Even audiences who aren’t queer navigate their lives with the help of codes. By showing how Owen and Maddy watch The Pink Opaque for recognizable signs and symbols, Schoenbrun provides their own roadmap to an audience also in search of codes. You can watch I Saw the TV Glow as if it were a horror film, albeit an unusually sexless and bloodless one, and no doubt some people will; but I suspect the film will generate a fervent cult following for viewers who understand how dysphoria and dysmorphia of some kind are the genre’s preferred subjects.
Treated as a child in need of curfews well into his early twenties by mixed race parents, Owen projects a not-thereness too grounded in terrestrial fear to say he’s not of this earth. His only friend is a kid he hasn’t seen in years, a prop used as a way to lie to his mom about sleeping over Maddy’s to obsess over their show. “I’m into girls,” she warns him one afternoon on the bleachers as if it needed to be said. Maddy dresses in the black uniform and wears the defiant bangs of a young woman who has modeled herself on outcasts from My So-Called Life and other period fare. Yet despite the age differences she senses a kindred spirit. Noting Owen’s curiosity about the episode guide to The Pink Opaque, she remarks, “You’re like me, you’re special.”
As for the show itself, its title nods towards a Cocteau Twins compilation whose creamy detachment is nothing like the show we see onscreen. In every episode Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan) fight the evil forces of Mr. Melancholy, a hat tip to the epochal-for-others Smashing Pumpkins album released in 1995; the arch-baddy is himself represented as that Georges Méliès moon. These forces may look like anthropomorphized ice cream scoops, and Isabel and Tara (who code queer) act more peevish than victimized, but thanks to Schoenbrun’s tonal control I didn’t laugh it off. Maddy and Owen believe in The Pink Opaque; they may be living the show, a point made when in a flashback Schoenbrun shows Maddy drawing the mysterious Pac-Man ghost that is the show’s symbol on Owen’s neck. The manner in which Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric K. Yue shoot the curvature of Owen’s spine, the downward slope of his neck, and his face in silhouette it’s as if they catch Owen after or in the middle of a transition.
Schoenbrun’s is a cinema of omission. Owen’s mom needs two scenes to register as a warm if detached presence: an all-purpose goodness to whom Owen appeals in a devastating late scene. His father, by contrast, is played by Fred Durst, kept in long shot benumbed by TV into the wee hours and who delivers, I think, two lines of dialogue but one of which addresses The Pink Opaque: “Isn’t that a show for girls?” I’ve mentioned Schoenbrun’s command of Lynchian visual rhetoric: shots of suburban supermarkets after 9-11, with produce sections shadowed by American flags; a tracking show up a residential street stained with pastel chalk graffiti and coming to rest at an ice cream truck; an all-girl punk show at a teen club; the cavernous wasteland of an indoor entertainment center whose video games and proscribed fun turn employees into patrons (the guests, Schoenbrun implies, may have their own Pink Opaque relationships with the games). Schoenbrun isn’t subtle — they want viewers to respond to images as the script demands — but they aren’t didactic either. I use the word “inevitability” in film reviews often to denote how an action triggers a reaction no less disturbing for being preordained. A good filmmaker creates reveries strong enough to lull us into temporary complacency.
“I want my movies to be the woods behind the school where you go to smoke weed and experiment and be awkward,” Schoenbrun told my colleague Juan Barquin. Flitting between fantasy and reality like humans do when getting through another day, I Saw the TV Glow keeps its ambiguities humming. Is that Owen shot from behind stomping down a football field in slo-mo as one of The Pink Opaque‘s stars? Does he slice his chest open so that the light of a Clinton-era TV can beam like a lighthouse. (Earlier in a state of panic he had hurled himself through the TV screen itself.) Do we need Owen’s intermittent fourth-wall-breaking voice-overs? Essential to I Saw the TV Glow‘s success are the performances of Smith and Lundy-Paine: his acting is a sustained aria of disquiet, while Lundy-Paine, the more extroverted actor, delivers a bravura monologue about what may have happened when she entered the world of The Pink Opaque.
I’ve tried to explain how this 100-minute film shook me: its clammy po-faced terror. Last night I dreamed about it. Schoenbrun offers no comforts. By the end of I Saw the TV Owen’s commitment, however frail, to a meretricious normality looks complete. Directors keep making movies about repression in the subdivisions because it keeps happening. Inviting audiences to treat their film as if it deserved worship like Owen and Maddy do The Pink Opaque, Schoenbrun offers a certitude: people like them may not know what will happen should they admit to their ungratified desires, but they’ll know what will happen should they not.
GRADE: A
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