I SAW THE TV GLOW dir. Jane Schoenbrun
By Sienna Axe, Morgan Stone, & Levi Homman
1/23/24 @ 10:30pm, The Ray Theater
Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack. (via Sundance)
Sienna: The rumors are true: I Saw the TV Glow is a major, major film. Its soundtrack alone—sixteen songs commissioned from some of Schoenbrun’s favorite artists, paired with a score by Alex G—will level cities. It’s also an exciting, propulsive, and deeply sad film, rife with the cautionary melancholy of a late-90s anti-smoking PSA. So broad that it feels impossible to write about, yet so specific that it cuts like a knife. I’ve never seen anything like it. I refuse to get into the details—and I strongly urge you not to look up anything at all about the plot—but I’ll say what I can in the meantime.
For starters: visually, it stuns. A lot of people have tried to do what Schoenbrun is doing aesthetically, but none have ever succeeded like this. Their command of their own, wholly-original cinematic syntax immerses you in their neon-washed world—a world both completely alien and freakishly familiar. Superimposed TV static and frame-spanning doodles work in tandem with practical production elements to bring the film’s reality—if you can even call it that—to life.
The performances are incredible. In Justice Smith (Owen) and Brigette Lundy-Paine (Maddy), Schoenbrun has found two collaborators who are able to both grasp the film’s language and make it their own. Smith has several jaw-dropping, devastating moments; Lundy-Paine has a third-act monologue that’s an easy contender for my favorite of the 21st century. Fred Durst, of all people, manages to horrify with only a few lines. Lindsey Jordan (aka Snail Mail) and Helena Howard mesh beautifully as the stars of the show-within-a-film The Pink Opaque, giving line deliveries it’s hard to believe aren’t from a late 90s-early 2000s monster-of-the-week teen drama.
I was talking to Levi earlier today, while we were waiting for another screening to start, about how I Saw the TV Glow feels like a grown-up debut feature. What I mean by this is: Schoenbrun makes films with the urgency and eagerness of an early-career filmmaker—which, technically, they are—but with the confidence and eloquence of someone on their tenth project.
The most beautiful (and amazing) thing about the film has been seeing everyone else’s response to it. Usually, when I leave a film to find that other people had completely different interpretations to mine, I either a) feel stupid or b) think they’re stupid. Neither is the case here. Every version I read, no matter how far off it is from mine, feels like a revelation: not the beginning of some eternal discourse, but a piece of a collaborative effort to uncover every hidden facet of the film. This isn’t something any one person can unpack alone; there’s far too much there. But together—letting what each of us finds visceral about it inform the others’ understanding—we might be able to get pretty close.
Cinema can only truly die if it stops evolving; as long as Jane Schoenbrun lives, we won’t have to worry about that. I love this film. I hope you will, too.
Morgan: Sitting down to watch I Saw The TV Glow, I had no idea what to expect. I read some spoiler-free reviews, but nothing could have prepared me for this film. It is absolutely a masterpiece, and Jane Schoenbrun has really established their aesthetic control and voice.
There’s a parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer within it that perfectly encapsulates that nostalgia and campiness without falling into the trap of sticking too close to the original. It’s intriguing, and the story within the story…is the story.
It’s hard to talk about this movie and not reveal too much about it. What works so wonderfully about it is that it has so many different possible readings…and they all seem to be right. These are just the three readings I focused on while watching. It’s bright, fast-paced, and ambiguous in a way that opens it to so many interpretations.
It’s about media obsession, it’s about finding and accepting a queer identity, it’s about how nostalgia alters memories, it’s about…SO MUCH.
Everything about I Saw The TV Glow feels so precise. The costuming, the lighting, the structure…it makes me want to watch it again. I’m having a lot of trouble expressing what I want to say about this movie a day after watching it, and I think it deserves another viewing to fully ingest it.
I only have two (or three) real critiques of the film. 1) there is a concert scene that is just a bit too long and takes you out of the film and 2) the old age makeup was not very convincing, but maybe it wasn’t supposed to be and 3) the sound was way too loud…this is not a critique of the film, but more of Sundance for not accurately balancing their sound, because it went from somewhat loud to actually hurting my ears and I was nowhere near a speaker.
I Saw The TV Glow is a film that I won’t be forgetting anytime soon. This review may not be able to tell you much about the film, because it simply demands you to watch it and piece it together yourself.
Levi: It’s hard to overstate what an exciting moment in time it is to witness the true beginning of Jane Schoenbrun’s career. Their debut feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, fascinated me as a unique piece of internet-infused horror filmmaking that begged to be peeled back and examined. World’s Fair, though, was limited by its minimal budget and its vague subject matter in a way that made it more inscrutably personal despite its emotional evocations. While I Saw the TV Glow still captures Schoenbrun’s unique brand of eerie unreality, it expands on World’s Fair’s ideas exponentially and presents them in ways filmgoers have never seen on this scale.
There are traces of a lot of other filmmakers here—Schoenbrun has been open about their inspiration from David Lynch, which shows, and I found myself drawing a number of comparisons to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome—but the formal polish on display here, as well as the decidedly transgender narrative that the nightmarish aesthetics are combined with, make Schoenbrun a certified trailblazer.
I’m almost certain general audiences will struggle with this; it never quite divulges its full intentions and has an abruptly ambiguous ending that leaves the audience with far more questions than answers. What it does do, though, is conjure deep-seated, oddly nostalgic feelings of self-discovery and childhood memory. Schoenbrun and director of photography Eric Yue bathe the entire film in neon greens, pinks, and purples, making Owen’s (Justice Smith) “reality” increasingly indistinguishable from the world of his favorite TV show (the Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark-esque construction that is The Pink Opaque). Smith himself gives easily the best performance of his young career, carrying his character through an entire life of existential crises and repressed trauma.
It’s a film that’s hard to criticize at all because it’s so confronting and dreamlike—when things feel uncanny we’re left wondering if that was Schoenbrun’s intention, or even if we imagined it entirely. As the TV Glow’s world became increasingly warped, I found myself questioning my own reality, not just the film’s.
I Saw the TV Glow is a wholly engrossing sophomore outing that not only has an astringent, revelatory story to tell, but also is a defining moment for an incoming generation of filmmakers. If you allow yourself to become Owen for 100 minutes, you’ll never forget it.
