I Saw The TV Glow

You will never be as obsessed with anything as an adult the way you were in your teenage years. We’ve all been down that path, crawling down the rabbit hole of a band, a book series, a movie, a video game, until we can’t go any deeper, then huddling there in the enveloping darkness waiting for the light of something else to pull us up and out again. It can be a transformative experience, but stay down in that hole too long and reality starts to bend around that hiding place, until you lose all sense of the way out.

With their previous feature, the excellent We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun charted that kind of obsession in the form of an obscure internet game with potentially dangerous consequences. This time, Schoenbrun gets more personal, and more primally haunting. I Saw The TV Glow is a remarkable portrait of pop-culture obsession—how it can unite us, change us, and ripple down through our entire lives in ways both uplifting and unsettling.

Jane Schoenbrun’s debut narrative feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, premiered at Sundance in 2021 – an edition of the film festival held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that it’s an immersive journey into creepypasta culture, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair actually benefited from debuting in that format. For their second feature, I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun has teamed with A24 – an indie juggernaut that’s become a brand unto itself – to expand the scope of their vision. The money is well spent: This is a film that needs to be seen on the largest screen possible.

There are some astonishingly beautiful shots in I Saw The TV Glow: hazy, ephemeral images that turn humdrum suburbia into Day-Glo dreamscapes. An abandoned ice cream truck, glowing green with smoke billowing out of its back. A Fruitopia vending machine that radiates like a pink beacon in the darkness of a school cafeteria. The vegetable aisle of a supermarket, transformed into a neon fantasia under Schoenbrun’s lens. A similar hand-sketched, luminous aesthetic appeared in World’s Fair, but it’s upscaled here, enhanced by Schoenbrun’s superb eye for composition. This is a labor of love, and it shows.

The content is hazy and ephemeral as well, following two decades in the life of Owen (Ian Foreman and Justice Smith). When we first meet Owen in 1996, he’s a lonely kid who finds an unlikely ally in Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a slightly older outcast at his high school. The pair connect over their shared love for the TV series The Pink Opaque, a teen horror anthology about two girls, Tara (Lindsey Jordan) and Isabel (Helena Howard), who use their psychic bond to fight supernatural evil. “Clips” from the “series” – basically a hybrid of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Goosebumps – are woven into the film, switching from radiant HD to grainy VHS with a touch of Lumière Brothers-style stop motion. They’re surreal and comedic and occasionally terrifying, and enhance the feeling that we’re watching a dream, or maybe a half-remembered episode of TV from 20 years ago.

Maddy and The Pink Opaque become an escape for Owen as his family life turns dark. His father (Fred Durst) doesn’t get it – “Isn’t that a show for girls?,” he asks when Owen asks to stay up late to watch it – and his mother (Danielle Deadwyler) is preoccupied. So Owen starts spending Saturday nights sleeping over in Maddy’s basement, watching the show (“10:30-11 Saturdays on the Young Adult Network,” characters repeat like a mantra) and slowly opening up to one another. Maddy speaks in sullen, angry bursts and rarely makes eye contact. Owen sucks on his inhaler and hesitates to give an opinion on anything. Both leads give heart-rending performances, but Lundy-Paine’s is especially moving, with a clear personal connection between actor and material.

In one touching scene, Maddy tells Owen that her former best friend has abandoned her because she “likes girls.” “I think I like TV shows,” Owen replies. Owen is asexual, but there’s more going on than just that; later on, Maddy dramatically reappears in Owen’s life, reminding him of things he needs to remember but would rather forget. The line between reality and TV blurs beyond comprehension, and an episode of The Pink Opaque where Tara and Isabel are buried alive by “big bad” Mr. Melancholy becomes a metaphor for Owen’s stunted self-realization. Here, I Saw the TV Glow gets scarier and more surreal: The “TV Glow” of the title is no longer a friendly hum, but a paralyzing scream. Alex G’s score gets louder and more grating as well, accompanying a shift in the soundtrack from dream-pop to doom-rock.

Schoenbrun described I Saw the TV Glow as an “egg crack” movie, a slang term for the thrilling, terrifying moment when someone realizes that they’re trans. In a knockout monologue that takes place inside an inflatable astronomy tent, Maddy describes feeling “like I was watching myself on TV” – an echo of characters talking about “turning into plastic” in We're All Going to the World's Fair. That feeling of dysphoric dissociation carries over, but the overall treatment of the gender-transformation theme in I Saw the TV Glow is more nuanced, urgent, and even hopeful: “It’s not too late,” a message in sidewalk chalk reads late in the film.

The vulnerability with which Schoenbrun explores their own feelings about gender in I Saw the TV Glow makes for a painful tenderness at times, as if everyone – including the audience – is about to break out in tears. If it occasionally feels vague, that’s because the emotions being articulated here are that way as well. Speaking of ephemeral longing: Another major driver of I Saw the TV Glow is nostalgia. There are abundant references to ’90s cultural touchstones, and Schoenbrun commissioned 16 original songs from artists like Phoebe Bridgers and King Woman to create a soundtrack like the Donnie Darko CD the director wore out in their youth.

There’s something here to speak to every high-school outcast whose only friends were TV characters, as well as anyone who woke up one day and realized that somehow they’ve gotten old. An earnest personal statement wrapped in a gorgeously surreal art-horror movie, it’s on a wavelength of its own, one most readily accessed by other lost, sensitive souls. But if it keeps one lonely kid company the way The Pink Opaque does for these characters, then it will all have been worth it.