I Saw the TV Glow
★★★★★
Crackling with fuzzy TV static and soaked in rich neon hues, Jane Schoenbrun’s audacious and singular “I Saw the TV Glow” commands your attention from its very first frame, and holds on long past its closing moments. Where their previous feature, the striking and haunting low-budget horror “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” felt like the work of an artist playing within the sandbox of their practical limitations, Schoenbrun’s follow-up feels practically limitless, erupting in relentless ingenuity and unbridled ambition for a mesmerizing one-hundred minutes of pure visual artistry and soaring thematic complexity.
The story follows the friendship between teenagers Owen and Maddy, obsessive fans of a crummy 90s-era Buffy-like television program called The Pink Opaque. But when Maddy mysteriously disappears, Owen finds his reality cracking, the line between his world and that of the show blurring and mingling.
There are obvious horror elements at play here. The unsettling, foreboding atmosphere; distressing body-horror images; the Pink Opaque monster of the week creatures (Mr. Melancholy will haunt my dreams). But make no mistake: this is a genre-blending mixture of forms in which traditional horror is but one single component. Instead, the real horror is an internal, deeply upsetting feeling that pierces every moment of Schoenbrun’s film. The feeling of denial, of repressing who you really are, who you’re too scared to let yourself be. Or, worse yet, the horror of believing it’s too late to start living truthfully. That you’ve wasted your life away.
The transgender subtext is so close to the surface it may as well just be text. “Sometimes, The Pink Opaque feels more real than real-life,” Maddy admits to Owen towards the beginning of the film. This thought will gnaw at him for the remainder of the runtime. What if his life isn’t what he thought it was? What if every assertion of what he knows to be real is just a denial of the reality he subconsciously knows to be true? What if The Pink Opaque is more than a TV show? What if he’s meant to be someone else?
The film’s profound allegorical nature is the true guiding force behind the picture’s narrative structure and plotting. I can only wonder what someone could have possibly gleamed from this experience had they turned their brain off for mindless horror shenanigans. The film reaches a point of such experimentation and symbolism, a complete abandonment of literal, logical storytelling, that metaphor and subtext become the only possible way to move forward, and in that space the film shines brightest. There are so many ideas at play, several themes and concepts being explored at once, and it is nothing short of miraculous that Schoenbrun’s film doesn’t feel crowded by them, rather heightened by the swirling chaos both visual and thematic. And it all concludes in a memorable final sequence that has left many divided. Some have called the film’s ending bleak and deeply sad. I found it overtly hopeful.
One point of unanimity is the film’s jaw-dropping aesthetic. Cinematographer Eric K. Yue finds harmony between the real-world and the TV’s glow by giving Owen and Maddy’s reality the same nostalgic wistfulness as The Pink Opaque, bathed in vivid neon pinks and greens and blues, radiating a cold emptiness behind superficial vibrancy. The world of the show is rendered in psychedelic swirling colours and wonderfully cheap practical effects, and this form of scraped-together imaginative play extends to the film outside the TV set as well. Hand-written text scribbles across the screen, laying atop action. A rotating projector image of constellations creates an entire environment out of a plain physical location. Body horror effects and disturbing supernatural imagery are conjured with an intended falsity that makes them feel all the more otherworldly. Schoenbrun feels so artistically liberated, so free to invent and create and explore, and their vision is breathtakingly unique.
With this, Schoenbrun cements themself as one of the defining cinematic voices of this decade. An artist of deeply personal stories that are born from contemporary cultural ideas and have broad appeal for the generation most directly living them, utilizing the language and aesthetics of the modern digital age in ways that feel more in-touch with the climate than what anyone else is even attempting. Many people saw themselves in the lonely digital noise of “World’s Fair,” and many more will find themselves in the glow of the TV here. I’m gonna go watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.