Dispatches from the Big Bear: 'I Saw the TV Glow'
Elif's Second Dispatch from the 2024 Berlinale Festival
‘I Saw The TV Glow’ Review: Jane Schoenbrun’s Emotionally-Charged Second Feature Is A Queer Reflection on the Visceral Horror of Coming of Age in the Suburbs
Jane Schoenbrun, visionary director behind 2021’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, delivers yet another mystifyingly disturbing account of the queer adolescent experience in a neon frenzy of sound and images.
A slow motion montage of the suburban high school – aptly named Void High – set to yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene classic ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year‐Old Girl’ (one of the many powerful needle drops from the eclectic soundtrack as curated by Alex G)introduces us to Owen (a disconcertingly catatonic Justice Smith), a soft-spoken outcast who crosses paths with the intimidating lesbian Maddy (a characteristically angsty yet eerie Brigette Lundy-Paine reminiscent of Ezra Miller in We Need To Talk About Kevin) in the darkened hallways on election night. He becomes enamored with the ominous yet enticing world of The Pink Opaque, a late night tv show reminiscent of the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks, where a pair of psychic girlfriends who communicate across the country fight a series of bizarre looking creatures believed to be supernatural manifestations of evil, to defeat the final boss Mr. Melancholy: the ominous Man in the Moon.
Owen and Maddy strike up a friendship through their shared interest in The Pink Opaque, the two even go so far as to draw the matching birthmarks of the two leads of the show on the back of their necks, markedly binding them to one another. As Maddy videotapes the episodes for them to watch together, Owen becomes increasingly more obsessed with the fictive reality of the show, blurring the lines between the static glow of the silver screen, and what lurks behind it. What starts out as an elusive mystery about a seemingly nostalgic tv show turns into something beyond its premise, with narrative cohesion being sacrificed for a broken reverie of images, evocative of feelings of queer dysphoria and adolescent anxiety. Befittingly, the film is peppered with cameos of queer indie darlings: from Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan who plays one of the two leads in The Pink Opaque to Phoebe Bridgers who performs in the background of a scene with the Saddest Factory Records’ very own Sloppy Jane.
Things come to a head after Maddy runs away from home, leaving Owen with nothing but a burning tv set to reckon with his growing pains alone. Much like in Schoenbrun’s previous work style takes precedence over substance in I Saw The TV Glow. They are more interested in capturing a mood than providing a narrative resolution, a point of contention that was confirmed by the director themselves in a follow-up Q&A. Schoenbrun uses media consumption as a metaphor for self-discovery and identity. The washed out mundanity of Owen’s suburban life is juxtaposed with the neon pink disarray of The Pink Opaque, as he slowly starts to get a semblance of who he is as a person through the weekly adventures of the two leads. Unlike the guarded yet outspoken Maddy, Owen never explicitly labels his sexual orientation; a dreamlike montage interspersed with cuts of him trying on a dress in the mirror with Maddy smiling in the background are the only visual hints we get explicitly addressing the self-acknowledged ambiguity of his gender identity. Although Maddy at one point goes so far as to ask whether he likes girls like she does, he hastily dodges the question by admitting that he prefers TV shows. The implications of Owen’s queerness through his emotional attachment to The Pink Opaque aren’t exactly subtle here but they are effective in conveying the escapist possibilities the alternate reality of a beloved childhood TV show provides. “What if I really was someone else, on the other side of the television?” he wonders before sticking his head into the broken TV set – Sylvia Plath style – questioning the validity of a reality in which his mind and body don’t align with who he feels he is inside.
By the time the bleak yet hopeful finale set in the dystopian casino world of Owen’s daytime job as an adult – that will have you thinking about it long after the credits stop rolling – crescendos to a halt, the prospect of becoming who he is terrifies Owen, the initial emancipatory glow of the screen beaming out of his chest: something blindingly bright and brimming with potential and yet a part of him he conceals from the world in shame, to be escaped from. Ultimately I Saw The TV Glow is a love letter to the late night trash TV we unabashedly loved as children because it spoke to an earnest part of our identity – one that we hadn’t quite discovered yet nor knew what to make of – and learned to roll our eyes over as adults, afraid that anything other than semi-ironic condescension would reveal what we felt then to be sincere was indeed justified.