The writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is a child of modern media—much like the rest of the old-Millennial age cohort, those of us weaned on VHS and broadcast TV in the 1990s and perhaps too well-positioned as initial receptors of the internet’s advent. In their first film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Schoenbrun dove, deeply and frighteningly, into the internet. For their second, the astonishing I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun explores the stuff that came right before we had access to everything, when objects of obsession were less accessible and thus perhaps more special, more significant. In investigating pre-internet fandom, Schoenbrun finds a heady allegory for identity.
I Saw the TV Glow, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, is about teenagers in the thrall of a television series. It’s called The Pink Opaque, a strange title in a movie full of strange material. But what The Pink Opaque is meant to evoke is plain: it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s Charmed, it’s maybe even a little Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It’s genre television of the sort that engrossed and made devotees of millions of kids who found meaning in stories of young people doing battle with supernatural forces out of higher, innate calling.
It’s maybe mostly Buffy, though, a fact nodded to throughout I Saw the TV Glow, from font choices to a particular cameo. Buffy was, and perhaps still is, a particular talisman for queer and trans people, many of them adolescents when they first encountered the series. Rich in subtext and allusion, Buffy became a bible of teenage experience for those needing help interpreting their own lives. I Saw the TV Glow honors that history while also taking it to account; its story of fandom is as cautionary as it is, in its strange way, nostalgic.
The film centers on Owen, a lonely 1990s teenager from a difficult home (his dad, played by Fred Durst, is stern and taciturn; his mom, played by Danielle Deadwyler, is dying of cancer) who bonds with a similarly isolated girl, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), over their mutual fascination with The Pink Opaque, about two teenage girls tethered by a mystical connection that helps them in their fight against various monsters of the week. Owen is the noob while Maddy is the devotee, leading her younger friend into a world of mythology and hidden meaning. I Saw the TV Glow spans decades tracing the results and implications of that obsession, tipping into the sinister and surreal as Owen, first played by Ian Foreman and then by Justice Smith, struggles to understand his intense connection to the show.
Through The Pink Opaque, Owen is perhaps glimpsing the possibility of another life, a truer self to be realized. The world as he knows it, and his own interior resistance, seem to deny him access to that fuller, more clarified reality. Maddy, who is gay, is the true believer, convinced of the show’s instructive power and eager for Owen to accept it. Here I Saw the TV Glow presents the gradient of, for lack of a more nuanced term, coming out. The film is not explicit about Owen’s identity, but in some ways it needn’t be. What is crucial and clear is that he feels displaced within himself, that he is wrestling with something internal and foundational that has been stirred by his friendship with Maddy and his ardor for The Pink Opaque.
Coded in that narrative is an ingenious metaphor for trans identity, affected so profoundly by pressures exacted from within and without. I Saw the TV Glow is a sharp and honest film, generous in its excavation, in the way it guides the viewer through complicated psychology. It is also bitterly sad, a portrait of confusion and negation that offers no empowerment, no political triumph. The shibboleths of Schoenbrun’s youth, the cultural markers of identity that they seemingly valued so fiercely for so long, are rendered insufficient, useless, even dangerous. What was lost in all of Owen’s vicarious fixation? What could have been gained by engaging more with the actual, non-imaginary world?
As it unfolds, I Saw the TV Glow—part mystery, part coming-of-age, part treatise on self—breathtakingly conjures up the particular feeling of being young and queer and glued to screens in that era, tantalized by a world just beyond reach. I am being vague about plot because Schoenbrun’s film is hard to describe, yes, but also because I Saw the TV Glow benefits from a blank, unbiased approach. It calls for fresh eyes and open hearts. The film is among the most profound—and, yes, important—pieces of trans fiction that I’ve yet seen, vividly staged with bold, declarative style while remaining beguilingly elusive. It is open for all kinds of assessment, containing multitudes of meaning. I Saw the TV Glow is a great film to talk about, to pick apart with a friend or fellow traveler over dinner afterwards, to study and reflect on.
It’s hard to think of another recent film that demands and then allows so much of its audience, that tries and rewards our patience. Schoenbrun’s filmmaking is both withholding—dialogue is slow and stilted, sometimes agonizingly so—and abundant. I Saw the TV Glow is the rare (and precious) sophom*ore feature that resoundingly expands on debut promise, that confirms its filmmaker as a mighty talent whose creative engine is churning into motion.
Schoenbrun is tackling huge matters that require no aesthetic supplement, but nonetheless they’ve found time to exquisitely compose each shot, to flood their film with gorgeous music and offbeat humor. I Saw the TV Glow is, one hopes, the thrilling announcement of a major artist, the way Boogie Nights was almost 27 years ago. Schoenbrun is a filmmaker for our era, deftly threading personal and cultural thought into a unique tapestry of contemporary life. Had the film existed in my 1990s teenage years, I’ve no doubt a bootleg video cassette would have been passed around with the same whispery awe that I Saw the TV Glow so strikingly captures and confronts.
