Sometimes I feel like Jane Schoenbrun films are more real than real life

I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Jane Schoenbrun) brings out the beauty in loneliness and alienation, while remaining sensitive and acutely aware of the requisite painful fear in it all. And its style is that of its filmmaker—maybe like a cool kid who is cool because they’re not cool by popular mainstream appeal standards, yet instead prove themselves even more desirable to the rest of us. 

     The first thing you notice is the music. I was enamored with a type of music that was coming out of Olympia and Portland in the ‘90s from like K records and Kill Rock Stars, then moved to what happened to it? Did it reemerge in Brooklyn or something? Has it vanished? Schoenbrun gets it though. It was like indie lo-fi folk twee, but also encompassing anything from Riot grrrl to hardcore. And in I Saw the TV Glow it’s fundamental to the mood and emotionally stimulating catharsis Schoenbrun excels in.

     Then there’s the look. Shot on 35mm, its compositions veer towards saturated primary cool colors. And oh so dark. Visually this all evokes something like a scary nocturnal space we get lost in, yet somehow safe and secure, even comfortable, at the same time. 

     And if you recall in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021, Schoenbrun) there seemed to be this almost like ASMR hypnotic vacuum quality to the dialogue. In I Saw the TV Glow there’s a little of that, but the rest of the time the actors deliver their dialogue in that atonal way you find in all Fassbinder’s movies. 

 

So moving on from its style to its content, what is I Saw the TV Glow really all about? I think there's some significant amount of doubling going on. Like with media (the TV show is also a symbol of and interchangeable with music) some of us can use it to escape our everyday real life, but also become overwhelmed by the emotions we discover about our own realities we are confronted with through it. And when this gets depicted in parts of the narrative that may become confusing I think that’s the point. Mr. Melancholy can be different things to different people: depression, drugs, suicide, disassociative thoughts or behavior. 

     The doubling of OWEN and MADDY’s drives could be seen as respectively attachment/fear of change vs runaway impulses/desperate for freedom. Owen has a voice that sometimes sounds like the weird sound device used when someone wants to remain anonymous as they’re recorded on an audio track, which could be a doubling of the ambiguous distortion of identity as akin to something someone genderqueer might experience. In contrast to Maddy, who’s firmly embraced that she’s a lesbian but has her own struggles with assimilating and fitting in. But the beautiful thing is that they find each other.

 

All of the Pink Opaque scenes are so much fun. And this nostalgia dependency as psychological horror mechanism is the perfect vehicle for Schoenbrun to yet again break free from conventional cinematic formalism and achieve such an effectively enjoyable form of personal artistic expression. Just go with it. For me the most haunting moment I encountered was when Owen is old and he says how happy he is because he finally got a family of his own. What does that mean? What does that line mean to you? I find it sad that I find it so difficult to believe him. And the way I identify with where that desire would come from in him and his need to assert this makes me so sad. This feels like the first movie to be scary in a touching, achingly connective with ourselves and those around us way.

04/27/2024 Plaza Theater ATLFF

Atlanta, GA

DCP