The Brooklyn Rail

Jane Schoenbrun’s virtuosic, neon-soaked sophomore feature, I Saw the TV Glow, expands on their debut feature’s themes on a larger scale, presenting existential anxieties around queer self-acceptance in terms both granular and cosmic. With the stunning We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), Schoenbrun recast queer adolescence as a stripped-down uncanny valley, painting their teen protagonist’s world with the glitchy cybernetic palette of an early creepypasta video, investigating dysphoria and alienation through the endless dissociative flow of YouTube autoplay. This first film, both achingly personal and boldly freeform, instantly announced Schoenbrun as a brilliant voice whose perspective speaks directly to a kind of intimate, often painful queer coming-of-age experience rarely depicted on screen. As they hone their skills and interests in this latest feature, Schoenbrun’s approach to a theme so often reduced to the realm of one-dimensional platitudes is genuinely subversive in its commitment to directness and earnest morbidity.

It’s 1996. I Saw the TV Glow begins with a commercial for The Pink Opaque, a fictional blend of SNICK monster-of-the-week shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and cult favorites like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The child watching is Owen (Ian Foreman, who soon grows into a transfixing Justice Smith), who floats through his time at Void High School (shortened to the apt acronym VHS on banners and pennants), lonely and painfully shy. When he notices an older student, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, burning up the screen with wonderful intensity), sitting alone reading an episode guide for The Pink Opaque, Owen is instantly drawn to the book’s hot-pink lettering and Maddy’s no-bullshit attitude.

After Maddy invites him over to watch the show (which airs past his bedtime), Owen’s world seems to open up—if only slightly—to a universe outside his parents’ dead-silent home where his interest in a “girl’s show” is viewed with suspicion. The Pink Opaque quickly becomes an escape for Owen, a forbidden refuge for a developing imagination, accessed primarily through bootleg tapes Maddy leaves in the school darkroom for him to find. Much as World’s Fair’s anonymous posters foster a heightened sense of connection online, Owen and Maddy’s friendship is made more intimate by its mediation through shared parasocial obsession: they rarely speak; rather Maddy’s tapes come with scrawled notes (shown on screen) whose tone perfectly capture the high-octane confessionality of a teenage diary. “We are the pink opaque,” one reads.

Years pass, and Owen wanders through the landscapes of an afternoon special (a fairground, a football field, a wrecked gymnastics room), frozen, like the halls of his high school, in a state of arrested development. The film, lyrically shot by Eric Yue (A Thousand and One) and pulsing with music by Alex G (plus an electrifying mid-film performance by Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers) is sticky with the anxiety he wears on his body. His mother (Danielle Deadwyler) asks him questions about the future, about his inner life, and he spits on his cotton candy to watch it melt into electric blue static, losing meaning and cohesion. His bedtime never changes. He knows “something is wrong,” but investigating questions of gender and identity makes him feel like “someone took a shovel and dug out my insides.” In situations like these, “sometimes,” Maddy confesses, “The Pink Opaque feels more real than real life.” When Maddy disappears, leaving nothing but a burning TV set behind, the lines between the two begin to blur in a Kaufman-esque fever dream beyond sanity and recognition. But in a VHS world populated by figures of nineties media nostalgia (with cameos throughout from the likes of Fred Durst, Amber Benson, and Danny Tamberelli and Michael C. Maronna from The Adventures of Pete & Pete), were they ever really so distinct?

TV Glow’s meditation on media fandom as an unstable lifeline for queer adolescents is a tragic portrait of potentialities never-quite-reached. Queer self-identification, as Kathryn Bond Stockton writes in her book The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, is frequently treated as a form of social death by the straight world: defining oneself as having been a “gay child,” a label that until recently was almost always chosen in retrospect, “is a gravestone marker for where or when one’s straight life died.” The queer child, then, becomes a ghost, a hazy non-being divorced from linear notions of heterosexual growing up. As such, TV Glow becomes an unearthly requiem for the terrifying period of uncertainty that precedes either this death or its foreclosure, itself presented as a form of metaphysical suicide. In a show-stopping monologue, Maddy describes youth’s passage in desperate terms, like a robbery or a slow death sentence. Owen begins narrating his life like an episode of TV, trying to make sense of his surroundings with comforting clichés. This postmodern, angsty, often deliciously abstract approach (“emo” as Schoenbrun has cheekily described their style), makes these tensions visceral and elevates them to the realm of Lovecraftian horror.

Owen and Maddy’s anguished search through their TV sets for selfhood beyond the rictus world of suburban malaise is put in visual conversation with Poltergeist and Videodrome (not to mention Donnie Darko); they press up against the screen as though their lives depend on it, and in some ways, they do. As Stockton describes, “The silences surrounding the queerness of children happen to be broken—loquaciously broken and broken almost only—by fictional forms.” The Pink Opaque is one such form. The characters’ demons take the archetypal forms of childhood—ice cream cones and clowns (brilliantly surreal renderings that blend practical and CG effects) with murderous intentions, sure to be bested each week through the power of friendship. But here, a glitch in the Matrix isn’t necessarily a liberating force; it also has the potential to trap. Is the show as real as Maddy believes it to be? There are many ways to lose out on an authentically lived life, and TV Glow’s pre-internet aesthetics and setting (a sharp contrast to World’s Fair) provide an astute angle from which to probe these contradictions in our current era of booming nineties nostalgia.

During their introduction (filmed in that pre-iPhone standby of selfie culture, Photo Booth) to the New York press screening for TV Glow, I spotted reams of queer film theory titles on Schoenbrun’s shelf, telegraphing the kind of thinking undergirding their portrait of tangled emotions and not-yet-formed selfhoods. For me, the film evoked, for example, José Esteban Muñoz’s classic 2009 book Cruising Utopia. Muñoz describes queerness as a utopian formation, a desire that is “always directed at that thing that is not yet here … moments that burn with anticipation and promise … the rich resonance of remembrance, distinct pleasures felt in the past.” This doubled sense of time, for Muñoz, and arguably for Schoenbrun, creates potentialities that bring past and future together by creating hope and continual desire in the present. Schoenbrun’s world of fuzzy techno-nostalgia, part of the current wave of analog horror, plays with time and meaning to highlight this eminently queer desire for fluidity in a world of hetero-structures.

The vicissitudes of Owen’s desire for worlds beyond this one can be best understood through an exploration of what Jack Halberstam calls “queer time.” For Maddy and Owen, time in “real life,” i.e., the straight world, is moving wrong, moving without them. In his In a Queer Time and Place, Halberstam describes queer time as an “alternative temporalities” which gives queer people the chance to “believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.” For these two, from 10:30 to 11:00 p.m. on Saturdays, the present is foreclosed. They are able, in Muñoz’s terms, “to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” The trick, one they so desperately strive to pull off, is to reconcile this liberatory feeling with the world around them, with time’s refusal to accommodate it. And easy answers are, to their horror as well as our own, never easy to come by.

Watching I Saw the TV Glow felt like a revelation, a peek into an imagined future-childhood where growing up queer is, if not entirely comfortable, nevertheless an experience for which our culture has familiar visual language. This peek into the future from the vantage of queer adulthood—in other words, of queer childhood past—gave me a sense of strange temporal vertigo not unlike the characters’ own. Queer children growing up today, of course, already do have far broader access to queer media than even their twenty-something counterparts.

For those of us who grew up immersed in the media of the early aughts, beloved teen films like Jennifer’s Body and shows like Buffy before them have become touchstones for the desires and experiences that we didn’t yet have the vocabulary to express. Even then, the broader cultural understanding of this fact has itself been a retrospective one, a realization of collective experience shared from peer to peer years later. Watching I Saw the TV Glow, knowing that films like it exist for young people who have not yet had the time to develop this vocabulary, but who will come to as time goes on, was an incredible experience. The thorny temporality of these last few lines, a tangle of queer childhoods and adulthoods blending and the melancholy and nostalgia therein, is at the heart of Schoenbrun’s film. This quiet masterpiece shivers with familiarity.

Schoenbrun has said that, in childhood, “we find ways to insulate ourselves from reality, to live lives dependent on fictions.” With I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun speaks to the deep hunger such fictions satisfy with tenderness and depth, even as they vividly animate the perils and temptations this same longing for utopic fantasy arouses in us. “Can there be something beautiful found in this—our appetite for delusion?” Schoenbrun has asked. Whatever answer one comes to, their poetic investigation of these themes illuminates Muñoz’s radical assertion that, for many queer kids within a heterosexual system, “the present is not enough.”