I Saw The TV Glow should come with a warning.
It’s a film you can’t prepare for, with no easy answers other than the ones you may not want to face, a film you can’t unsee.
There are few adjectives more thudding when critiquing a film than ‘important’, but it’s necessary here. I Saw The TV Glow knows it’s an important film. With A24 backing, Jane Schoenbrun had the opportunity to create a moment in the cultural conversation around trans identity and they’ve done so with idiosyncratic aplomb. They might just change the world.
I Saw The TV Glow is trans-nonbinary auteur Schoenbrun’s third feature, the first to be made after 2021’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair catapulted them to the attention of cinephiles with a taste for the intersections between horror, new media, and formal explorations of identity.
We’re shown moments in the life of Owen (first Ian Foreman, then Justice Smith), starting from the seventh grade, as he becomes fascinated by a late-night television serial called The Pink Opaque. Owen and Schoenbrun are both 90s kids, and the stylings of The Pink Opaque clips will be familiar to those who grew up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other cult shows of the era. Indeed, Amber Benson cameos in the film at large, and a Pink Opaque character is named after her Buffy character. This is a film preoccupied with televisual cinephilia, and the way that fandom and identification with media can shape and define us.
It’s hard to know how exactly I Saw The TV Glow plays to audiences who are not queer and not in the know about the gender transition context of its writer-director that underpins it. And if you are queer, if Jane Schoenbrun’s new film resonates, it’s difficult to write about it without your take on the film being informed by your own experience. Some non-queer critics have characterised the film as being concerned with the ‘dangers of nostalgia’, a monumental misread of the central allegory that adds credibility to the pivotal idea that our protagonist can be trapped by self-defeating untruths and mental separations.
On first viewing and approached with understandably high expectations, I Saw The TV Glow’s beats may seem slight or weirdly mapped. But Schoenbrun’s film has a form more akin to a constellation than a straight line of narrative beats. For those whose adolescences were defined by feeling other or ‘wrong’, by trauma and repression, there were moments that shone through. Schoenbrun chooses to show us those glimmers rather than make neat a shared personal history that never is.
Truly cisgender audiences have nothing to fear, but everyone else should be warned that I Saw The TV Glow will crack you open.
It’s to their credit that instead of giving the spectator what they think they want in these glimmers – to overtly validate, to provide gender euphoria – they opt to hurt us over and over. The film, with its intentionally thin, eggshell subtext, is a deep abyss of repressed and unresolved feeling, increasingly shot through with intense, screaming pain as it formally pounds against its own walls. Like its in-universe TV show for its protagonists, it’s a film that’s ‘felt’ rather than merely watched.
And structurally this agony proves ingenious. When Brigitte Lundy-Paine’s trans equivalent of the Barbie monologue (but well-placed and didactic where it needs to be) finally hits, it’s full-body chills, emotional overwhelm. Schoenbrun has created a film language and syntax that emulates the experience of gender dysphoria for the spectator.
Emulates? Or perhaps it induces or reveals? It’d take a whole panel of critics being honest with themselves and with each other to figure it out. Truly cisgender audiences have nothing to fear, but everyone else should be warned that I Saw The TV Glow will crack you open.
The film’s painful in other ways too. An epilepsy warning for this film should not only be provided, but bolded and underlined, preferably not put in flashing lights, as Schoenbrun goes hard on them in TV Glow’s most intense moments. But this feels like pain with purpose. Every moment of strobing flicker accompanies a spike of dysphoric agony. Staring inside yourself can be painful. Schoenbrun’s potential reasons for utilising strobes are certainly less juvenile than for instance Gaspar Noe’s, and there’s an interesting throughline of reflected strobing light on character’s faces as the beginnings of an egg-crack moment that can also be found in World’s Fair. Nonetheless, the degree to which they feature here has to be noted and cautioned.
With heartbreakingly weighty, resigned physicality, Justice Smith gives the best performance of its kind to date, his face, his posture, his cracking voice embodying a fragility that could crack at the slightest provocation but never quite does, quavering like he’s cautiously removing Jenga pieces in his mind. Lundy Paine is equally fantastic, their dissociative, depersonalised flatness giving way to a fire-eyed urgency that’s heart-wrenching in its emotion.
The film’s structure is a mixtape of memories, and the soundtrack is built on much the same philosophy. Schoenbrun assembles an all-star list of alternative artists to craft a soundtrack that would give Gregg Araki a run for his money and manages to evoke nostalgia for a sonic life you yourself did not live through and that up to this point did not exist. It’s a remarkable feat, utilised to the fullest in a euphoric scene where Caroline Polachek’s blaring guitar and synth electrify and transform the school hallway into an emotive juvenile fandom stream-of-consciousness.
Formally the film also fascinates in its framing devices. With Owen narrating events to camera, discussing the changing viewing experience of episodes of The Pink Opaque as we’re shown clips of it, intercut and on old CRT televisions, Schoenbrun gives us the transgender equivalent of Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman. The film presents representation and identification through fictitious media of a nonetheless recognisable type, and doing so helps its protagonist, and the similarly identifying viewer, situate themselves.
It’s so much a felt emotional journey that the rewatch experience deserves elaborating also. Knowing the beats, the film still feels like going into guided hypnosis but now with a gnawing impatience for some of the later realisations to happen already. If anything, this experientially heightens the allegory, a one-way mirror through which you cannot persuade in which you can nonetheless potentially see your own reflection. You can’t save Owen from your position before the screen but you can perhaps save yourself.
I’m genderqueer, but in many respects cisgender. I Saw The TV Glow leaves me feeling peculiar, derealised, distressed, in a way that I can’t quite fully verbalise. ‘I Saw The TV Glow should come with a warning’, I think to myself.
But it doesn’t. And it shouldn’t. There is still time.
I Saw The TV Glow screened at Sundance London from the 7th to the 9th of June. A UK general release will follow later this year from Park Circus. The film is available now digitally in the U.S.
