I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair is perhaps the most notable Sundance breakout of the decade so far. That film, which revolved around one lonely suburban teenager’s experience with an online Youtube challenge, combined creepypasta aesthetics and screen-bound horror tropes (e.g. Unfriended) with a free-floating sense of dissociation. With their A24-produced follow up, Schoenbrun takes similar themes to a much grander scale, this time, exploring two friends’ relationship to their favorite TV show, The Pink Opaque.

I had a complicated response to I Saw the TV Glow. In the moment, I found its narrative structure, which hops around a timespan of over two decades, clunky and inelegant, and I often thought Schoenbrun’s dialogue was distractingly bad. And yet, I found the film’s despairing vision deeply unsettling.

What I deeply resonated with was Schoenbrun’s handling of The Pink Opaque. They do a fantastic job, especially in the film’s opening, before the TV show is even introduced, of mirroring the protagonists with the characters from the show. Schoenbrun gets how media can facilitate self-discovery, how the worlds and moods created by a work of art can make us feel good in ways we never imagined. It’s transcendent to feel comfortable, for things to feel right. Owen and Maddy don’t just want to be someone else, they want to feel what they feel in The Pink Opaque all the time. The film presents this as a trans allegory, but it’s easily extrapolated. For example, it reminded me of my own coming out during the pandemic, when budding awareness of my sexuality coincided with my growing obsession with the queer sensibilities of directors like Apichatpong and Tsai. Those films expanded the possibilities I envisioned for my own life. In TV Glow, Schoenbrun presents the tantalizing liberation of The Pink Opaque, and depicts the situation’s worst possible outcome. It’s a closet film, but more broadly, a film of willful, subconscious repression. As Owen’s hesitancy dooms him to suffocating suburban purgatory, I Saw The TV Glow presents one of my worst nightmares.