MOVIES: I Saw the TV Glow - Review: A Foundational Study of Identity

I Saw the TV Glow is a foundational text by Jane Schoenbrun, an instant modern classic and a better homage to the 90s television era of Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its legacy and impact on fandom than anything else; especially any reboot, could ever hope. It’s a film with a dark, gloomy and seedy world at its core – and we are plunged into it through the eyes of Justice Smith’s Owen, whose parents are controlling, preventing him from having a social life – or at least, a stilted one. His obsession with the trailers for a TV show The Pink Opaque, about a world beneath our own and girls twinned by supernatural bonds but never meet in person, leads him to Brigette Lundy-Paine’s Maddy, a girl whose hyper-obsession with the show broads on the extreme – an escape from reality for them both?

With echoes of David Lynch,I Saw the TV Glow is an ode to the trans experience of being uncomfortable in your body and realising that it is not your body – it’s an ode to the experience of not being sure who you are and not being brave enough to change given the circumstances – not everyone makes that transition. Repression is at the core of I Saw the TV Glow – when asked whether he prefers girls or boys, Owen can’t answer, he says he likes TV shows, and the inward horror of knowing who you truly are but being too scared; wondering if its too late, is reflected in him at every turn. Justice Smith’s vulnerability opens up Owen in a non-traditional way, and his bond with the older Maddy is stilted at first, their shared connection between them bonding over the show and also being the few outsiders in a small town. Maddy believes she will die there if she stays – Owen can’t quite embrace that yet. He’s not ready.

Life goes by so fast when you’re not comfortable in your own skin and the film embraces that head on – an accelerated lifestyle when you wake up and realise that it’s now too late to become who you are. Lundy-Paine is superb as an awkward older teen, and Justice Smith excels too – the fracturing of their relationship is broken when the TV show, inevitably, six seasons in, is cancelled on a cliffhanger. There’s a lot of commentary on rediscovering old television shows that you watched as a kid all these years later now they’re on a streaming platform, and when they run into each other as twenty somethings – it’s like they’re clinging to something, a kind of reality that they never really knew was there.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was a revolutionary study of the always-online, loneliness and paranoia induced by lockdown and social isolation. I Saw the TV Glow cements Jane Schoenbrun as one of the most talented writers/directors of the current generation – a film that matters so much more; getting the love-affair with a culture so distinctively American. For those who didn’t grow up on Buffy they’ll have grown up on Doctor Who. The fandom connection is there – and original songs from Pohebe Bridgers and Caroline Polacheck really help avoid the full-bait nostalgia trappings that say, a 90s hits album would’ve done. Bridgers and Polacheck’s music is both used at key moments during the film – and the capturing of both eras of the pre online world of the 1990s and 2000s almost makes it like the first entry in a trilogy that would include We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and whatever Schoenbrun makes next. It’s a reflective inward gazing that he pours into Owen, and it’s heartbreaking when Owen looks back on what was and becomes embarrassed by it. Was any of it real? Was it real to them? The older you get and the more you change – the less time there is to embrace it. Not everyone has that option of the early transition – and the end result is a puzzle that asks you, the audience, to put the pieces together in a way that feels as devastating as All of Us Strangers did earlier this year.