Jane Schoenbrun's hodgepodge of barren emptiness and blazing LED
an analysis by Lily Barmoha and Hannah Potter
"What if I really was someone else? Very far away on the other side of a television screen."
Schoenbrun’s 2024 retro-inspired horror film, set in 1990s suburbia follows Owen (Justice Smith) who mainly goes through life with his head down, minding his own business, until an older, edgy classmate Maddy (Jack Haven) introduces him to the young adult sci-fi television show “The Pink Opaque”, which stars two girls who take down different themed monsters every episode. Owen and Maddy bond with one another over feeling like an outsider in their small town and within their families. Maddy proposes that they run away together; Owen does not, while Maddy does, and she’s missing for eight years.
Hannah: The film was brought to life by writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. Commonly known for their production work across various projects including “Collective: Unconscious” (2016) and “Eyeslicer” (2017), Schoenbrun made their directorial debut with drama horror “We’re All Going to the Fair” in 2021. Schoenbrun conducted the film with a tighter budget, flexing their muscle for creating immersively imaginative stories surrounding teenage characters under rare and thrilling circumstances to create the passion project of “I Saw The TV Glow.”
Schoenbrun’s writing, while immersive and mostly well-received in execution, has received its fair share of critique from those who claim Schoenbrun muddied the film with projection as if it’s nothing more than 100 minutes of nostalgic teenage recreation. Schoenbrun finds this narrative laughable, responding to the criticism with a wise rebuttal: there is a vast difference between self-awareness and projection. Schoenbrun responded to the absurdity of this assumption in an interview with Katie Rife for Letterboxd, saying “If I was just trying to faithfully recreate something I invented for myself two years ago, I would be so sleepy and so bored, and you would feel it in the movie. Production is collaborative: you’re collaborating with all of these different artists, but you’re also collaborating with reality and the world as it exists.”
Schoenbrun furthermore reveals to Rife that their personal wisdom on the topics exhibited in the film comes not just from their skillset as a writer, but from their efforts to know themself. For them, this self-awareness in turn makes the process of writing stories about teenagers struggling with the complexity of identity a merely intuitive task. Rife writes that “this self-awareness is evident in their work, which channels the emotional turbulence of Schoenbrun’s lived experience as a trans person into mesmerizing, visceral art-horror movies about the feeling of being outside of one’s body, the terror of unrealized potential and the liminal beauty that Schoenbrun calls “glow.”
Lily: As Owen grows up, he remains very introverted, working at the movie theater and refusing to make eye contact with his coworkers. It’s not until one night, nearly a decade later, do he and Maddy reunite. Sitting at the bar, against the backdrop of musical artists Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers performing a heavenly yet haunting tune, crooning “My bedroom has no door, so I can never close 'em / I paint the ceiling black so I don't notice / When my eyes are open.” Here, Maddy asks Owen if he ever felt like watching “The Pink Opaque” felt so much more than watching a TV show.
Maddy goes on to tell Owen that she asked someone she met on her travels to bury her alive, the same way her favorite character in “The Pink Opaque” died during the finale of the show. During this, Maddy reveals claims that the act brought her to “The Pink Opaque” reality as one of the stars, and that the “Midnight Realm” - a dimension where the two main characters are left for dead - is the real world, and that her and Owen's lives are dark and hopeless illusions.
Hannah: This illusion is an imaginative if not indirect portrayal of the trans experience, as Owen is forcibly surveillance to continue living as “Owen”, although he knows through Maddy he isn’t truly “Owen.” The story creates a commentary on the innermost thoughts and feelings of transgender people through Owen. Just as trans people often express they feel as though they are a different person trapped inside the wrong body, Owen is a gifted television character trapped inside the body of a working-class American. A primary talking point of the imaginary TV show “The Pink Opaque” is the connective, unsubtle telepathy between characters Tara and Isabel (Maddy and Owen), and even in the “real world,” it is impossible for the characters to keep their distance from one another.
Lily: Owen eventually loses touch with Maddy and both his parents have passed away, he’s now a sickly, grown man working at an arcade filling up the ball pit; he speaks to the audience, claiming that this is what grown men do, get a job and start a family, and that he’s content with his decisions, despite the fact that he’s quite literally withering away. While at work, Owen has a meltdown in front of the entire staff and children, who freeze, and backs towards him as he screams that he’s dying. Immediately, Owen apologizes for his actions, going back to his demure disposition, physically closing in on himself as he hides in the restroom. We then see Owen cut his chest down the middle to reveal “The Pink Opaque” playing inside of him. The film ends with Owen continuing to apologize to the patrons of the arcade, shaken and sickly.
Justice Smith gives a performance that wormed its way into my heart, Owen’s so understated and shy that even as the main character, it felt like he took up as little space as possible within me, until the end when you look at the full scope of his life and the identity held down inside him, and it felt like I was punched in the chest. On a more prominent level, Schoenbrun portrays one of my biggest fears: moving through life so quietly and keeping to myself that I’m 40 and have done nothing at all but merely survive. “Time wasn’t right. It was moving too fast. I was 19, and then I was 20, and then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over in a DVD. I told myself ‘This isn’t normal. This isn’t normal. This isn’t how life is supposed to feel.’” Maddy says while confiding in Owen about her experiences she claims to have had in “The Pink Opaque” universe, where she felt truly alive, unlike on Earth.
We see this happen with Owen, who isn’t living his life at all, but simply going through the motions, physical illness and depression gnawing at his outsides in. When we see that Owen has “The Pink Opaque” playing inside him, running through his veins like blood, it solidifies the queer and trans narrative that had been run throughout the entire film. Owen and Maddy used to dress up as both the female protagonists of “The Pink Opaque” and Owen not being allowed to watch the show at his house because “it was for girls” contributes to the idea that “I Saw The TV Glow” is all about the dire consequences of repressing one’s true identity.
“It’s either a burial or an excavation, dependent on how much you’re willing to withstand,” writes Claira Curtis about the film. This phrase describes the dichotomy of Owen and Maddy’s journeys with uncovering or swallowing down one’s true identity. In Maddy’s case, through literal burial, her true self was excavated from her coffin on Earth, a stark contrast to Owen who’s kept his identity so buried inside him, that he’s literally dying from it. Schoenbrun paints the unique yet all-too-common darkness that can come with grappling with a queer and trans identity and does so with glaring neon imagery, working to make one feel like they're in a sensory deprivation tank while watching, unable to exist in the real world but at the mercy of the neon world made from Schoenbrun’s pen and direction.
The film is marketed as a horror movie, but I believe it has many more elements of a coming-of-age, even if Schoenbrun flips the genre on its head.
We see Owen from a seventh grader to a middle-aged man, how he reacts to friendship, familial hardship, and sense of self. Yet, unlike most coming-of-age protagonists we know, - who fall to the whims of life, going along with the highs and lows until they reach the hopeful conclusion - Owen is headstrong and rejects the temptations of expanding life, time and time again until he deteriorates from the inside out.
Hannah: The film’s ending is unnecessarily controversial but emphasizes the complex reality of self-acceptance. Schoenbrun does not merely give us an easy exit with a supremely “happy” ending, but a gentle close to a single chapter in Owen’s life. It’s clear in the final moments of the film that these events do not signify the end of Owen’s journey, but the beginning of something else entirely.
“To get Owen to a place of true self-love and self-acceptance would take at least another movie. I knew that I wanted it to be really honest to the fact that just because you’ve now finally seen yourself clearly doesn’t mean that the half a lifetime of damage that repression has instilled in you is going to go away. I don’t view it as a cautionary tale or a definitively sad ending. I just think it’s truthful to the fact that if you’ve been taught your whole life to think of yourself as imposter or apologize for being yourself, like many trans people are, that instinct doesn’t go away overnight.”
Lily: “I Saw The TV Glow” has quickly proven itself to be a standout in the modern cinematic landscape, a hodgepodge of barren emptiness and blazing LED. You enter the supernatural through a human-craving television show, but witness the experiences of the cashier at the grocery store, the woman you pass on the street, the little boy and outcast girl stuck in an unheard town, fated to each side of the spectrum of self-expression.