“I think that I like TV shows.”
“Write what you know” and “Follow your passions” are pretty common pieces of advice for aspiring artists. After Martin Scorsese made Boxcar Bertha (1972) for Roger Corman, John Cassavetes told him, “You’ve just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit.” His next project was the personal Mean Streets (1973), which was a gateway to all his subsequent classics. While the wisdom is generally sound, it doesn’t always yield satisfactory results; this is proving true with a younger crop of filmmakers (of my own generation) whose knowledge and passions are intricately bound up in Internet/meme/fandom culture.
Take, for example, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, about two teenagers (Ian Foreman/Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine) who bond over their love of a campy, long-running, late-night television show, obsess over its gimcrack lore, and come to the startling belief that their true selves exist within the show—that “real life” is a pocket universe in which they’ve been imprisoned by the show’s villain and their experience of the show is actually manifestations of their true repressed memories. Sort of a riff on The Matrix (1999) with the Neo character (Smith) refusing to take the red pill when it’s offered by Morpheus (Lundy-Paine) who has seen “the real.” (Also like The Matrix, I Saw the TV Glow can be read as a transgender allegory. Critics did this retroactively to The Matrix when the Wachowskis both began presenting themselves as women; Schoenbrun was open about it prior to directing films and the allegory is much less allegorical and basically just part of the main text of the film, though not heavily emphasized.)
There’s nothing wrong with embracing one’s adolescent experiences, nor with identifying strongly with the protagonist of a show or book series or what have you—I love The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–2018) and Firefly (2002). Sometimes my inner voice sounds more like Columbo (1968–1978, 1989–2003) and MacGyver (1985-1992) than I care to admit. Schoenbrun clearly adores Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). But it is also good to have a healthy relationship to those fictional experiences as one transitions to adulthood, which usually means relinquishing close friendships with television characters. Art can have a tangible effect on your outlook and values and habits. It may help you cope with unstable family situations or social anxiety. It can even be the basis of social interactions. But it cannot be a substitute for them, nor for engagement with the physical world, establishing a life purpose, et cetera. That’s where Schoenbrun takes I Saw the TV Glow. It’s more or less a shrine to social estrangement, perpetual adolescence, and disassociated stupor. It doesn’t exactly endorse ambient dread as a way of life; the pubescent narrator initially resists the idea of life-in-television, finds the show childish when he rewatches it in middle age, and has a mental breakdown in a climax that wisely does not gesture toward transcendence, suggesting that the filmmaker may view such a lifestyle as detrimental. But even as the characters are abjectly miserable people, the film wallows in and romanticizes that dysfunction, makes it glow, so to speak, and refuses to offer even a vague notion of escape.
If one can accept the thematic thrust, they might still take issue with its treatment, which largely consists of one character drolly narrating the events of the film’s story and the other character explaining the themes of the film to the narrator, with lots of moody music (Alex G), colorful lighting, symbolic images (burning televisions, glowing chalk drawings, a projected planetarium, a chest cavity occupied by a television instead of a heart), and superimposed, handwritten notes about the show as embellishment. In some sense, this does capture the detached, anguished existence of a socially inhibited person whose only friends are not made of flesh and blood. It certainly isn’t without merit or a foothold for those who felt ostracized, misunderstood, or uncertain of themselves as youngsters, or had an epiphany that helped them contextualize strange experiences buried in their past. Overall, though, it’s fairly dull and unedifying. Intentionally so, I think. How else does one explain how agonizing it is every time someone speaks in this film? Both characters are perfect examples of aggravated loners and reminders of why the Hollywood quirky girl archetype is usually derided as being totally unrepresentative of actual outcasts. That at least makes it more interesting to think about and discuss than the usual A24 fare, as far as that goes.
If there’s a saving grace it’s the intermittent fulfillment of the premise’s staticky late-night channel-surfing promise: those few snippets of dream imagery informed by overconsumption of junk media, when the moon-faced Mister Melancholy traps the psychically-attuned heroines and makes them drink Luna Juice and buries them alive and whatnot. It’s here where Schoenbrun seems on the trail of media-minded head trips like Persona (1966), Videodrome (1983), and Inland Empire (2006), superior films that work through their ideas creatively instead of just vomiting up a list of them and executing a set of calculated and abrasive tricks to dress them up. I think the aim is to capture that jolting sensation of stumbling back to reality after having been lost in a fantasy world, narrowed and simplified so that everything was momentarily clear but now called into question as one returns to waking life. Alas, all the feints and gestures and subtext and claims of existential discomfort never actually evoke that feeling in the viewer, and in fact the film itself eventually grows tired of it and reaches for a more generic form of chaotic audiovisual surrealism.
I’ve had an idea percolating on the backburner that filmmakers like Schoenbrun, working from a hyper-online, socially stunted perspective, are somewhat akin to the “movie brats” of New Hollywood—filmmakers raised on film who attended film school and then went to work making films inspired by their favorite films, where their forebears were WWII vets and stage directors and photographers bringing diverse influences to the table. There have been many films made about the dangers and possible euphorias of media interconnectedness, made by filmmakers who brought a variety of perspectives to the subject. But now we have filmmakers who were raised on message boards and algorithms making films inspired by those things. The window they open on our cultural health is distressing to behold. But they should not be dismissed outright as meaningless or artless. Rather they should be challenged and mulled over and contended with.
Like the fictional show within it, I Saw the TV Glow seems bound to be tightly embraced by a select few would-be cultists who connect with it in a special way.
Sources:
Brown, Mick. “Martin Scorsese interview for Shutter Island”. The Telegraph. 07 March 2010.