Director Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow offers an impressionistic view of what it means for a disaffected teenager to become obsessed with a single TV show.
Beginning the movie in the 1990s, Schoenbrun -- a trans* director who says the movie is personal but not specific to her life -- introduces us to Owen, a character who's consumed by a weekly TV show called The Pink Opaque. Owen lives more in the show's world than in what we generally, and often casually, refer to as "the real world.”
Played as a seventh grader by Ian Foreman and later by Justice Smith, Owen discovers the show when he meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a sardonic gay ninth-grader whose self-imposed isolation bristles with defiance.
I Saw the TV Glow leans away from trans issues, opting for a broader display of adolescent dysphoria as experienced in the conformist-driven climes of suburbia.
You’d think by now, artists might have gotten past using suburbia as a metaphor for stifling conformity but Schoenbrun makes an unnamed suburb ground zero for a woozy exploration of memory, time, and alienation.
The movie wallows in uncertainty. Significantly, Owen has latched onto a YA-oriented program aimed at girls, an interest that earns his father's derision and suggests that Owen might be standing on shifting gender sands.
"I like TV shows," Owen says, when asked if he likes girls, an answer that’s both revealing and evasive.
The Pink Opaque, by the way, centers on two teens (Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) who form a psychic bond, whatever that might mean.
The acting is purposefully flat, and, aside from a screeching scene near the movie's end, mostly, uninflected -- "zombie cool” tempered by a plaintive quality Smith brings to the role of Owen.
If you see the movie and are puzzled by it, you won't be alone. As for me, I can’t say I much cared about the characters Schoenbrun creates, although Owen’s vulnerability can be touching.
Maddy is Owen's major connection to others. She eventually disappears, leaving a burning TV in her backyard as a memento of abandoned adolescence. She'll return a decade later, only to increase Owen's abiding confusion.
I Saw the TV Glow may speak most clearly to those who already share Schoenbrun’s view of the deracinated quality of contemporary life or who overdosed on TV during the 1990s. Maybe it will speak to those who fear, as happens in the TV show within the movie, that some form of monster inhabits every story.
After an amusing beginning, the movie drifts into what struck me as a string of self-conscious attempts to avoid a conventional storyline. Rather than following a narrative-driven map, the movie offers a flow of images that resemble dreams or memories, which, I’d argue, is just another kind of trap.
At one point, Owen says he doesn’t look inside himself because he’s afraid of what he might find, maybe nothing more than the TV images he's digested. He shows few signs of emerging from the estranged shallows of his existence.
Schoenbrun plays with many themes but I Saw the TV Glow seems less interested in involving us in the experiences of its characters than in looking for a language in which to express how they experience the world.
By showing Owen’s marginal jobs, the movie makes a clever comment about the cultural shift away from movie screens to the kinds of screens you might find in a game-filled arcade where stimulation proliferates at punishing levels.
Overindulgence in fantasy may block obsessives from seeing themselves but you wonder whether they can see anyone else, either.
So much for I Saw the TV Glow. What some will see as an affecting exploration of alienated spirit also can look like an advanced case of millennial tunnel vision.
All I can say is that the movie increasingly struck me as a dreary jumble of ideas and impressions to which I said, "no thanks." Not my cup of depression.
*I mention "trans" only because Schoenbrun talks about it in interviews and, I think, equates the state of emotional indeterminacy that we find in the movie to her own experiences prior to making a decision to transition. More simply put, Schoenbrun talks honestly about her experiences prior to becoming a trans person.
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