A horror movie with sex on its mind

  Remember the horror series Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma? The original starred Billy Preston, an actress who has vanished from public view. Obligatory sequels followed, establishing the Camp Miasma movies as a horror staple that wore out its welcome.

  Stop scanning your memory. There never was a Camp Miasma series, but director Jane Schoenbrun bases her movie -- Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma -- on a meta-conceit. An indie filmmaker, Hannah Einbinder's Kris wants to remake the original Camp Miasma movie, retooling it for contemporary audiences.

    To prepare, Kris travels to an abandoned camp where the movie's former star (Gillian Anderson) lives in isolation. Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) makes movies that have garnered a following, partly because Schoenbrun's films deal with (wait, let me try to calculate the number of themes) movie madness, trans issues, pop culture, female eroticism, and campy asides, this time evidenced in the search for the perfect Jolly Rancher.

     The horror element of Schoenbrun's movie involves a character called Little Death that lives at the bottom of a lake near the abandoned camp, emerging occasionally to spear people to death or, in the case of Anderson's Billy, to deliver the world's best orgasm. 

    Little Death wears a box over his head that resembles a repurposed air vent that might have been salvaged from the bottom of the lake. His look is more last-gasp Halloween costume than one calculated for terror.

     The screenplay makes comparisons between Billy and Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard. Kris wants to convince Billy to appear in the remake. A studio wants a version that's more woke, less transphobic.

     Less a character than a collection of intellectualized tropes and inhibited sexuality, Kris makes an argument for the remake that sails over Billy's head. Billy understands that Kris' over-intellectualization masks the link fundamental between fear and desire that she's been avoiding.

      Transparent artifice from production designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly makes it clear that Camp Miasma, which includes a segment from the original movie, needn't be taken with Kris' cinematic seriousness.

     That's not to say that Schoenbrun doesn't indulge in gushing sprays of plasma as Billy slowly coaxes Kris into accepting her libidinous desires, no matter how strange they may seem to others. 

      Mostly a two-hander, the movie includes supporting performances from Jasmin Savoy Brown as Mari, Kris's bisexual partner, and Aren Buchholz as Thor, Mari's male lover.

      Appearing as a studio exec who's baffled when Kris calls him to pitch her latest version of Camp Miasma, Dylan Baker lands the movie’s funniest scene, a send-up of the mismatch between studio preoccupations and auteur ambitions.

      Wild and amusing as all of this may sound, Camp Miasma misses an essential horror ingredient: scares. Moreover, its amusements seem aimed at an audience that, like Kris, is fluent in the language of horror. It pays to know something about split diopters and how they’re used in horror films.

      Speaking with a southern accent, Anderson's Billy is more intent on liberating Kris's sexuality than on making another movie. Anderson's's vampy, campy performance constitutes the movie’s main attraction, enriched as it is by the humanity Anderson* conveys.

      Camp Miasma, which is less morose than I Saw the TV Glow, lives in its own world and seems aimed at those who want to be part of Schoenbrun's inside joking and gender explorations. Me? I kept waiting for the movie to break through its own self-involvement.

*Thanks to reader who pointed out name mistake. Now fixed.

Trapped in an alienated life

 

  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.