Stay tuned: "I Saw The TV Glow"

If you've spent any time online in recent months, you'll likely be aware that I Saw The TV Glow arrives freighted with extratextual baggage; that its writer-director, Jane Schoenbrun, is trans; and that the film refers, whether explicitly or obliquely, to the experience of being trans. But what if you just walked into it, drawn by the mysterious light of the title or the copious four- and five-star reviews on the poster? Perhaps more aptly, given the milieu it describes: what if you stumbled across it on television in the middle of the night? Schoenbrun has given us a slowburn study of the bonds forged by cathode rays, one that opens in 1996, as asthmatic seventh-grade outcast Owen (Ian Foreman) befriends Gothy ninth-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) via their shared love of a cult show: "The Pink Opaque", which clips reveal to be a fantastical mash-up of the then-voguish Buffy (young-adult network, strong female leads), The X-Files (monster-of-the-week episodes, tangled mythology) and the original Twin Peaks (photogenic leads, woodland setting, banal dialogue, dreamy mood, abrupt cancellation leading to least satisfying finale imaginable). Yet just as we're settling in for a leftfield coming-of-age drama, Schoenbrun starts moving the timeframe ahead, first by years, later by whole decades. The show continues to cast a spell, particularly on Owen, clinging to its comfort-blanket of mysteries on videotape, then DVD, then streaming, but the people on the screen seem angrier, lonelier, sadder; the innocence of their high-school sleepovers fades, and their closest friends move on. Our growing sense of entrapment - or boxing-in - is only heightened by adroit casting. The boyish Foreman is removed from the frame at an early stage and replaced by the heavier-footed, sorrier-seeming Justice Smith, a lad with furrows in his brow, a frog in his throat and a default expression of great upset, whose Owen appears to have realised the adult world he is entering into, with its ill-paid menial tasks and terrifyingly quiet nights in, has little to nothing on the magical TV show he thrilled to as a child. The movies don't tend to mention this much (for obvious reasons), but it can fuck us up, pop culture, just by elevating our expectations of what awaits us out there.

Twin Peaks, famously, had its own show-within-a-show in "Invitation to Love", the hysterical daytime soap that provided an ironic counterpoint to/running commentary on the events of the series it was contained within. Schoenbrun is evidently one of a generation of outsider artists who've gorged themselves on David Lynch's oddly wholesome brand of weirdness: other hat tips in that direction include the female lead's name, a midfilm bar sequence (which actually feels a slight misstep, as slavish in its homage as the end of Bonello's recent The Beast), the image of a TV on fire, and dialogue made newly glacial by the insertion of dead air between the lines. Yet the prevailing mood here proves less reminiscent of Lynch than early Gregg Araki, and 2004's unforgettable Mysterious Skin in particular: hypersensitive, yet more melancholy than outright weird, Alex G's shoegazey soundtrack describing quietly seismic shifts in the make-up of the characters' world. What I think it's really about - and here's where Glow maybe does get extratextual - is the struggle to articulate something within you, common to most teenagers, commonly borne out in chalk pavement etchings, dramas on CW and the WB and early films alike. For the characters on "The Pink Opaque", we only have the show's scriptwriters to blame for any inarticulacy. Yet for the characters in the film, the show becomes a safe means of connection, a way of talking about feelings without talking about their own feelings. (I would posit this is a broadly universal phenomenon - that cis hetero men have been known to do the same thing with sports, World War II and the Roman Empire.) 

Without this emotional encryption device, life becomes far trickier: you see it later on in the film, as the now palpably unhappy, self-harming, increasingly discombobulated Owen discovers his old pals have different memories of this formative experience, and fails to relate to the suburban normies around him, who seem so full of confidence, in themselves and around others, that they may as well be characters from another series, or planet. The one figure in the vicinity who appears comparatively assured is Schoenbrun, who's used this struggle as the basis for an affecting, unsettling mystery such as might feature in "The Pink Opaque" itself, a cautionary tale on the perils of not looking too deeply inside yourself, a more abstract moodpiece that varies in intensity, and a series of images that print themselves firmly upon the imagination. This is what I would define as a frequency-film - you have to tune into it, appropriately - and I can well understand the responses both of those who've found it ineffably profound and those left shrugging. (It strikes me as dependent on a fundamentally torturous relationship with one's inner life that even some happy-go-lucky trans folk may not share.) Still, I would hope anyone who happens across I Saw The TV Glow down the line in the wee small hours would be intrigued enough to stay tuned, as with anyone who's ever been given pause to contemplate the vagaries of this world: how strangely, incomprehensibly, often cruelly it turns, how there are things out there even those of us who work with words struggle to put into words. There are mysteries in life we cannot finally explain, and for which no episode guide can truly prepare you.

I Saw The TV Glow is now playing in selected cinemas.