I Saw the TV Glow (2024 | USA | 100 minutes | Jane Schoenbrun)
Into each generation a new Donnie Darko is born. With Lynchian threads as applied to post-millennial trans awakenings, grounded in a deep love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and coming with its own slew of possible interpretations, Jane Schoenbrun’s eerie, visually entrancing, and sonically inventive cautionary love note to the nineties just might be it for the Zoomies.
Set in a pre-internet time when shared fandoms created friendships from semi-secret, closely held, shared sacred texts. I Saw the TV Glow captures a fleeting moment in recent history when basic cable young adult fantasy soaps could act as beacons of taste and lifelines to lonely teens. Spanning decades, the film opens with children in the main roles but soon hands off to evocative performances by Justice Smith as a biracial kid left to fend for himself with an adoring mother an overbearing yet absent father and Brigette Lundy-Paine as an older wiser girl who invites him into her basement after his bedtime to watch television under the assumption that her terrible parents will never notice.
In what appears to be a big jump in production from their debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Schoenbrun puts A24’s pocketbook to exceptional use. Cinematographer Eric Yue lovingly recreates the low-budget aesthetics of these basic cable marvels as well as fancifully capturing the enchanting hyper saturated glow they layered over the bland real worlds of enraptured fans. An entrancing original score by Alex G compliments an enviable series of bookings worthy of The Bronze to create an enveloping soundtrack. With artists like Phoebe Bridgers contributing to the cast and soundtrack with their best impressions of era-appropriate angst, it’s not hard to imagine a deluxe edition of the soundtrack on cassette and vinyl being a mixtape that sells out instantly in the A24 merch shop, with even more special versions available only to card-carrying members.
Rather than capturing a sliver of young adulthood or an epiphanic realization, the film’s scope is one in which months stretch to years and years yawn to decades. With this expanded timeframe, we witness the ways that loneliness can catapult one teen to a kind of liberated madness while slowly hollowing the other into a shell. It’s a dreamy text whose unreliable narration is a feature for a new generation to pose speculative dissections, hunt for easter eggs, and create their own meaning from the seeds it plants. At the same time, it’s a cautionary tale about how extreme obsession with cultural objects as a shield against hard reality can become its own kind of mindfuck with an inescapable undertow.
A perfect entry in Sundance’s Midnight canon, if only to figure out what Fred Durst was doing in this cast.
I Saw the TV Glow plays as an official selection of the World Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Image courtesy of Sundance Institute.