I Saw the TV Glow's director might be a genius. That doesn't mean the movie is | CBC News (2024)

Jackson Weaver · CBC News

· Posted: May 17, 2024 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: May 17

"It feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. I know there's nothing there, but I'm still too nervous to open myself up to check," saysOwen, one of the many lost charactersin Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow."I know there's something wrong with me — my parents know it, too, even if they don't say anything."

It is a good speech, a great speech even, by a writer-director who's already proved their mastery over the revealing dialogue of adolescence in We're All Going to the World's Fair. Here, that mastery continues: made with intention, Schoenbrun's vision is topped only by obviously deliberate execution in a visually stunning, confidently subtle allegory for the constantly evolving horrors of growing up in a modern hellscape.

But simply knowing what you want to say, and having the talent to say it exactingly, doesn't mean it's enjoyable to hear. Because it's no accident thatI Saw the TV Glow is a difficult, hinted at thing; its message lives somewhere between the everyday struggles of lonely adolescentsand the overwhelming feeling of destroying oneself to survive growing up transgender.

But in action, it's a nearly inscrutable metaphor hidden beneath miles of 90spop-art symbolism. Itboth asks too much of its audience while offering too few rewards for theeffort.

The surface story follows Owen — at the beginning, a timid seventh grader dragged along to election night at the local high school, and initially played byLet the Right One In's series star Ian Foreman.

WATCH | I Saw the TV Glow trailer:

Awash in the blue filter that both telegraphs our overall mood and the 90s nostalgia seemingly pumped into the set's air vents, Owen quietly wanders past pastel-coloured lockers and the Keith Haring inspired-Fruitopia vending machines thatmore or lessdefined the decade. Along with the religiously lit CRT-TVs and glow pens, they're part of the many props trying to send us back in time with a series of unending bonks on the head.

Owen soon stumbles on Maddy, a ninth grader juggling the dual responsibilities of avoiding volunteer duties and doing her best Ghost World impression. But after a brief jab at Owen's youth causes him to crumple into himself — for the first of many, many times — Maddy softens.

Prying into what turns out to be a strict, sheltered childhood with a bedtime so early he can't watch the coolest show on TV, she becomeseven nicer. Owen is invited over to a secret sleepover in Maddy's basem*nt so they can stay up to watch The Pink Opaquetogether, painted in the same staticky light as scattered shouting and implied violence echoes upstairs to sketch a picture of Maddy's own problems.

Pink Opaque

As they grow (and the Owen role is taken over by Justice Smith) their friendship unfolds in tandem with the events of Pink Opaque, a show about two telepathically linked teenage girls at summer camp.

Anotheraping of 90s content that, while accurate in broad strokes, is too much a celebration of the style to feel genuine. The too-good and too-modern-to-be-true X-Files Jr. feels more like Adventure Time through a rose-coloured screen than actual memory, and perhaps the sole point where a hiccup in Schoenbrun's direction makes it difficult to stay immersed in their world.

But it's enough to hook Owen, hunchingover glowing screens to devour Pink Opaque tapes Maddy giveshim.

The rest of I Saw The TV Glowjumps up the surrealism bydippingin and out of that TV world until the realities are mixed.What follows is an untangling of those characters' threads that plumbs the depths of a mystery that viewerscan either go into blind, or do some major homework to unpack.

Granted, there are hints throughout. Owen, a Black boy with a white father in a suburbia seemingly devoid of diversity, is closed off from the outside world in virtually every way. He answers the question of whether he likes girls or boys with "I think I like TV shows." His pivotal moment is an eruptive, guttural scream that he spends the next several minutes apologizing for.

Aside from his late-addition voice overs and storybook-style narration that clears up some of the plot while damaging its overall quality(an explanatory crutch inSchoenbrun's work that goes all the way back totheir pseudo-documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination)Owen stays tight-lipped around nearly everyone.

Waifish workhorse

Smith is well versed in this type of role.InDungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, he was gradually dialling up his figurative awkwardness knob. It wasturnedall the way up to ten inThe American Society of Magical Negroes and is inching up to an11 for this. He appears to be studying for a PhD in mousy, disaffected young men. And sure, the depiction of non-stereotypical Black youth is novel, but a resume whereby he simply stutters and whispers through a non-masculine version of Blackness without variation or insight has diminishing returns of depth.

But the real heart of I Saw the TV Glow is a few layers below that.

An early scene shows Owen undera pink, blue and white playground parachute. Later, he ends a conversation with his concerned mother by spitting on turquoise cotton candy, cowers when his father questions whether Pink Opaque isn't "a show for girls," and storms past hallway signs with encouraging words like "pain is weakness leaving the body," "veni, vidi, vici" and "to thine own self be true."

Coupled with a collapsing Pink Opaque narrative that literally devolves into characters being buried alive, for a certain crowd, the metaphor of addressing or hiding from gender dysphoria couldn't be more accessible.

And despite personal anecdotes becoming more of a faux pas in film criticism, I can say everything about this story should be geared towardme: from the living through the decade, racial isolation, dysphoria and paralyzing introversion I should see myself hearteningly echoed in Owen.

But while that opens a door to Schoenbrun's work, the interior isn't all that exciting. The surface story of a nostalgic show bleeding into reality honestly limps along, and was done more efficiently in "Pirate Cove,"fromChannel Zero,a horror anthology that devotedits entire first season to a decade-specific children's TVshow with uncannily evil overtones.

The era'saffectations here are more a sanctified nostalgia.Films that use the setting to live, not play dress up — likeMean Creek's Josh Peck screaming very standard youthful slurs, orSuper Dark Times' annoyance at poortechnology rather than reverence of it—show an era that doesn't feel improved into obscurity.

And ifI Saw the TV Glow were a short film, like Schoenbrun's last effort, it may have been able to stand on the merit of its central idea. But where films like Skinamarink or Sasquatch Sunset give audiences just enough tools to work out what's going on — walking the line between stress and boredom all the way to the end — I Saw the TV Glow divides.

Because as beautiful and deliberate as it is, I Saw the TV Glow is too plodding and stretched to make unearthing its point worth it. And for those not primed to those interpretations off the top — or not willing to read analysis beforehand — I Saw the TV Glow may simply exist as a pretty, but plodding, social media style"corecore" postof the 90s.

But as that TikTok trend of mashing seemingly meaningless but evocativeimagery together is basically a new form of Dadaism, maybe there's another explanation forI Saw the TV Glow's impossible to follow weirdness. With a message that's clearly there, and Schoenbrun clearly an impressive rising talent, it could just be that I didn't get it.

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