Bold, Audacious ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Explores Fandom, Identity, and the Way We Remember
The nostalgic charm of 90s suburbia
The school gym. The football field bleachers. The multiplex, the fast food drive-thru, the quiet leaf-covered street where your friend lives. Something about the detail and clarity with which Jane Schoenbrun evokes 90s suburbia in ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ makes you remember growing up there — even if you didn’t.
But that’s the thing about memory, isn’t it? It can be distorting. And that’s what Schoenbrun, an exciting filmmaker on only their second project, is driving home in this tale centered on those angsty school years when you’re trying to fit in, or merely realizing you don’t — particularly, and more intensely, if you are queer or trans and don’t quite know it yet.
“Memory can be distorting, and that’s what Schoenbrun is driving home in this tale centered on those angsty school years…”
We first meet middle-school-aged Owen (a wonderfully empathetic Ian Foreman plays this younger version) on Election Day 1996. Owen’s mom (Danielle Deadwyler) takes him into the voting booth at the high school. But Owen’s interested in something else: older student Maddy, who exudes a Goth toughness, reading a book of episodes of ‘The Pink Opaque,’ a horror-esque series on cable.
A nostalgic look at the voting booth
Remember when you could touch and collect tapes, albums, that sort of thing? Somehow that seemed more of a concrete relationship with the culture we consume than the equivalent today. You don’t have to worry nowadays about remembering a show wrong: you can always find it somewhere. But you don’t feel you ‘own’ it anymore than you ‘own’ a song on Spotify.
The nostalgia of physical media
‘I Saw the TV Glow,’ an A24 release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association ‘for violent content, some sexual material, thematic elements, and teen smoking.’ Running time: 100 minutes. Three stars out of four.
The movie poster for ‘I Saw the TV Glow’
