Jane Schoenbrun's teen drama thrives on abstraction – Marin Independent Journal

Lina PortmanMay 31, 2024

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Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in a scene from “I Saw the TV Glow.” (A24 via AP)

Jane Schoenbrun's “I Saw the TV Glow” is a beautiful, sad film that turns more in on itself throughout its running time rather than exploding into catharsis, providing a potentially confusing experience for audiences expecting a teen drama or a conventional horror film. The unique moment when the world stops for poor Owen (Judge Smith) should not necessarily be interpreted as “real.” Paul Schrader, the legendary filmmaker and screenwriter whose screenplay for “Taxi Driver” ended on a similarly ambiguous note, hailed Schoenbrun as a generational talent.

“Glow” is infused with imagery from ’90s TV shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “My So-Called Life,” bathed in neon green and pastel purple. Television offers Owen and his friend/possible alter ego Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) a way to escape their miserable home lives, and as the film progresses, the boundaries between reality and the screen become blurred. start to fade. It's easy to assume that Schoenbrun is making a statement about technology's grip on modern life, but the director sees media as a place of refuge, where children can form an identity before they are ready to present it to the “real” world.

Owen is played by Ian Foreman for much of the first half of the film, aging quite abruptly into the softer-featured, sad-eyed Smith. He's one of the most passive heroes in recent cinema, his voice rarely approaching a halting croak. Maddy enters his life like an angel and disappears just as quickly, but not before treating generations of drama classes to a heartbreaking six-minute monologue, delivered mostly in a single shot, in front of a spotlight. stars dotted with images of the constellations. Robert Altman's elliptical 1977 masterpiece, “3 Women,” comes to mind, with its amniotic pools and drenched mosaics of divine creatures.

The songs appear and disappear, mostly written by younger women and queer artists, all commissioned by Schoenbrun with the goal of creating the “ultimate soundtrack to a teen drama.” The scene at the heart of the film takes place in a bar on the outskirts of town, where young rock star Phoebe Bridgers takes the stage and sings a song called “Claw Machine” that expresses everything Owen is unable to say. Although “Glow” is too enigmatic to join “Civil War” and “Everywhere All at Once” on independent distributor A24's list of crossover hits, the soundtrack already seems assured of a place in history, and “Claw Machine” is one of the best rock songs of the year.

A scene from “I Saw the TV Glow” by Jane Schoenbrun. (Courtesy of A24 via AP)

Those who grew up in '90s TV land may have a more Pavlovian reaction to what's on screen than those who didn't, even if the film is far from the parade of signifiers one might expect. The film's pervasive sense that all is not well with reality has been linked by some commentators to the experience of gender dysphoria, and what may be enigmatic to the cisgender viewer may be revelatory to the trans viewer. (Schoenbrun identifies as non-binary.)

So what’s in it for an audience whose experience doesn’t necessarily match that of the characters? On the one hand, the intoxicating freshness of the film: Schoenbrun's work seems alive, with an assured visual style and a reluctance to sacrifice his sickly dreamlike vision on the altar of an orderly plot. Then there's the pervasive, whiny tone of the film, in which the pathos comes from the fact that everyone only has one life and you can either set aside your dreams and desires or live them freely . If you were moved by “Brokeback Mountain,” with Heath Ledger stuck in his little trailer at the end, this is the first step toward understanding the conflict at the heart of “Glow.”

Schoenbrun is one of America's most exciting directors, and while their films can be frustrating at first, they mature in the mind and reveal their deepest secrets once they've marinated in the brain for days or even weeks. Their previous film “We're All Going to the World's Fair” involved a girl who is essentially swallowed by the Internet, in the same way that the girls in Peter Weir's 1975 crime film “Picnic at Hanging Rock” were swallowed by the living landscape. Its marketing as a horror film didn't do much to help audiences get used to it – it was more of an abstract coming-of-age drama, and the same goes for ” Glow” – but between the two films, it’s clear that Schoenbrun has cracked the code to creating Gen Z tears.