Jane Schoenbrun’s new movie I Saw the TV Glow has sparked a wave of excited buzz and a sharp spike at the indie box office during its slow rollout in limited release. Like Schoenbrun’s previous movie, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, TV Glow was a sensation at Sundance and a subsequent critical hit. Both movies have won fans with their queasy, dreamy late-night tone, and the way they tap into familiar feelings of dread and alienation, compounded with the relief that can come from finding a fandom and sharing an obsession with other people. In World’s Fair, the protagonist is drawn into an online community sharing creepypasta-type stories. TV Glow, by contrast, centers on a late-night TV show called The Pink Opaque, about two girls using their psychic connection (and their magical, matching, glowing tattoos) to save the world from evil.
In a Q&A Wednesday night after a screening of the film, simulcast to viewers at Alamo Drafthouse screenings across the country, Schoenbrun (who identifies as non-binary and trans) discussed how all those elements came from their background growing up alienated and disconnected in the suburbs. Schoenbrun says they found a lifeline through television — particularly Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“I really did live and breathe Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Schoenbrun said. “I cared about Buffy more than I cared about my real life. And just having that consistency — when I was, like, 10, I watched the first season of that show while it aired, and was with it for seven years. And it was such a tool of dissociation for me.
“It was, in hindsight, I think, very much a coping mechanism for not being able to form the kinds of deep romantic relationships that other people can form when they’re an adolescent in the right body. I wasn’t in a place where I could open myself up to people, but here was this show that was so emotional, that I could have this relationship with.”
Schoenbrun describes Buffy as a show that “felt very queer,” even though they wouldn’t have known to describe it that way at the time: “It was giving me a place to go that was different than what was allowed elsewhere.” Like so many fans at the time, Schoenbrun was appalled when the show killed off Tara (Amber Benson), the girlfriend of longtime series co-lead Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan). At the time, Willow and Tara were among the only openly gay couples on television. Tara’s unceremonious death set off a storm of fan outrage that’s still frequently a focus of retrospectives and interviews about the show, and that comes up in regards to any new ancillary work.
It also led to a short but crucial cameo in I Saw the TV Glow — one Schoenbrun considered an emotionally necessary fix for Buffy fans. It’s no coincidence that one of the heroes of The Pink Opaque is named Tara. And it’s also no coincidence that when the movie’s protagonist, Pink Opaque fan Owen (Justice Smith) goes looking for comfort in a crucial moment, he finds it with a woman played by Amber Benson, in a brief cameo.
“It just felt like an extraordinary grace to let him get a hug, and for us to kind of get a hug, and to see this presence,” Schoenbrun said at the Q&A. “In the context of what happened to Tara, [the cameo] was, for me, a bit of a corrective. I was like, I want to see her on screen. At one point — we didn’t actually do this, but I wanted to dress her in the same clothing that she was wearing when she got killed off on Buffy. It’s just really important to me, just personally as a fan, to see that she’s alive.”
Schoenbrun also listed some other shows that figured into their writing on I Saw the TV Glow. The cancelation of David Lynch’s surreal drama Twin Peaks was a longtime interest. That show built a fervent fandom when it debuted in 1990, but it was canceled after two seasons, ending on a series of cliffhangers. The fan response to the lack of resolution on that series stuck with Schoenbrun — “it being such, like, violence to the people who loved that show […] It almost feels like their own pain, or more painful than their own real pain.” Twenty-five years later, the series was revived for a third season, known as Twin Peaks: The Return.
Schoenbrun also noted that they grew up on Nickelodeon shows like The Adventures of Pete & Pete and Are You Afraid of the Dark? — “all of this media that was, in this post-Spielberg way, being like, Trust us, the suburbs are magical. I loved so much of that stuff growing up. And I think a lot of my own mythology, of my childhood and coming of age, was created by a lot of those shows […] It was like a religion that I was taught.”
Those elements — the fascination with TV series ending and reviving, and with the “magic of the suburbs” theme — twist together throughout I Saw the TV Glow’s plot. They also led to further cameos. The titular stars of The Adventures of Pete & Pete, Michael C. Maronna and Danny Tamberelli, appear in the film briefly, as Owen’s ghostly neighbors.
“If I ripped off Twin Peaks: The Return in the movie, it would probably be in the casting of Pete and Pete, and painting them white like ghosts,” Schoenbrun said. “For me, it was just all about the uncanny nature of aging. Seeing child actors as adults together, as almost these specters on the same suburban streets [where] they used to be kids on television, felt really ripe.”
Schoenbrun resists the idea that any of these these cameos might be labeled as Easter eggs. “A lot of this can be done badly in movies that I don’t like,” they said. “The ‘Easter egg,’ as people would say — it kind of makes me shudder. Because I’m not making a movie that’s just like, Cool references, bro! […] I try to like think about those sorts of things less as Easter eggs, and more like filling out the movie in a way that’s going to deepen the ideas of the film.”
I Saw the TV Glow will expand into more cities on May 10, and will hit full nationwide expansion on May 17.
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