I Saw the TV Glow review (CCFF 2024)

With both I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Jane Schoenbrun brings forth a menagerie of inherently relatable thoughts and experiences, but these aren’t generally pushed much further than the sheer mention (“Have you ever felt…?” “Do you remember…?”), often falling short of actually emulating the feeling (in me) through cinematic language.

Have you ever tried to run away, only to realize nothing changes when you do? Have you ever watched a TV show from your youth and realized it fails to spark the same feelings it once did? Do you fear growing old and finding too late that you’ve made the wrong choices?

And yet, especially in I Saw the TV Glow (which may simultaneously fall more victim to that tendency and rise more successfully above it), that struggle to convey is in itself compelling, lending a beating heart to the whole affair.

And perhaps that is why, in many ways, this feels like a bigger-budget magnification of ideas already explored in Schoenbrun’s previous film: the exploration has not been resolved. There’s a pervasive fear of abandonment, that, whether online or in real life, a person might just disappear, leaving only ambiguity in their wake. There’s the obsession of an isolated teenager who turns to the worlds behind a screen as a salve for their shifting identity and unstable reality.

And if the eventual reflection from adulthood is implied in World’s Fair (with the burden of retrospection placed more on the viewer), here it’s made explicit. So too is the transness, rising from subtext to text-text, albeit still largely obfuscated in favor of conveying the feeling more than the concrete. And beyond what was also touched on in World’s Fair, this brings plenty of new ideas to the table, established through stray bits of dialogue that attempt to tie everything together in pursuit of some truth. It’s safe to say it’s a film with a lot on its mind.

With the gift of an A24 budget, Schoenbrun’s desire for striking imagery is more fully realized in I Saw the TV Glow, offering beautifully haunting visuals aplenty. The cloud of colorful static hovering above Owen’s head; the crackling, sparking mess of wires that turns truly otherworldly in the wide shot, like a force beckoning; the constellation tent; Owen’s head pushed through the TV screen. This is a film that yearns for color, for beauty in the macabre, and sometimes it finds it.

This is seen also in the soundtrack, which is about as great as was intended, bringing together artists that range from worldwide prominence to relative obscurity. It prominently features a Yeule cover of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl”, which pushes the melded tones of the original to their natural conclusion, not a complete sonic upheaval but a stuttery enhancement of what was there. In some ways it may serve as a microcosm for the film as a whole: whispery, glitchy, sad in the simple ways, conveying its nostalgic depression with an almost upbeat poppy sheen, which is not an unfamiliar combination for an Emily Haines song.

I Saw the TV Glow, in another repetition of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, so deeply sticks the landing with its ending — this time in an abrupt Kaufman-core dose of pit-in-your-stomach absurdism that continues to keep me up at night days after watching it — that the film as a whole practically begs to be re-examined, which means I really wouldn’t be surprised to see it click with me even more upon a rewatch. As of now, I’m bemused by the fact that concepts that are usually quite moving to me failed to register all that much in the context of this film. However, having now witnessed the central stalk of its messy web play out, it may become easier to reach the film’s wavelength. Plus, as wonderful as it is to see any film with a sold-out crowd (I saw this via the Chicago Critics Film Festival), especially a film that has only been seen in that context a handful of times, many movies do benefit from being seen alone, even if only as a rewatch. That’s probably inherently true of a movie largely about loneliness.

On We’re All Going to the World’s Fair:

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is disquietingly authentic in its portrayal of isolated youth, and it’s impressive how closely to reality this film captures such a specific truth of modern life through the psychology of a teenager. Casey is at an age where it’s practically impossible to escape the ambiguity between believing and inventing, where the loneliness of the internet, and of being in a far-flung exurb or small town in the middle of nowhere, comes with the delusion of connection being attainable simply by existing on one side of a computer screen, that being part of a greater trend, game, movement, conspiracy equates to not being alone.

There’s a lot to laugh at when it comes to the corner of the internet this film portrays, this world of ARGs and internet horror stories. It’s easy to look back at the tales of a certain era and wonder how they so got under our skin, and this film leans into that retrospection: there’s a glimpse at the trailer for a terrible horror movie that somehow perfectly captures the vibe of YouTube filmmaking (especially a certain era of it), and the character JLB has a cringeworthy early-2010s creepypasta image macro as his profile picture. We understand the mechanisms of this world, and so there’s a degree of helplessness in watching Casey fall into it. It’s easy to cringe at, but in an empathetic sort of way that ultimately leads to sadness. The artifice of it all only means that there are ample opportunities for a young person to humiliate themselves, to feel silly and stupid for being led to believe something they don’t believe by people who also don’t believe it.

The connection between Casey and JLB is what really makes this film stick the landing. The internet only enhances the inherent ephemerality of relationships. You can “know” a person for quite some time and yet, once they disappear, you may realize you were missing even the basic structures of understanding. The grief that follows is an uncertain one: you knew someone existed, but that’s about it. They were a flickering pixel.