Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow and De-realization

Part-collage, part-90s-nostalgia-porn, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a genreless, liminal trip about an increasingly media-addled world where the unconfronted anxieties and problems of the internal seem to be ignored like a high school clique, switched off like a TV channel, or dished out like “the monster of the week.” The film watches like how OMORI (the video game) plays— the player plays in one realm and the story responds in another. In I Saw the TV Glow, the surreal-90s-paranormal-girl “Young Adult” TV show, “The Pink Opaque,” acts as the metaphysical plane where the two main characters (and their TV quasi-doppelgangers, dubbed “imaginary friends”) can remotely express themselves through. The high school, suburban reality acts as the depthless counterpart where concrete details contextualize the show’s metaphorical revelations. While this literal dimension is where our characters seem to exist, their internal lives exist elsewhere—their dreams, aspirations, anxieties, and discomforts—in the show.

The acting is rightfully awkward and stilted—like reading a script and pausing between every line. Justice’s lower lip, always twitching and jutting out, perfectly encapsulates that high school outcast, mouth-breather persona. The soundtrack bangs with tracks from alex g and yeule, and that walk through the hallway with Caroline Polachek blasting is a vibe. The montage scenes near the end feel slightly schizophrenic, unsettling yet suppressed.

But the film is much more than its aesthetics—empty shopping carts, CRT static, and pink paratextual Sharpie. The liminal imagery acts as a rejoinder between the flat “real world” and its eerie, Goosebumps-esque counterpart. They remind us, ever so often, of the dialectical relationship between the two realms—that maybe the show and its answers to Owen’s life are hiding behind silver screens, broken power lines, and empty parking lots; that maybe an alternate life exists in those places, behind cracks and gaps in the endless flat of consumer suburbia; that maybe this alternate reality is reality and it is everyone else who is stuck in a dream; that maybe everyone ignoring this empirical fact about the world is what gives you meaning in a world that might as well have already ended. For Owen, Mr. Melancholy’s snowglobe and the gym class parachute symbolize this insular, hidden place outside of time. The nostalgic media of our childhood offers us, at least, this eschatological consolation.

However, it is this nostalgia for our childhood media—for me, shows like Adventure Time and movies like Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular—that permeates our experience into adulthood. Among I Saw the TV Glow’s themes on trans identity and an allegory on suicide, I was most impressed with how the film deals with a contemporary postmodern dilemma: de-realization. Popularized by pre-cursors to postmodernism such as Nietzche, who describes it as the “last breath of a vaporizing reality,” de-realization is the dissolution of the distinction between the “real” and the “apparent” world. In an increasingly globalized and mediated America, de-realization becomes so pervasive that media often feels more real than reality: Scenes of Owen looking at fire feel numb, sobering, but scenes of him looking at the TV feel voracious, desperate—staring into an alternate reality he desperately wants to escape to… until he plunges headfirst into a cracked TV set.

My favorite scene on de-realization is when Maddy-quasi-Tara returns from the “dead,” monologuing to Owen in front of the constellation projector at school. Maddy says when she “buried herself alive,” it felt as if she “woke up from a dream”; that it felt like all of her life before “returning” to “The Pink Opaque” was a lie, artificial memories of suburban life fabricated by the big bad of Mr. Melancholy. Reality, instead, lies within the show—she is Tara and Owen is Isabel. As Maddy is making the case for Owen to distrust his reality, her speech is monotone and resolute. Her body is unmoving, ghostly behind the projections of stars rotating slowly across her face. The camera is in the first-person position of Owen and we, as the viewers, watch Maddy speak to us as the projector rotates the stars, as the stars connect into constellations, and as the constellations are overlaid with images of their Greco-Roman myths. The entire scene is elegiac and ekphrastic: It describes the process in which reality becomes sectioned off, turned into stories and media, and that we—alive or dead—are painted in its colors. From Owen’s perspective, as we watch the stars phase into their fictional overlays, we can’t help but feel as if we are just another star watching the galaxy move along with us; that maybe our storied perspective is just another one among many; that maybe “The Pink Opaque” is as vivid and significant as our life, or perhaps that our life is just as transient and insignificant as a TV show.

I Saw the TV Glow portrays de-realization in a way that many other postmodernist works of art do not—it strictly does not intellectualize it. Other films contemplate de-realization from loftier frames, such as Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and the allegory of a theater play. Anderson’s film, in contrast to Schoenbrun’s, stays in its metaphorical realm for almost the entire film, posing it as something near all-encapsulating for the characters/actors. Not only does Anderson not intermix the metaphorical frame with the literal frame as Schoenbrun does, making the movie less accessible and trackable, but the viewer is incapable of escaping the high-brow presuppositions of the metaphorical realm. Being at least aware of character archetypes, theater cliches, and story terms are all prerequisites in the viewing experience of Asteroid City, making it more impenetrable for those not privy to these meta-story elements Anderson plays around with. I Saw the TV Glow, however, speaks to the consequences of de-realization in our phenomenological experience as laypersons. The average watcher of movies and TV, especially one younger, does not consume for some deeper, explicable cultural themes. Instead, they watch for comfort and expression, and to cope with the inexplicably capricious realities around them. Their associations with these shows, as they grow older, become nostalgic and somehow more vivid and sensational than the finer, intellectual themes of consensus-driven media. I Saw the TV Glow speaks to those people, perhaps stuck in the trance of career aspirations and adult life, isolated and adrift from their childhood selves.

I do have a few minor criticisms of Schoenbrun’s movie concerning, most notably, its up-in-the-air ending. While the liminal aesthetics fit the haunting, uncertain fate of Owen, the film’s abrupt, ambiguous ending does not feel entirely warranted. Ambiguous endings open up interpretation, liberating the viewer’s mind to pick and choose between a few possible endings (usually two). However, I Saw the TV Glow’s ending both does not answer the de-realization problem (Is Owen’s 9-to-5 the primary reality? Or were Maddy’s words to be trusted?) and does not give clear prospective endings to mull over either. It is not obvious, even, that the film’s de-realization dilemma at that point is binary as the birthday party scene—where Owen’s screams “shut down” his robotic coworkers—may hint at a bleeding over of the two realities. However, the bleeding over may as well be purely metaphorical, rather than the metaphorical affecting literal. In other words, the movie’s structure, its “seasons” and TV plotline, and its more lucid scenes, slowly evoking a potentially self-damaging indifference towards reality, seem to imply a blueprint or roadmap that is not fully realized. Nevertheless, the ending retains its staying power as Owen walks down the fun center, apologizing to the kids, and potentially the theater audience, for intruding on their day with his fictional life.

I Saw the TV Glow is a landmark film on where identity lies in a de-realized, mediated world. It perfectly illustrates the comfort of familiar spaces—90s late-night TV, cul-de-sac chalk drawings, and VHS (“Void High School”) tapes—and the terror of stepping into your true self—whether that be a sexuality or a gender, a personality or a feeling, a TV show or an imagination. It then washes it all away. You find yourself in movies and cartoons, in power lines and fluorescent lights you can’t look at for too long; your TV cracks and you move away; you get a job and become “well-adjusted”; your alternative identities dissolve until you are a shell of a beginning—either this is real or the media you live through is. One day, you awake from a dream and wonder, “What if I really was someone else… really far away on the other side of a television screen?”