After exploring gender dysphoria in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), where we followed the transformation of a young girl participating in an online horror role-playing game, transfeminine director Jane Schoenbrun deals with transidentity with the same originality and sensitivity in I Saw the TV Glow (I saw the TV glowin French version), his second feature film.
A lonely teenager, Owen (Ian Foreman, moving) leads a dreary life with his mother (Danielle Deadwyller) and stepfather (Fred Durst, from Limp Bizkit). One day, Owen sees Maddie (Brigette Lundy-Paine, hypnotic), immersed in reading an episode guide for a science fiction show he doesn’t know, The Pink Opaque (named after a Cocteau Twins album).
Maddie then introduces Owen to this series where we follow two friends, Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan), who each live in their own world and must fight against the monsters sent to them by Mr. Melancholy (Emma Portner). The years pass and Owen (Justice Smith, moving) remains a loyal viewer of the show – a kitsch as fabulous as it is disturbing with its creatures which evoke the world of Méliès, Harryhausen and Cronenberg. Then Maddie leaves town and The Pink Opaque disappears from the waves.
Carried by the thunderous original soundtrack by Alex G., to which songs from Sloppy Jane and King Woman are added, I Saw the TV Glow accurately expresses the spleen, uneasiness and identity crisis specific to adolescence. So much so that the melancholy that emerges from the film becomes contagious and grabs us in the gut. Prisoners of an unhappy home, one because of illness, the other because of violence, the characters have no escape other than the fantasy of a cult series, said to be for girls, at the end of the evening.
Under the cover of fantasy and horror, behind which we can sense the influence of Lynch, Jane Schoenbrun thus addresses the mental illness that threatens Owen and Maddie, whose obsession with The Pink Opaque is such that they come to believe that their reality and that of their heroines are connected. If Owen’s transidentity is not addressed head-on, unlike Maddie’s homosexuality, who clearly claims to like girls, it is suggested by Owen’s identification with Isabel.
However rosy the universe of their favorite show may be, Jane Schoenbrun abandons her characters to a rather dark future and the spectators, paralyzed, to unanswered questions. There are films that escape us at the time, shock us, then haunt us long after having seen them. I Saw the TV Glow is one of those films.
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horror drama
I Saw the TV Glow (V.F.: I saw the TV glow)
Jane Schoenbrun
Justice Smith, Brigitte Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman
1h40