Practically from the moment the counter ticked over into the 21st century, the internet has been haunted by the phrase “‘90s Kids Remember.” It began around the dawn of social media, during that ecstatic burst of connection when college kids around the world began to realize the universality of their formative experiences: Remember Trapper Keepers? Ren & Stimpy? Bubble Yum? As Millennials slouched towards middle age, the phrase began to take on something of a reactionary bent, a creeping kids-these-days boomerism, an implied sense of the superiority of their childhood experiences over TikTok or whatever. At its core, though, has always been a sad sort of longing for innocence lost, just as there has been for every previous generation. That the ‘90s may or may not have been much better than the 2020s scarcely matters; we just want to go back to a time when the only things that mattered were AIM chats and Total Request Live.
Jane Schoebrun clearly remembers all of this more acutely than just about any ‘90s kid currently working in the arts. Their latest film, I Saw the TV Glow, takes the eerie, online-age alienation of their 2021 breakthrough We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and expands it into dazzling widescreen psychedelia. TV Glow is a film about the intense bonds we form with media to sublimate the pain and confusion of our real lives, and the way our brains and hearts can tumble the silliest bits of genre-fic ephemera into something unimaginably meaningful.
This, again, is probably a universal concept, but the form it takes here is unmistakably rooted in the ‘90s. Our hero is young Owen (played as a child by Ian Foreman, and from ninth grade into adulthood by Justice Smith). Owen is a cripplingly shy and repressed kid; he shares a very close relationship with his sickly mother (Till’s Danielle Deadwyler) and a frightening one with his father (Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, whose presence is so shockingly effective and skillfully deployed that it never reads as stunt-casting). Owen seems mildly frightened both by the world around him and by himself, retreating into a default state of monosyllabic numbness.
Owen meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a sulky teen a couple of years older, lurking in a corner reading an episode guide for a TV show called The Pink Opaque (this is the first of many cultural references which may be indecipherable to those born a generation before or after; in the days before the internet fully took root, paperback episode guides for geek-friendly shows were essential totems of fandom). Owen has seen ads for the show, but is unable to tune in thanks to his strictly enforced bedtime. Seeing a possible kindred spirit– or perhaps simply feeling pity on someone even lower on the high school totem pole than herself– Maddy starts leaving Owen VHS tapes with helpful notes for the neophyte (“Mythology episode!”), and eventually they begin meeting for weekly viewing parties.
It of course doesn’t matter that The Pink Opaque is, by all appearances, a very silly show, about a pair of tween girls who communicate across the astral plane to fight a series of rubber-suited monsters (the primary inspiration here is clearly Buffy, with a sprinkle of Are You Afraid of the Dark?-style kiddie-horror and a dollop of the plausibly deniable sapphism of Xena: Warrior Princess). It also doesn’t matter that Owen and Maddy have zero romantic interest in one another; Maddy likes girls, and Owen doesn’t seem to have a clue what he really wants (“I think I like TV shows,” he stammers when pressed). But the bond the pair form with The Pink Opaque, and with each other through their bond with The Pink Opaque, is very real and very powerful. In one scene, while watching the show’s heroines battle a ridiculous evil clown, Maddy bursts into wracking, heaving sobs. This scene is not played for laughs, nor does it elicit any. When Maddy disappears without a trace somewhere around junior year, it’s impossible for Owen not to see a connection with the fact that The Pink Opaque is unceremoniously canceled a month later. It seems natural that one can’t exist without the other.
To the outside observer, this strain of intensely personal fandom can appear irrational. Appropriately, Schoenbrun films the proceedings through a gauzy, dreamlike haze, its unnamed suburban wasteland shot in soft neon reds and blues mimicking the distortion of a second-generation VHS dub. Synopsizing the film, it’s tempting to say something like “the lines between fantasy and reality blur” (indeed, I did just that in my column for Cambridge Day earlier this week), but the truth of the matter is that those lines are pretty porous to begin with. We see this world through the eyes of Owen, a confused, repressed kid desperately searching for some sort of mythology through which to understand his place in it. Maddy abruptly reappears a decade later, and the story she tells Owen of her absence sounds too fantastical to be true. Even as he protests, though, one suspects he believes it has to be true. How could it not be?
So what’s “really” going on here? I think there probably isn’t a single answer to that, because the question is beside the point (though I’m sure that won’t stop every Youtuber and their mother from uploading a three-hour video titled “I Saw the TV Glow Ending Explained!”). This is an impressionistic and extremely personal work by one of our most exciting and innovative new filmmakers, and what it’s “about” has far more to do with its characters’ inner landscapes than what’s actually happening around them. Schoenbrun, it must be noted, is trans and nonbinary, and it’s not difficult to read gender dysphoria into Owen and Maddy’s unhappiness (curiously, this is the second film this year in which a trans filmmaker ponders the ways in which genre fiction shaped their personal journeys, following Vera Drew’s Batman-influenced alt-comedy fantasia The People’s Joker). The film’s final act, in which we follow Owen from awkward, unhappy adolescence into awkward, unhappy middle age, is almost unbearably sad, yet there is a sense that it’s not set in stone, that this is only one possible road. While there’s no Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shaking Owen awake, we do linger on a bit of sidewalk chalk which could serve as the film’s epigram: “THERE IS STILL TIME.”
Do kids still interact with TV shows like this? I’m old enough at this point not to have an answer, but my sense is that something has shifted; streaming originals, even at their best, carry a whiff of disposability, and even hot-button shows like Euphoria and Riverdale seem to fade once the initial burst of discourse burns off. But even if that moment is well and truly an artifact of the past, I Saw the TV Glow captures its strange wonder with just as much cosmic accuracy as Donnie Darko captured the teenage ‘80s (I regret to inform my fellow Millennials that the gap between TV Glow’s setting and year of release is nearly twice that of Darko’s). For a brief time, it felt like a teenager really could unlock something about themselves and the world around them by huddling up in the dust by the Fruitopia machine and reading plot synopses of some dumb show’s third season for the fifteenth time. That might not make a whole lot of sense to someone raised on TikTok, but ‘90s kids will always remember.
I Saw the TV Glow
2024
dir. Jane Schoenbrun
100 min.
Part of the 2024 Independent Film Festival Boston
Opens Friday, 5/10 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Director Jane Schoenbrun will be in attendance Saturday, 5/11, to accept the 2024 Coolidge Breakthrough Artist Award and conduct a Q&A following the 8:00 screening
