I Saw The TV Glow (2024)
Wonderful movie. It gave me an existential crisis.
The second movie by newcomer Jane Schoenbrun, after Everybody's Going to the World's Fair, which I found incredibly boring. TV Glow deals with two teenagers in the 90's bonding over a mystery television series for teens. A boy and a girl, played by Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine respectively, one from an overprotective household, the other one from a negligent one. As they grow up, drift apart and meet again a good while after, they realize that their memories and the content of the television show have become interlinked in mysterious ways.
It's a movie that started off on a note that didn't exactly win me over, much like World's Fair failed to. Dealing mostly with nostalgia and teenage angst, the first of which I never really experienced because the latter never really went away. That said, as the movie went on that became more or less like what it is about. What if your time as a dysfunctional teenager never became the memory it's meant to be, because rather than growing out of it, you just turn into a dysfunctional adult. And what if your only way to contextualize it is finding meaning in the artistic creations that made you who you are. The arc of Justice Smith, or perhaps it's more of a spiral, really hit me.
I dunno. I lost my first real job because I had a panic attack and every subsequent one because my performance wasn't up to standard. Surely it should be obvious to anyone who's seen the movie why the ending hit me pretty hard. It's like... you try to look normal and functional but you realize you're not fooling anyone, not even yourself and you sort of imagine a version of yourself that works right and sort of claw and cut and scratch at yourself to get it out but it doesn't and all that's left is to find meaning in things other people created and the way they reflect off you like, goddamn it, I'm doing right now.
In a sense, Smith and Lundy-Paine seem to be different versions of the same character, just with different outcomes. The latter is left a lot more ambiguous, although on closer analysis it might very well be the bleaker one between the two. There is something very interesting in the way Schoenbrun depicts the show that serves as the medium that connects these two young people. A sort of teen mystery show, some of the footage we see directly references the off-beat Nickelodeon sitcom Pete and Pete. Not to put too fine a point on it, to me it mostly brought to mind some half repressed memories of shows named The Secret World of Alex Mack and So Weird I think I saw a couple of times as a kid. It appears to be the sort of thing that features just enough evocative imagery and and ideas to occupy the mind of a teenager with nothing else in their life. Especially in a time when access to media was more limited.
Past all of its surrealist and postmodernist touches and some rather token feeling lynchian musical sequences, it's a movie about maladjustment, and a very hard hitting one. Jane Schoenbrun is a transwoman... and, well, it's not hard to see how the movie reflects that kind of experience. Especially not in those scenes when the two leads see themselves in the role of the televisions shows two female protagonists. But by all means, it's not only about that kind of experience. This one's for all of the outsiders out there.
All of which is to say, this movie really, really worked for me. Now, as to whether that makes it a great movie on a more objective scale, I'm not entirely sure. A lot of people are going to expect harder hitting payoffs or a less abrupt ending or a sort of more literal treatment of its outwardly abstract elements, that all act as rather straight forward and almost impossible to misunderstand allegory. But I feel it's the sort of thing that either hits you emotionally, or it doesn't. The only other movies that did this for me were Synecdoche, New York and I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Charlie Kaufmann. The latter of which I periodically rewatch, the former of which I don't dare to. Was this as good as either of those? Not quite, but it comes closer than the second movie someone's made has any right to. It left me pretty impressed.
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