Consequence’s Annual Report continues as we interview Jane Schoenbrun, our Filmmaker of the Year for their film I Saw the TV Glow, our favorite movie of 2024. You can watch a selection of the idea above or via YouTube, and hear the full conversation on the latest episode of our Consequence UNCUT: Annual Report podcast, available exclusively on Amazon Music.
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Horror movies and coming-of-age stories make up two sides of the same coin. Both rip the world open to let unruly new realities in; both force their protagonists beyond the bounds of what’s supposed to be possible. I Saw the TV Glow, the second feature film from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun — Consequence’s 2024 Filmmaker of the Year — collapses those two genres onto the same face, subverting their well-worn tropes while plumbing their simmering emotional potential. It’s the most expressive movie about repression you’re likely to see for a long time, and a deep, passionate excavation of the way a television screen can be an incubator for nascent queer identity.
Like Schoenbrun’s 2021 debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair — a slow-burning horror tale about an isolated teenager playing an online alternate reality game — it’s easier to talk about what doesn’t happen in TV Glow than what does. It’s a queer coming-of-age story where no one comes of age; no one accepts who they really are; no one climbs into their own skin. It’s a horror story where the monsters inside the TV are alive and it doesn’t matter — they never threaten the suburban idyll into which they emerge, no matter how much the story’s characters wish they might.
The movie’s plot is not its engine; Schoenbrun’s vivid, sensual gaze instead speaks the language of unspeakable dreams, breathing life into those nightmares that swarm behind the eyelids of kids who can’t find a way to become who they are. Written while Schoenbrun was beginning their own gender transition, TV Glow peers into the psychic hinterlands of pre-trans existence: that place where thwarted desire eats you alive. Speaking over a Zoom call from their Brooklyn home, Schoenbrun admits they steeled themself for how a broader audience might receive such a striking and personal story.
“The only reason I had any confidence that TV Glow would have an impact was because I was completely astonished by the fact that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair reached as many people as it did,” they say. “Seeing people have really emotional responses to the interiority the film is trying to discuss was really moving and shocking to me, and sort of this proof case of, like, ‘All right, if I do a lot of really deep digging and try to say the unspoken things through cinematic language, people will pick that signal up.’ I went into TV Glow with an understanding that that was the goal more explicitly. I knew that once the movie was done and A24 released it, I would probably need to brace for impact. But I was really careful with my process to not let that intrude.”
Set largely in the textural wonderland of the late 1990s, TV Glow watches Owen, a socially bewildered high schooler played with virtuosic awkwardness by Justice Smith, as he strikes up a friendship with Maddy, a sardonic lesbian two years his senior played by Brigette Lundy-Paine. They bond over their shared fascination with a supernatural-mystery TV show called The Pink Opaque — a Buffy-meets-X-Files-on-Nickelodeon story where two teen girls astral-project away from their boring suburban lives to fight cartoony demons on the psychic plane.
The Pink Opaque envelops Owen and Maddy. Their lives don’t make sense to them; the show does. Sitting together in front of the TV, the two teens forge an intimacy they only barely understand: a friendship alloyed by their shared alienation and the strangely compelling symbols that beam out to them from the screen.
