‘I Saw The TV Glow’: Defying The ‘Marvel Hegemony’
Jane Schoenbrun, the transfeminine director of “I Saw The TV Glow,” understands the tough landscape for independent filmmakers working in Hollywood, and their latest film is fascinating because it demonstrates a willingness to struggle for creative freedom in an industry that settles for franchises, reboots, remakes, and biopics.
In a conversation with director Richard Kelly, known for “Donnie Darko” (2001), Schoenbrun told Kelly, “I hope that my film can serve as an example, not just to people in my community making more honest work as trans folks, but as proof in the last gasps of the Marvel hegemony that we can make some really cool, new, personal things if artists were trusted a little bit more to do that.”
Making films that reinvent how audiences perceive narratives in film is risky for an up-and-coming filmmaker, especially given their trans identity.
“If there are only a few trans film-makers working in any kind of a space that touches Hollywood, there are even less people on the other side of the table, who are trans,” Schoenbrun said in an interview for The Guardian. “There are just not any trans people in any kind of position of power.”
“This is a language barrier, and the things in my films that might appear incorrect or impenetrable to this audience who has the power to give me a green light, are the exact things that are going to resonate to me and my community. And doing that work is crazy,” Schoenbrun added.
“I Saw The TV Glow” revolves around two characters, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a lesbian, and Owen (Justice Smith), who is sexually confused. Both cope with issues of identity and difficult home lives by watching a popular adult television show called “The Pink Opaque.”
The world of superheroes fighting evil monsters each week “sometimes feels more real than real life,” according to Maddy. It opens Maddy’s mind to the possibility of a better life outside of suburbia, and that desire convinces her to runaway from home. And then, “The Pink Opaque” is canceled.
Owen can rewatch episodes that Maddy recorded for him on VHS tapes, but he will never find the closure that he seeks from his most favorite show. He must mature into an adult and accept who he is, and the person he wants to be in life, on his own.
Maddy and Owen seem to be metaphorical characters, with Maddy representing someone with the teenage confidence to embrace their queerness and Owen representing someone who takes much, much longer to accept their gender identity or sexual orientation.
When Maddy asks Owen, “Are you sure it’s just a TV show?” it is easy to interpret this question as a sign that they can no longer separate fantasy from reality and a comment on fandom or how millennials obsessively consume media. But Maddy may also be alerting Owen to the fact that “The Pink Opaque” can be his gateway to unapologetically living life as a queer person, too.
“I think a lot of American entertainment, its primary goal is to satisfy in a very shallow and short-term way,” Schoenbrun said to Kelly. “To give you an experience that feels like spectacle, or feels relaxing and satisfying enough immediately that you can then go on with your life and see the next thing that’s going to satisfy you.”
Schoenbrun intentionally defied popular conventions by depicting snap shots in the life of Owen instead of crafting much of a plot and making Owen a confounding and unsettling character, who would not easily satisfy audiences.
Owen, according to an interview Schoenbrun did for Polygon, is supposed to be a character that trans people can relate to on a “deeply visceral level.” The “passivity” that he displays is part of challenging what we could broadly refer to as the Marvel hegemony. It forces us to confront our own “ideas about what proper narrative or progress” is for a character in a movie.
The phantasmagorical imagery in the film is designed to jar viewers and linger after the credits. If the meaning of what’s on screen feels indecipherable, then at the very least one may step back and consider the audacious vision behind “I Saw The TV Glow.”
Television and movies that influenced Schoenbrun were part of the cultural zeitgeist of the 1990s. They pay homage to “The X-Files,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “early Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky films,” which taught them about “cinematic storytelling.”
Coming of age, Schoenbrun felt like they were living with a “feeling of unreality” and longed for a “liminal, dreamlike space,” where the world would no longer limit their existence. “So the film language that I’m indebted to in my work and that I’m trying to use to express something of my own experience is very much about liminality and body horror and shimmer and the aesthetic of haze,” they shared with The Guardian.
Entertainment executives invested in maintaining the Marvel hegemony treat representation as a way of enticing a range of potential moviegoers from disparate groups to buy theatre tickets or subscribe to streaming services. This is far from liberating to Schoenbrun.
“Who is the audience that is for? I’m not sure that it’s for me, and trans people,” Schoenbrun contended in an interview for Polygon. “We know we exist, you know? It’s for some kind of imagined idea of equality that will never actually exist, because we live in, like, a fundamentally evil, white-supremacist, capitalist hellscape,”
“But the idea of art creating possibility — or putting language to possibility — that previously felt either undefined or unimaginable feels to me like a form of representation, if you could even still call it that, that I could get behind.”
“The idea of, like, a queer coming of age as something that’s inherently about creating unrealized or previously unrealized possibility, both on a personal and political level, and a piece of art that is speaking very honestly and personally about everything, that’s both liberatory and terrifying and difficult about that. I’m proud to have made that,” Schoenbrun concluded.
Cinema is fortunate to have an emerging artist like Schoenbrun, who can simultaneously diagnose what ails filmmaking while creating movies that serve as examples of how a filmmaker can successfully break the mold. (They also just have an infectious passion for film.)
At one point, Schoenbrun features “Claw Machine,” a musical interlude by Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers that punctuates the despairing and isolated mood. They sing, “I paint the ceiling black so I don’t notice when my eyes are open.” It is one of the movie’s most gutting statements.
Seeking refuge in entertainment unquestionably appeals to those living in a world that stigmatizes and attempts to legislate them out of existence. But there is a transcendent nature to “I Saw The TV Glow” that manifests because of the malaise that millennials and younger generations must confront in their lives.
Both Maddy and Owen are working class characters, and their experiences point to a limited future, where they are unlikely to achieve the so-called American Dream. That only compounds their struggles with their queerness.
Schoenbrun’s “I Saw The TV Glow” tells us that rewatching our favorite childhood movies and TV shows is unlikely to fill the void eating away at us. And yet, the acute sense of powerlessness that we feel when confronting late-stage capitalism and growing climate catastrophe inevitably means that we probably will still try to return to worlds of bygone eras—if we have not already.
