This interview originally ran on January 18, 2024. I Saw the TV Glow is now streaming on Max.
Jane Schoenbrun used to list to themselves the titles of every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to fall asleep at night. Anyone who has spent time thinking about Buffy Summers and Sunnydale will recognize their influence on Schoenbrun’s new film, I Saw the TV Glow, premiering at Sundance on Thursday. The writer-director’s latest is not so much an homage to the beloved teen drama, though, as it is to the adolescent obsession one could have with its world. What results is a haunting meditation about how thin the line between fiction and truth can become when you’re in search of self.
I Saw the TV Glow feels like a natural outgrowth of Schoenbrun’s earlier Sundance effort, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which captured the unnerving zeal of a teen’s fascination with an internet Creepypasta challenge. But their second feature is also a product of their experience with gender transition. “When I started the screenplay for this, I had been on hormones for about a year and I was still very much in this early stage, which in my experience and I believe a lot of others, is a pretty intense and specific moment,” they say. “You’re sort of dealing with a lot of the bad without much of the good yet, the sort of immediate aftermath of blowing up your entire sense of reality and existence.”
The film stars Justice Smith as Owen, a reserved kid in the 1990s whose mind is blown when a slightly older teen Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) introduces him to The Pink Opaque, a Buffy-esque young-adult TV show about two girls who realize they are psychically connected and begin fighting the forces of evil together, with tattoos of ghosts glowing on the back of their necks when their powers come alive. The Pink Opaque initially serves as a refuge for Owen, who has a tenuous grasp on his own identity, but its hold on him warps into something more threatening when elements of its narrative begin seeping into his universe.
Schoenbrun infused I Saw the TV Glow with a lot of their own sometimes life-saving cultural fixations, among them music. Now aligned with A24, which snapped up Schoenbrun after the buzz of World’s Fair (and will release I Saw the TV Glow in theaters later this year), the director had the resources to make their teenage dreams come true. There’s a sequence in this film featuring numbers from Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers that echoes certain Buffy scenes where the action paused for live performances at the Bronze, a fictional music venue frequented by the show’s characters. Here, the place is called the Double Lunch. But Schoenbrun also went beyond what you see onscreen, commissioning 16 original songs by mostly queer artists for what they hope is a “banger soundtrack.” To illustrate the kind of sound the musicians should evoke, Schoenbrun made mixes for them and said, “I want you to write the song you would have played if you had shown up on Buffy in season three.”
Owen and Maddy live with bickering, suffering parents in a claustrophobic suburbia dotted with ’90s signifiers like Fruitopia vending machines. The depressing stupor of their real lives contrasts vividly with clips from The Pink Opaque, and the supernatural adventures of its heroines Isabel (Helena Howard) and Tara (Lindsey Jordan, a.k.a. the singer-songwriter Snail Mail) — the latter named after a Buffy character. Like the WB drama, The Pink Opaque features goofy-looking monsters brought to life with practical effects. But the show-within-a-movie is also gorgeous in a strange way, combining the fuzzy feel of ’90s television with arthouse surrealism. “I remember describing it to people early on as: I want to take a latex monster from Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark? and frame it beautifully in like a Gregory Crewdson portrait,” they say. All together, the show evokes a delirious stew of moods, the kind that would understandably become a fixation for someone like Owen.
Staying up past their bedtime in their parents’ basement to watch the likes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? was the first time Schoenbrun remembers falling in love with storytelling and images. “The older I got and the more I found myself clinging to those fictional worlds, the more the desperation of it maybe started to reveal itself,” they say. Still, the director’s aim is neither to dwell on nor distance themselves from that desperation. “I hope this is multilayered. And I hope this is not a film about how great it is to be a TV fan and also not a film about why TV sucks. It’s a film about being lonely and looking for something that feels like real life.”
If Buffy was the primary inspiration for Schoenbrun, a “mild inspiration” was a recurring dream they had from around age 12 until Twin Peaks: The Return aired in 2017. The dream centered around the ending of the original run of the David Lynch series, in which Kyle McLachlan’s Dale Cooper grins at the camera, face splattered with blood, and asks, “How’s Annie?” Schoenbrun remembers feeling almost “assaulted” by that ending. “There was something horrible unresolved in my subconscious.” Exploring how a moment like that can live inside one’s brain, mutating independently from the art where it originated, intrigued the director.
I Saw the TV Glow evokes some of Twin Peaks’ dreamlike Lynchian terror as Owen and Maddy’s both come to rely on The Pink Opaque as a sort of salvation. In Smith and Lundy-Paine, Schoenbrun enlisted two queer actors on the rise. Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, however, was Schoenbrun’s “white whale” of a casting coup to play Owen’s judgmental father. Schoenbrun has been a fan of Limp Bizkit and other nü-metal bands for years, relating to their lyrics about being outsiders. Before meeting with him, Schoenbrun went to a concert where they felt “a little scared as a trans girl” — and then got on a Zoom with Fred, where they realized the singer is a true cinephile and got to chatting about Lynch and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas.
Music like Limp Bizkit’s is like a “Rosetta stone for understanding our current white-male moment,” Schoenbrun explains. To have Durst in the role of Owen’s restrictive father was significant, as that character represents an oppressiveness and pressure to conform. “It felt generative for Fred Durst to be in the mix and glaring at Owen from a couch because I think that glare means something very specific when it’s Fred Durst glaring,” Schoenbrun says.
But perhaps there is no appearance more impactful in the film than the brief cameo by Amber Benson, who played the tragically fated Tara on Buffy and who shows up here as the mother of one of Owen’s schoolmates. As a lesbian character, Tara symbolized Buffy’s own complicated relationship to queerness, so it was especially meaningful to Schoenbrun for Benson to be involved. Her presence on set felt healing in a way, they explain. “I got the keys to a certain kind of sandbox and 16-year-old me, I think, would be really proud of what I did.”