Jane Schoenbrun

7.0 We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021)
7.2 I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

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Jane Schoenbrun (USA, 1987) debuted with the horror movie We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021).

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) is the enigmatic fable of two misfit teens who enter the supernatural world of a horror TV show until they go mad, a story drenched into a surreal atmosphere reminiscent of David Lynch. The film has no ending, which leaves it open to interpretation. The simplest interpretation is that both dysfunctional teens are driven mad by the obsession with that show. The more complex interpretation is that everything happens in the protagonist's head. At a superficial level, it can be viewed as a satirical indictment of TV culture (taking inspiration from the TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", which ran from 1997 to 2003). At a deeper level, it can be viewed as an existential allegory about the search for an identity and a meaning by the most ordinary individuals. In parallel, it embraces styles and attitudes of absurdist theater mixed with the bleak dimension of "descent into madness" melodramas.

In 1996 a teenage boy, Owen, sees commercials about a TV show titled "The Pink Opaque". At a school event he notices a girl, Maddy, who is reading a book titled "The Pink Opaque": the official episode guide. In the evening he talks to her. Owen is in seventh grade. Maddy is in ninth grade. Maddy tells him that the show, a horror show way too scary for most kids, is broadcast every saturday night and that she watches it with her friend Amanda. That's bedtime for Owen. Maddy suggests that he comes up with an excuse. Owen asks his parents to sleep over at his friend Johnny's house. His mom drops him off at Johnny's house and he runs straight to Maddy's home. He meets Amanda. The three of them watch the show. We see only a couple of scenes. Maddy explains that in each episode two teenagers, Isabel and her imaginary best friend Tara (who together form the "Pink Opaque"), use their psychic power to fight a different monster. The monsters are sent by the evil Mr Melancholy, who wants to trap them in the Midnight Realm. Maddy tells Owen that this supernatural show feels more real than real life. In the morning Owen packs his sleeping bag and walks back home. Two years later Owen is in ninth grade. His mother is worried that he seems to be aloof. He asks his parents permission to watch the late-night show and complains that noone else in his grade has a bedtime anymore, but his father is strict. Maddy has been videotaping the show for Owen so he didn't miss any episode. They have been meeting in the "dark room" where she develops her photographs. We see him secretly watching an episode in his bedroom. Maddy tells him that she and Amanda don't talk anymore after Amanda told everybody that Maddy tried to touch her breast. Maddy confesses that she indeed likes girls. Owen doesn't know whether he likes girls or boys: he likes TV shows. Owen asks to watch the show with her and again fakes a sleepover with his parents. After they watch the show, Maddy tells Owen that she's planning to run away and invites him to join her. This causes a shock in Owen. He confesses that he had been pretending to sleep over at Johnny's. Then his mother dies of cancer and a few days later Maddy disappears after burning her TV set and a few days later the show gets canceled.
Eight years later Owen is still a shy boy. He works in a movie theater and the other workers make fun of his introversion. One night he sees a mysterious light, caused by a downed power line, accompanied by a sudden wind. And then he finds pages of the "Pink Opaque" book blowing in the wind. One day he meets Maddy in a supermarket. He hardly recognizes her and she behaves like a zombie. Maddy takes him to a nightclub where a sensual singer (Phoebe Bridgers) is singing a song that begins with "I saw the TV glow". Owen is excited that she's alive and tells her she has to contact the police because everybody thinks she's dead. She doesn't care. She wants to talk about "The Pink Opaque" and insinuates that it was more than a show: it was real life. She has spent the past eight years inside "The Pink Opaque". We then watch Kris Esfandiari sing the "Psychic Wound". She tells Owen to watch again the last episode, in which Mr Melancholy captures Isabel, who has sensed that Tara is asking for help from another dimension, and transports her to the "Midnight Realm" and shows her this Midnight Realm in a crystal sphere, and we see that inside the sphere there is Owen watching the episode. Isabel, poisoned and foaming from the mouth, gets buried while she's still alive. Owen goes crazy after watching this episode and inserts his head into the screen of the TV set. His father rescues him. This is most likely just a dream because we see him leave the house in perfect conditions. Maddy talks about her eight years away but she seems to be alone as Owen is walking into the old high school. She says that at one point she paid a kid to throw dirt into a grave where she had placed herself into a coffin. In other words, she buried herself alive. She delivers her monologue against a background of rotating constellations. She managed to crawl out of the grave and found herself in season six of the TV show (the show was terminated after season five). Maddy claims that they are in the Midnight Realm, trapped by Mr Melancholy, and that she is Tara and he is Isabel. "The Pink Opaque" is the true reality and what they see as reality is an illusion. She wants to bury owen alive, so he can start living as Isabel, but he runs away and locks himself in the house. He decides that she is insane but is still haunted years later by her story. The story is now narrated by Owen. The movie theater closes, his father dies, he throws away the old TV set, he starts a family, he buys a large-screen TV, and one night he finds "The Pink Opaque" on a streaming channel. He is disappointed that the show now looks so silly.
Twenty years later Owen is a middle-aged man with asthma. He attends a birthday party. Suddenly he starts screaming for help, feeling that he is dying. Everybody freezes and nobody speaks as if time is now still. Then we see him in a public bathroom, lying on the floor and cutting his chest with a knife. As he pulls his chest open, he discovers a TV set inside and watches it at the mirror. He then walks around the amusement park where he works, apologizing to people who don't pay attention to him.