“I wasn’t a child of arthouse cinema. I was a child of television”: Jane Schoenbrun on I Saw the TV Glow

With I Saw the TV Glow, director Jane Schoenbrun has crafted a cult hit from a love of cult media. Their first feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, about a young teen participating in an online role-playing horror game, was a sublimely creepy exploration of what it was like to grow up on the internet. Now, they’ve made a film about spending adolescence glued to a cathode-ray TV screen, searching for escape from an ill-fitting identity. Maddy and Owen, the dejected 1990s suburban teens of I Saw the TV Glow, bond over their shared obsession with The Pink Opaque, a supernatural teen show-within-the-film that’s constructed from Schoenbrun’s memories of 1990s TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1990) and The X-Files (1993-2002). 

It’s a film about the transcendent possibilities of fandom, when reality and fantasy blur, and what happens when, as Schoenbrun puts it, a person like Owen is “drained of the possibility of fiction, trapped in the identity of normative reality”. Though it only recently arrived in cinemas, the film has already built up a fandom of its own – ‘Janeheads’ have hosted 1990s-themed I Saw the TV Glow parties, another designed their own VHS cover for the film. And as a filmmaker who is active on social media, Schoenbrun has been engaging with that fandom in real-time, as participant and creator.

Zoom interviews are never ideal, but it felt strangely appropriate to speak with Schoenbrun through a screen, ahead of I Saw the TV Glow’s release, where the director shared their thoughts on the affirming nature of fandom, early critical responses to the film, and plans for the third instalment in their ‘screen trilogy’. 

What has it been like following responses to the film on social media?

Obviously, like all of us, I think about leaving social media for my mental health constantly. But I do think there is something really interesting about sort of demystifying myself as the auteur. While I probably have thought about I Saw the TV Glow more than anyone else in the world, I am still just as fallible and insufficient as any single audience member engaging with a piece of art. There is something interesting about being honest about process and being honest about intention, to a degree, and leaving a lot of room for people to make the piece of work their own. Also I like making little jokes. Twitter, unfortunately, is a very good medium for this. 

Given the film is about the affirming nature and potential destructiveness of fandom, what is it like for you, now the film has a fandom of its own? Does it feed into the work?

I think it feeds into everything in that it’s a strange form of art making, and it’s not one that I participate in without self reflection, but it’s also what I first fell in love with, in terms of making art and fiction. I wasn’t a child of arthouse cinema. I wasn’t a child of novels. I was a child of television, and of the video store and of the early internet. I was on forums for The X Files and Buffy message boards. It’s a language that I live in and breathe as much as Martin Scorsese lives and breathes classic Hollywood. Does that mean that I am participating in it just to continue that same process? Not necessarily. I think that the work is self reflective of these notions of fandom, but is also trying to speak in a deeply personal way to people who want to engage with work on that level. It’s maybe more postmodern and more self-aware of the loneliness inherent in fandom and the insufficiency inherent in fandom. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not also using that form to make something. 

In a recent tweet, you noted that cis and trans critics had different initial reactions to the film. Were you surprised by those reactions?

I wasn’t surprised by the different reactions. I think at first I was fascinated by the discourse around the film. When you make a movie about something that there isn’t necessarily a lot of articulate cultural language to express, and the response to that movie, from a large audience – in this case of queer people – is, ‘oh, my God, this is expressing something that is so deep and personal to me that I’ve never been able to put into words before’. But then the other response from just as large an audience is, ‘what is this? this was just so boring’. That’s an interesting situation. I think as an artist, you can’t help but be proud of unearthing something that’s seemingly invisible in this way – invisible in the sense that so many people relate to it so viscerally. And just as many people don’t.

You also spoke about not wanting fans to gatekeep those reactions…

Being able to play a role in an evolving cultural conversation about the language through which we understand transness was, I thought, very productive. But that’s not the same thing as saying the film is about one thing, and one thing only, and every other read of it, or every other nuance of it, is invalid. And I don’t think it had got to that point, but I could sort of feel people being annoyed by the fanbase a little bit. You know, I’m a serious artist, you don’t want your work to be associated with being annoying. Although it’s probably unavoidable because I feel like most people, at least in America, just think trans people with our pronouns etc, are annoying. But I really didn’t want the conversation to become ‘here’s what this movie is. And if you didn’t understand this, you’re wrong’. That’s not the kind of art that I like, and that’s not the kind of art that I want to make. 

How do you feel about the label of trans cinema generally, and being positioned as a leading voice within it? I often wonder if that’s a term directors are happy to identify with, or if there’s a danger of approaching trans experience as a monolith.  

I think that if it becomes a monolithic understanding of my work in general, as a human being and an artist, it becomes problematic. And it becomes potentially ghettoising and stifling, and positions the work in, in some kind of minority bucket, right? Christopher Nolan never has to deal with his work being positioned as cis or straight white male filmmaking, it’s just filmmaking. And no artist wants to be known just for their identity, but at the same time, transness is not just an identity, it is a state of being and a perspective and a gaze on the world and one that is so intrinsic to my life. The reason that I didn’t stay in the closet or stay repressed is because I wanted to become, I needed to become, to fully exist in the world. And so the work is going to be reflective of that gaze and that desire… 

I stand on this generational divide between Millennials, which is my generation, who I don’t really relate to, they’re very binary and have essentialist views on gender. And then Gen Z, their understanding and language around gender is so much deeper, and I think more evolved, than my own generation. In that cultural reckoning, this evolution of understanding is incredibly important. To be involved in that culturally as an artist is exciting. But no, you don’t want it to become like pigeonholing. 

Your narrative feature debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was so immersed in the online world. What made you want to shift things back further in I Saw the TV Glow, to a 1990s era of print episode guides and VHS tapes?

The internet in that movie is this dreamy mix of more contemporary online spaces and the internet of my youth, which was the internet of Buffy fan forums, The X Files and GeoCities websites. So in a strange way, I think that both films are reflecting backwards on this late 1990s period, which was a time when I was a lonely queer kid who was repressed and spending a lot of time in the basement on the computer after everyone in the house had gone to sleep. I don’t really view it as so different, really, I think is the answer. In the same way that it made sense to make a movie about growing up online, it made sense to make a movie about growing up in front of the television screen. 

I Saw the TV Glow is full of pop culture signifiers, like when Phoebe Bridgers appears on stage in a bar, but it never feels forced. Are such moments led by your tastes?

I assume so. Especially with this film. I think I do a version of this all the time. But the joy of making an art film about 1990s television is that I can just pull the things from 1990s television that I continue to have a bit of an aesthetic fetish for – like the live band playing at the local club phenomenon… It’s pulling from the lexicon that I grew up with, and that I studied, without really realising I was studying it at the time. It comes from this place of love, and that’s just a language that comes very naturally to me. But it’s not just nostalgia. It’s not just tribute. It’s not ‘look at my version of this shit I loved when I was a kid’. It’s utilising that love and those tropes to hopefully talk about something a little more ambiguous.

The character Owen is played by Justice Smith from age 14 right into adulthood. Why was it important to cast the film in this way?

Without going too deep into spoiler territory, it’s less an ageing process and more of a deterioration or a suffocation that we’re watching. And so I wanted Justice’s performance, but also just the physicality of the character and the way the character looks, to feel heightened and almost increasingly grotesque.

There’s a point in the film where Owen streams The Pink Opaque as an adult and feels this deep embarrassment. Is that a feeling you remember or recognise?

I think I was always embarrassed of the TV that I loved growing up. I never told anyone about my total obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997-2003], for instance, because it was thought of as a show for girls. And that was a signal that I didn’t need, I was savvy enough socially to know that I didn’t want that association. I’ve had a lot of internalised shame about it. And yeah, we get older and we look back at reruns of this TV show we thought was so scary and realise it’s just a guy in a latex monster costume. How could that have felt like the whole world to me?

But I think I’m interested in that less as just a phenomenon of ageing, or cheap production value becoming outdated, and more as this emotional evolution from the wonder of childhood. A space where I at least felt much more open to being carried away from the limiting confines of what I had thought of as reality, to a space of late-stage dysphoria, before my egg crack [a term for the realisation one is transgender]. So I think that scene at the end of the film is really trying to talk about a certain kind of shame or being drained of the possibility of fiction, and trapped in the identity of normative reality. I think it’s what’s going on there on its deepest level. 

You’ve just written a novel, Public Access Afterworld. It’s been described as part of a trilogy, along with your last two films. Do you see it that way? 

Very explicitly. There was We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. And then the process of I Saw the TV Glow was burrowing deeper into this thing [of] the screen as a means to talk about identity. I was going through this very tumultuous period of early [gender] transition, and Public Access Afterworld is to me the third and by far the biggest part of that process… It’s very much this epic opus of becoming…  I’ve been describing it as a beach read for intellectuals. Also, it’s also going to be its own trilogy, within a trilogy, forgive me!

► I Saw the TV Glow is in UK cinemas now.