Robert Kojder chats with I Saw the TV Glow writer/director Jane Schoenbrun…
Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun has elevated every aspect of their talent with I Saw the TV Glow, a dread-infused, existential, hypnotic horror tale that, much like their excellent debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, has gender identity allegories at play. It also works as a universal story of isolation, growing up as an outcast the dangers of obsessing over nostalgia, and a surreal, freaky flick blurring the lines of reality and a mysterious TV show the central characters are invested in.
The film is overflowing with much to discuss, whether it be strictly discussing the horror elements, gender identity commentary, phenomenal performances, absorbing filmmaking, the appearance of Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, a reconstruction of the 1990s, and a riff on a monster of the week TV show… these talking points go on forever. I Saw the TV Glow is one of the richest viewing experiences in quite some time and is my favorite film of the year so far.
It is also undeniably a labor of love for Jane Schoenbrun and an indisputably important film (just go read some of the Letterbox’d reviews from people who are discovering themselves through the film, and having their lives changed.) As such, Jane is incredibly thorough with their answers, and I couldn’t have been more grateful. Enjoy the interview below, but more importantly, please take a chance on their singular vision and purchaser ticket to I Saw the TV Glow:
I love this movie. It’s the best I’ve seen so far this year.
Thank you.
RK: It’s already changing people’s lives, but what would you say to anyone experiencing the repression depicted here for someone who has a hard time embracing and being their true self?
When people come up to me after the screenings, and it’s been happening quite a lot actually in talking to me about their own journeys through repression, and speaking about that from various points in the process, whether that be just starting to question their gender or beginning to transition but being very much at the early stages of it when it can feel incredibly daunting, I think my instinct is to first of all just give each person a little hug and try to tell them to be kind to themselves. We, especially people who, for whatever reason, have learned to hold themselves in, tend to be quite hard on ourselves. And we tend to expect more from ourselves than we’re capable of delivering, almost religiously, even in the abstract or from a long distance. From looking at it from far away, people are doing quite impressive things, and I certainly count myself among these.
So much of my own journey to unrepress and work through a lot of internalized transphobia, homophobia, and a lot of things impeding me from being myself… I didn’t love myself, and I’m still in the process of getting there, and I suspect a lot of people are, and I think I understand why it’s easy not to love yourself when you know all of the sort of signals you’re receiving from the world around you is that your true self is something to hide or bottle up. The advice I tend to give people that’s like a blanket would just be to go slow, be kind to yourself, and try slowly to learn how to love yourself.
Your direction here is so confident. It’s one of the most hypnotic films I’ve seen in years. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair had a similar confidence. Where do you think that confidence comes from?
I’ve watched more media than anyone probably should in a life, and I wasn’t just watching it to have fun. Part of having fun for me is studying and I think it always has been. Even when I was a 4-year-old watching TV, I’ve been fascinated not only by what I’m being shown, but why the things that I’m being shown are affecting me. So I think I’ve always been a student of not only storytelling language, but aesthetics, media, emotion, and how the language of light and sound can be used to create experiences.
When I set out to make a film, I’m not just concerned with what the story is that I can deliver to an audience in this random medium that I’m working in. It’s more about what can I do with the language of film that can be expressive specifically because of the language that I’m working within. I always start from that place and try to focus on the medium itself and what can be done with it. Film is just such a versatile medium, so it’s not about logic. It’s about feeling, texture, rhythm, pacing, and sound. Those are just things that I’m sensitive to and love utilizing in the way that an artist utilizes paint on his paintbrush.
I’ve also always been drawn to films that feel like realms more than stories. My favorite films are always the ones that feel, in the same way, that the longer you go without hearing your favorite album, you want to return to the mood of it; the ones that are all-encompassing in some way aesthetically or almost feel like “Remember that dream I had once?” I strive to make films like this, too; to make films that can get deep into one’s subconscious and use, again, the tools of cinema to do that.
The film’s exploration of the dark side of clinging to nostalgia resonated with me as someone tired of nostalgia-pandering in our world. Can you talk about where that idea came from to turn nostalgia into a haunting presence?
I think it’s always come somewhat naturally to me. I feel so haunted by brands of my youth that the impulse, I think, has always existed to want to unmask them for whatever is grotesque underneath them. As a child who grew up surrounded by media and was raised, to a certain degree, by the Burger King playpen, the allure of that artificiality and also its sinister nature was always present for me even before I really understood the political context surrounding it.
As I’ve gone from a nerdy 11-year-old obsessed with TV to a nerdy 37-year-old in a world where all of the people around me seem more and more infantilized by fandom or IP or this longing for a cinematic universe. it’s just struck me as pretty hard at this point to look at that and then look at our nightmare of a country and not see a connection there. The political thinker who’s maybe informed me the most on this subject would be Mark Fisher and his concept of hauntology and his idea that we no longer live in a capitalist reality where the future is something that we’re allowed to imagine, because the future is just so clearly a dead end unless something really radical changes in our structures. So increasingly, we find ourselves trying to burrow into the past, whether that be the 1950s or the 1980s… these times before the slow deterioration of the present really began to sink in.
And I think of my own complicated relationship to nostalgia, understanding its allure, but also finding it quite sinister as, like you said, the darker side of that, the spillage out everything that feels unsustainable about our nostalgia culture.
There are lovely moments with Maddy explaining things about The Pink Opaque to Owen in a way that feels real and reminds me of how friends and I would show each other new things back then in the 90s/early 2000s, like a movie or a video game. Can you talk about the memory of a friend or someone getting you hooked on something for the first time?
An exciting moment was when I got to college. I was so excited to get out of my hometown, and one of the things I was most excited about was how it seemed like when I got to college and when I went to school in a city as opposed to going to high school in suburbia, is that there would be other people around who shared my taste in music. Music was such a big way that I distinguished myself from all of the other people around me in my teenage years. Past Napster, but somewhere between Kaza and Limewire in the file-sharing moment when I got to college, there was a server where everyone could share their files with everyone else in the dorm, almost like a peer-to-peer software.
And I remember downloading so much music from the hipster girls across the hall from me and them turning me on to American Football, Cap’n Jazz, and I think that’s where I first discovered the Cote Twins in my freshman year of college, and this huge influx of everyone else’s teenage music now being accessible to me. High school was a huge music moment for me, but college was as well because I felt like it was the first time I was able to fully immerse in the present tense in the kind of art music scene that made me feel like myself.
Brigette Lundy-Paine delivers a phenomenal monologue about being buried alive. I don’t want to say too much about it, but can you talk about what it was like directing them through that intense sequence and what it took to get it right?
They did the lion’s share of the work there. They were preparing for that specific moment in the film for literally a year, reciting that monologue to themselves every day like a mantra. They worked in private on it for a long, long time before they presented it to me. And then we worked together for a number of weeks ahead of production on it and nailing the tone. We watched Liquid Sky together, which has a great monologue that was like a pseudo inspiration for it. I showed them old interviews with Chan Marshall from Cat Power who had an inflection that I wanted them to have in their mind. Then the aesthetics of the scene obviously were a huge part of it, and finding the right inflatable planetarium was a big part of the job.
Working with DP Eric Yue and Emma Portner was a big part of that scene. Emma is a dancer and choreographer who plays a lot of the monsters in the movie. They moonlit as a movement consultant that day, in ways that on-screen play is very, very simple, but really, really landed the scene. That crawl that Brigette does at the end of the scene is something that they worked on with Emma. We went in a lot of different directions. It was the thing that Eric and I left to last because it felt so delicate and so hard to crack in terms of the visual language.
Early on I had always imagined it as one take. Then Eric and I like watching Jami music videos and thinking deeply about choreography and the monologue’s emotional arc; the emotional arc of the words could mirror the emotional arc of the camera movement there. It was one of the most exhausting but cathartic days I’ve ever had. Bringing that to life and seeing the level to which Brigette was sort of able to tap into something pretty primal in that moment was really moving for me.
It’s my favorite scene in the movie. As someone who grew up listening to Limp Bizkit, can you talk about what Fred Durst was like on set and how he got involved?
He was a mensch, so sweet, and a cinephile. Within like three minutes of getting on a Zoom call with him, we were talking about Paris, Texas. He was telling me stories about hanging out with Harry Dean Stanton in the 90s, and I think at one point he told me that he started Limp Bizkit so that he could direct music videos for the band, and he’s a lover of film. He’s a great performer and very much not like the guy who spends most of his time in his trailer and only comes out for his scenes. He hung out and was an incredibly warm and professional presence on set. He is really sensitive; I think a lot of the anger that comes out in his music is his own way of reflecting on a lot of his sensitivity in a strange way.
I loved the idea of Fred as an emblem of something; he’s a great performer, but there’s also something about the cultural context of it being Fred Durst who’s glaring at Owen from the couch that, if it was just any face, even if it was a face that looked like an angry dad, there’s a specific resonance that it takes on when it is Fred Durst.
That’s what went through my mind.
Yeah, tapping into that was important to me, and he just took it really seriously and was a wonderful collaborator.
That’s awesome. Those are such thoughtful answers. Thank you so much for your time. The movie’s incredible.
Thank you, Robert.
Many thanks to Jane Schoenbrun for taking the time for this interview. Read our ★★★★★ review of I Saw The TV Glow here.
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com.
