A24’s latest film, I Saw the TV Glow is a coming-of-story about teenager influenced by a fictional ‘90s late-night show titled The Pink Opaque. Glow stars queer performers Justice Smith as Owen and Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maddy. Owen and Maddy’s friendship is tested when their television show is canceled and their bond is broken.
Trans writer/director Jane Schoenbrun shot the unique film project on 35mm and VHS. This is a follow-up to Schoenbrunn’s previous work We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and online television series The Eyeslicer.
While in town for the Chicago Critics Film Festival, Schoenbrun met up for a private interview for Windy City Times.
Windy City Times: How was the screening at Music Box Theatre last night?
Jane Schoenbrun: (they/them) I feel like I have been doing Q&As for the last 20 years at this point. We just had a screening in New York and there were a lot of things leading up to it, but for some reason coming out here and seeing it at Music Box was so rejuvenating. I had never been to that theater before. I had just heard about it for years and years, being like a palace. We have a lot of cool movie theaters in New York, but nothing like that.
The first thing I did when I walked in there was make them give me a tour. I went up to the balcony and I was awed by it. I was played in and out by the organist to talk onstage.
It was a packed house and a warm experience. Showing my project at a critics’ festival made sense because it was for people who care deeply about film.
WCT: There’s a parachute game at the beginning of I Saw the TV Glow that I played as a child. Was that something that you did also?
JS: I did do the parachute, and I knew about it through pop culture childhood iconography. What we did do was an inflatable planetarium, and that is in the movie. I have memories from kindergarten when I crawled into a little tube. The workers at the school would inflate a big dome inside the gymnasium and someone would come in and project the stars.
There is a queer lens to think about it through. It is when you are a child in a space that doesn’t feel magical, in the way you are being told it should, then you seek out these places to hide. That might be inside a parachute, a planetarium or a TV show to love.
WCT: With a queer cast how were pronouns addressed on the set of I Saw the TV Glow with crew members?
JS: We all said our pronouns at production meetings, but it was hard. It was hard because making a film at this scale we were working with a lot of unions. I was not hiring my friends necessarily, but instead an intergenerational crew from many different backgrounds. I was stepping into the biggest role of authority on the set as a trans person, so I surrounded myself to a certain degree with trans folks.
I won’t sugarcoat it. It was an intense experience and there were a lot of issues with legibility onset. Beyond legibility, people on the set with power were in fact queer folks and that was challenging. You could feel it in the air that people didn’t know how to deal with that, especially with older men. Those men are the people that are typically with power on sets.
That should be our goal as artists to be able to step on a set and feel completely comfortable. We should be surrounded by people who see us and understand our community in the way I want to be seen and understood. I don’t know if that is possible in 2024 or in a commercial filmmaking landscape.
WCT: Hopefully, things will grow and get better.
JS: I think it is a labor issue as much as anything. I feel it when I do press or pitch new work and try to navigate the industry and Hollywood. There are queer people certainly, but there aren’t trans people in any position of authority.
I worked with a great queer person that was on sound for my first film. I wanted her to be head of the sound department and she wasn’t in the union so we couldn’t hire her for that position. I told my producers I wanted to interview at least one person who wasn’t a white man for the sound. They were not able to produce a candidate because there wasn’t one in the union in New York.
Hopefully, it will get better. Whether is heteronormativity or misogyny, it is quite entrenched in the structures I am working within, especially in transness. To be trans and exist in spaces where we are not treated fairly is exhausting by the hour, if not the minute. I do worry about if trans folks can acclimate to those environments so they can exist in positions of power.
I hope that it happens, but I am also skeptical and try to be outspoken in the ways that it’s challenging.
WCT: What is The Pink Opaque based on?
JS: It is a loose amalgamation of lots of ‘90s stuff that I loved. The primary reference is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This was the golden era of teenage girls finding monsters and saving the world. I grew up in love with those TV shows. I Saw the TV Glow is my spin on that genre.
WCT: Did you consider The Pink Opaque to be the title of the movie?
JS: Yeah, but I really loved the name I Saw the TV Glow. It seemed more in the realm of what my movie was as opposed to the TV show within the movie.
WCT: Your film made me think about how genders were very separate on television shows in the past like Facts of Life and many others.
JS: I am far from the first person to point out the way we are socialized and seen through the media, advertising and in films. People are gendered through culture. We learn about gender and what is expected of us largely on television.
In the case of someone like me, I didn’t feel quite right in a boy’s role. I gravitated towards things that were more girlie. That felt quite natural, but it also felt wrong or felt like I was crossing an invisible boundary that I had been fed signals to never cross.
That is what the film is speaking about. I was told Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a show for girls and I loved it dearly, but I also didn’t want people to know that I loved it.
WCT: What does the tattoo on the back of the neck signify for the characters?
JS: It’s a ghost with glasses. In the same way that Harry Potter has a lightning bolt scar on his forehead, there’s an easy trope to signify that someone is special with that tattoo as part of their destiny. On one level it is playing off of that, but in The Pink Opaque, the queer coding is subtle.
The characters often talk about feeling different than everybody else around them. They use the word “destiny” a lot. What they are talking about on there is an otherness that I was not subtle about.
The ghost with glasses came to me pretty late in the process as we were getting ready to prep. I came to realize the ghost was a pre-transition me and the tender version of me that I was trying to commune with while making this film.
WCT: Thank you for sharing that. Is the moon man in Glow from The Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness?
JS: Yes and also A Trip to the Moon, George Melies’ short film that students watch in film school. It is a very famous early silent film. The Smashing Pumpkins made the “Tonight, Tonight” video and adapted it into their teen angst fairytale album. I loved that record when I was a teenager and I think that’s because it was a world much like Nickelodeon on Saturday nights when it was SNICK (Saturday Night Nickelodeon).
All of these shows and that record brought me somewhere else. It was an early reference point in conceiving I Saw the TV Glow. I wanted to conjure something that was within that realm and it nailed the tone of my film.
WCT: What would you like people to take away from I Saw the TV Glow?
JS: I am a trans filmmaker who is trying hard to make movies that aren’t too worried about representation in an external sense or not translating the trans experience for the benefit of mainstream cis audiences. I am not trying to say that trans people are like everyone else.
I am making trans films from being inside it and in a way that feels honest. It may be surprising to people who haven’t been through that experience. It is important to me that the film expands a pop cultural language of what is and isn’t queer and trans work.
I hope the film can exist in a continuum and lineage that continues to be articulated and illuminated by other trans voices. I am incredibly proud of the film as a queer and trans form of expression.
WCT: What are you working on next?
JS: A few things. I wrote a novel last year, so I am very excited about that. It is my swing at a fantasy epic.
I grew up with the TV shows that Glow is ripping on and I want a world built like that. Being able to do that on the page with complete control without having to think about bringing it to Hollywood was such a beautiful experience. It’s called Public Access Afterworld and it’s a wild ride!
I have a new movie that I would like to shoot within a year called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. It’s an exploration of the teen sleepaway camp slasher genre and all of the gender trouble inherent in it from Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill. A tale of the final girl being pursued by a killer has always seemed to me to be preoccupied with gender in ways that it doesn’t understand itself. It feels like a way to talk about my coming into myself.
I Saw the TV Glow is now playing in Chicago.