I Saw the TV Glow, a sensory UFO (review)
By merging the worlds of Cronenberg and Lynch in a story of identity, Jane Schoenbrun gives birth to a film as strange as it is captivating, presented in the American Competition of the Champs Élysées Film Festival this year.
Shy, simple and lonely, Owen (Justice Smith) leads a life of bland banality. Until the day he meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a few years his senior and who introduced him to the best way to escape this gloomy reality: television. And more particularly, The Pink Opaque, a “buffyesque” series broadcast every Saturday night on the youth channel. Its heroines are Tara and Isabel, two teenagers connected by thought who, together, must fight an evil enemy by the name of Mr. Melancoly, and his henchmen sent to Earth. (Netflix would have its next success there if it reproduced this series). Owen and Maddy become totally addicted to their adventures but when the show is cancelled and Maddy suddenly disappears, a series of strange phenomena will come to shake up their daily lives, gradually blurring the line between reality and fiction like a snowy screen on a television.
A hand coming out of a screen, a body entering it, David Cronenberg had already patented the concept in Videodromebut Jane Schoenbrun takes it even further by adding a plot punctuated by twists and turns that are as enigmatic as they are symbolic. To tell you more would be to spoil the experience. Could Cronenberg have imagined a character scalping himself and discovering in his being nothing but a troubled screen? Or that our world is in reality the continuation of a fiction in which the protagonists would be trapped? In this universe that also evokes the cinema of David Lynch and where the serial characters seem to find their origin in Méliès or in old seriesI Saw the TV Glow makes supernatural science fiction a tool for staging and questioning around oneself.
“I know there’s something wrong with me – my parents know it too, even if they don’t say anything.” Justice Smith very accurately manages to convey all the embarrassment of his character: he doesn’t seem to know what he likes, apart from television, nor what he is. He doesn’t belong anywhere except in front of a screen, and admits on several occasions to feeling empty, perhaps even living in someone else’s body. Or more precisely… someone else’s. Because Owen is Tara and Maddy is Isabel! And it is by killing the host bodies that their true identities awaken, going beyond the reality/fiction dichotomy of Owen/Tara, to an allegory of trans identity that Jane Schoenbrun, a trans and non-binary filmmaker, depicts and highlights under purple, blue and pink neon lights, in the manner of her first feature film We’re All Going to the World’s Fairremained unpublished in French cinemas.
Impossible to skip ahead I Saw the TV Glow. Immediately intrigued by this sensory UFO produced by Emma Stone, we let ourselves be carried away, guided by a story that breaks the fourth wall and by a mystery that will remain partly intact even after its final image. Let’s hope he can find his way to the room one day.
By Jane Schoenbrun. With Justice Smith, Phoebe Bridgers, Fred Durst… Duration: 1h40. Release date unknown.
