In Some Manner a Horror Film

Placing TV Glow at the top of his list of the twenty-two best films of the year in Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson writes that “Schoenbrun’s sad, searing memory piece is in some manner a horror film, in others a somber and devastating drama of identity featuring intensely engaging performances from Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine. Full of metaphor and allusion, I Saw the TV Glow is on its face a reconsideration of Schoenbrun’s television-obsessed teenage years—those Buffy and Charmed and Are You Afraid of the Dark? days enjoyed by so many millennials. But in all that decidedly abstract pop culture referencing, Schoenbrun unearths something else: a picture of the trans experience that is as urgent and empathetic as it is sorrowful.”

“TV Glow’s meditation on media fandom as an unstable lifeline for queer adolescents is a tragic portrait of potentialities never-quite-reached,” writes Payton McCarty-Simas in the Brooklyn Rail. “Queer self-identification, as Kathryn Bond Stockton writes in her book The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, is frequently treated as a form of social death by the straight world: defining oneself as having been a ‘gay child,’ a label that until recently was almost always chosen in retrospect, ‘is a gravestone marker for where or when one’s straight life died.’ The queer child, then, becomes a ghost, a hazy non-being divorced from linear notions of heterosexual growing up. As such, TV Glow becomes an unearthly requiem for the terrifying period of uncertainty that precedes either this death or its foreclosure, itself presented as a form of metaphysical suicide.”

The “dreaminess” in TV Glow is “ever-present, making Owen [Smith] and Maddy [Lundy-Paine] feel like ghosts walking through a haze, practically the only characters who feel like real human beings living in a fake world,” writes Juan Barquin in Reverse Shot. “This hypnotic state comes less from its reference points (including Lynch, Araki, and Assayas) than the way that Schoenbrun makes the mere notion of existence full of dread . . . It’s rare to witness a work so drenched in the understanding of the trans experience and, more specifically, about the way ignoring one’s identity and reality will inevitably eat away at one’s core. Though the word is never explicitly said, every bit of I Saw the TV Glow feels designed as a metaphor for dysphoria.”

In FQ, Benson-Allott, the author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television, suggests that “to truly appreciate the trans and queer world-building of I Saw the TV Glow, one must see it in the context of Schoenbrun’s earlier features, which also celebrate the life-giving and community-generating power of horror media. Collectively, A Self-Induced Hallucination [2018], We’re All Going to the World’s Fair [2021], and I Saw the TV Glow demonstrate three fundamental truths about horror media, horror fandom, and their utility: (1) Horror creates community; (2) Horror provides a means of processing reality; and (3) Horror helps its fans manage the difficulty of self-discovery. Schoenbrun’s films extol horror’s life-affirming functions, which are often overlooked in critiques of its morbidity and pathologizations of its fans.”