I Saw the TV Glow (2024, Schoenbrun)

Good, but frustratingly close to being really good and occasionally great which makes the fact that it is merely good all the more disappointing. Schoenbrun has a vision, and commands exceptional control of color in their frames. They have big ideas, and a clear affection for the forgotten (and lost, the two are distinct) media of the 90s and early 2000s. (Clarissa Explains it All, anyone?) It's a victory that IStTVG pays passionate homage to media and brands that were pervasive at the time and have all but disappeared from the public consciousness while refusing to resort to nostalgia mongering. A difficult line to toe, to be sure.

Yet this toeing of the line leads to long stretches that are too subtle--too self-conscious--to bring all Schoenbrun's disparate ideas together. IStTVG wants to be about Suburbia, and The 90s, and trans identity, but it's really only effective at being about one of those things--the horror of refusing to accept who you really are inside, and the role media can play in awakening these feelings. The colors are (literally) shown in the opening moments, with our protagonist Owen wandering around inside one of those parachutes gym teachers used to trot out on slow days in P.E., distinctly hued to resemble the Transgender flag. Brilliant visual storytelling--we're told exactly what to expect for the next hundred minutes.

Schoenbrun loses sight of this mission very quickly, or at least sufficiently obfuscates it so I was left wondering where we were going. Thought, for a while, what on are people smoking when they call this Lynchian? It's barely Arcade Fire. Yes, it's the 90s, and yes this is set in the suburbs, but there's very little trenchant observation, or emotion, connected to these things. We're just there, hanging out, with an awareness that we're hanging out in the 90s. However! At almost exactly the halfway point, Schoenbrun takes us to a bar at the outskirts of town that closely resembles Twin Peaks's Roadhouse and treats us to two(!) musical interludes even more closely resembling the outros of Lynch's The Return. Ah, we got there. Took too long, but we got there.

What follows is basically what I bought a ticket for: hallucinatory blurring between media and reality, grotesque renderings of the refusal to accept said reality, and shots of sickening neon that blanket much of the America's mass produced infrastructure. Yet through it all I couldn't shake the feeling that for a movie so boisterously about being yourself, IStTVG feels awfully preoccupied with its own sense of cool, its fear that if it got too sincere or too strange it would lose us--and that's exactly what lost me. Remove the quotation marks, add some more weird shit, and you've got something really special here. Something resembling, I don't know, The Pink Opaque, the TV show that may or may not be the source of our characters' true reality (it is). Schoenbrun is so close to breaking the ice, though--give them one more, and they may just do it.

P.S. - Features an exceptional Conner O'Malley jumpscare, equal parts funny and frightening.