I Saw The TV Glow – Berlinale Review

Mad Hatter: In the gardens of memory, in the palace of dreams, that is where you and I will meet
Alice: But a dream isn’t reality…
Mad Hatter: Who’s to say which is which?

I Saw The TV Glow is director Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up feature to their dreamy, unnerving micro-budgeted We’re All Going To The World’s Fair. It’s another voyage into the way niche media can inspire, mediate and possibly endanger young people’s budding sense of selfhood. There’s no slump here from Schoenbrun, who delivers an emotional powder keg built from the memories and dreams of late 90s tv – Buffy, Eerie Indiana, Twin Peaks, and The Adventures of Pete and Pete.

Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine star as two friends, Owen and Maddy, who form a deep bond over their shared love for a young adult TV series, “The Pink Opaque”. This series, reminiscent of 90s-to-early 2000s cult genre shows, acts as both a shared totem and dangerous obsession for the duo. But when the series is abruptly cancelled Maddy mysteriously disappears, propelling Owen into a quest for closure that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined. The film, set between 1996 and the present day (or at least a version of it), delves into the characters’ psyches, exploring their identities, and the ways in which media can both isolate and unite individuals​​.

Smith’s and Lundy-Paine’s performances are nuanced and powerful, bringing to life Schoenbrun’s vision with a sincerity that captures the essence of their characters’ struggles and desires. The film not only reflects on the nostalgia of ’90s media but also on its lasting impact on those who consumed it during their formative years. “The Pink Opaque”, while a fictional show within the film, serves as a metaphor for the personal and collective quests for meaning and identity among youth, particularly those navigating their gender and place in the world​​​​. The mythos of the show is off psychically linked girls who must battle the sinister Mr Melancholoy, a demiurge-like figure who is able to move people into false realities and inflict suffering and psychological pain. His moon-like face is playfully referenced at one point with a clos-up of an LG TV logo, complete with sinister slogan “Life Is Good.” Schoenbrun prods us to ask “is it really?”

Schoenbrun’s direction and the editing by Sofi Marshall create a surreal, unnerving experience that oscillates between eerie dread and overwhelming sensory assaults. The characters always feel like they’re on the outside looking in, underscoring the film’s sense of adolescent angst, and of the spectral presence of media in their lives.

Schoenbrun is clearly fascinated by serialized genre tv, each show with its mythos and lore, season-long arcs and overarching big bads, and all the shippng and stan communities that can build up around them. The most passionate acolytes of these shows gather around electronic water coolers, argue and debate, eulogize dead characters, pray for romance among the survivors, and endlessly attempt to locate hidden clues, crack the narrative code, decrypt the semiotics, read between the lines and identify what it’s really all about and where it’s really all going. These are the shows that live on after the credits roll, in the episode guides and forums, and buzzing in the minds of viewers.

Partaking in a fandom is can feel like an escape, both in the social aspect of the community, and the alternate world of the show. These days we have wikis, podcasts, Reddit groups and cosplay events. Before the shows of today there was Lost, and before that Buffy and The X-Files, and before them Twin Peaks, and in each one if you got close enough, obsessive enough, it might seem that there was secret signal on the wire. A viewer’s ability to tune into its wavelength might acts as a doorway to joining a community – which is in turn a base psychological need for most people, especially teenagers with their tribes and affiliations. I certainly remember carefully reading through The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer.

But is there a limit to how closely a person should commune with the reality of a show? After all, there’s a long history of philosophical and theological thought regarding to need to wake up from the false reality in we find ourselves. From Buddhism to the Advaita Vedanta, from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Christian Gnosticism and Existential authenticity, we are asked to consider that we live inside a dream. As David Lynch made sure to insert into Twin Peaks The Return, “we are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream – but who is the dreamer?” To try to escape from such a dream by focusing on the dream-within-a-dream of a TV show is perhaps to move in the wrong direction, to just journey further down the rabbit hole rather than out of it.

Schoenbrum seems to asks us to consider the opposite – that the way out of a dream is to make sure that you are the dreamer, to dream a dream of your own choosing with lucidity rather than submit to someone else’s nightmare. Perhaps there is nothing but dreams all the way down, and true liberation comes from choosing the dream you want to dream – that is to say, choosing the life you want to live. The shows that are most successful in generating a communities create a kind of shared imagination; with headcanons, fanfic and slashfic that empower viewers and so can be seen as fundamentally liberatory.

From a trans perspective, liberation means embracing your true self, rejecting all pressures to accept that your true heart is “not real”. To accept even that there is a choice to be made, and the choice is yours, is the first step. This step will be made against a background of ingrained pressure to not even think about such things, that to do so is to be a traitor to reality. The fight to overcome this is the battle that each trans ‘egg’ must fight – a battle against the oppressive elements of society but perhaps more powerfully also a battle against internalized cisnormativity.

“The battle for the mind of North America will be fought on the television screen.” – Videodrome.

As Owen asks “What if I was really somebody else?” I was reminded of Philip K Dick’s convictions that we are living in a false reality, our consciousnesses deliberately clouded. In the Spring of 1974, Philip K. Dick experienced a series of strange and profound events, including an encounter with a “pink light” which he described as an “information-rich beam,” transmitting directly to him a vast array of spiritual and philosophical insights.

Dick referred to this pink light experience as a moment of “anamnesis,” a term from Platonic philosophy meaning a recollection of the Forms that the soul had known before birth into the material world. He believed that this experience had momentarily reawakened his knowledge of a higher spiritual reality. This event led him to write extensively about themes of reality, identity, and the divine in his later works. He speculated that the pink light had been a manifestation of a divine intelligence.

Dick later claimed that during his visions and altered states of consciousness, he lived a parallel existence as a first-century Christian persecuted under Roman authority. He described vivid, detailed recollections of this life, which he saw as overlapping with his own. These experiences informed his later work, particularly the “VALIS” (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) trilogy, where he explores themes of Gnosticism, the nature of reality, and the existence of a hidden, divine manipulation of human history. Dick became convinced that we we all still living under the Roman Empire, its true nature obscured, with something he called ‘The Black Iron Prison’ – a lower spiritual plane governed by a demiurge, a false construct designed to obscure a true, divine reality from human beings.

Dick’s obsession with this theme was a big inspiration on The Wachowskis. At the end of trans allegory The Matrix, Thomas Anderson has broken free of such a prison, been renamed Neo, is fully cognizant of the false reality of the Matrix, and is able to transcend it and bend it to his will with seemingly positive results. A happy ending!

Conversely, at the end of Twin Peaks The Return Agent Cooper switches one dream for another, but continues to labor under the illusion that he is in some sense still in reality, an objective, damaged but fixable place of true reality. But the show ends on a note of terror, with Cooper, now renamed Richard, having pushed past all attempts to keep him in his place but now uncertain of anything much at all, and still perhaps tormented by the evil force known as Judy.

It’s perhaps from both of these that Schoenbrun is picking up the baton – I Saw The TV Glow is the best “escape the matrix” trans egg movie since The Matrix, but viewers will have to decide for themselves whether there is a happy ending for Owen, or simply more traps within traps.

I Saw the TV Glow serves as a reminder of the ways in which media can shape, define, and sometimes distort our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and of the difficulty of ridding ourselves of false consciousness. Schoenbrun has created an emotionally bracing film that is not only a narrative about youth and identity but also a visually and emotionally resonant piece that challenges viewers to reflect on their own relationships with media, memory, and each other.

I Saw The TV Glow played at the Berlinale in February and is playing SXSW tonight, ahead of a 3 May 2024 release.