"I Saw the TV Glow" finds the director again using fictional cultural ephemera to construct worlds that recall the power of the screen.
By Grace Byron
Jane Schoenbrun understands the cursed records of suburban memory. Their films—A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018), We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), and now I Saw the TV Glow (2024)—construct imagined archives from cultural ephemera, like internet lore, YouTube videos, and television shows. These pieces of world-building distort the concept of the transition timeline—a series of images that tracks the effects of Hormone Replacement Therapy—by undercutting the sincerity of the so-called transition “journey” with displays of disappointment and dysphoria. Whether searching for information about ghosts, ghouls, or gender, Schoenbrun’s characters struggle to self-actualize. In I Saw the TV Glow (2024), the cul-de-sacs are covered in chalk hieroglyphs for a séance with the people we might have been. Around every corner lies a new monster of the week: longing, loneliness, horniness.
Other artists have used imagined archives as a way to examine desire, projection, and gender. Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) focused on the Center for Lesbian Information and Technology (CLIT) and a fictional Black woman actress who vanished without a trace. Shola Von Reinhold’s novel LOTE (2020) took a similar approach by imagining how its protagonist might commune with the modernist movement. Elsewhere, the work of Susan Stryker has taken both a literal approach to reanimating the archive, in the book Transgender History and in the historical documentary Screaming Queens (2005), as well as a more creative strategy, in Christine in the Cutting Room (2012), which imagines a fictional backstory for Christine Jorgensen, the transgender activist.
For Schoenbrun, the archive is a living place and a byproduct of media consumption. Data, stories, and folklore converge and mediate the possibility of connectivity through cultural objects. Slenderman, ASMR comment threads, and old VHS tapes extend the specter of togetherness. These imagined archives allow Schoenbrun to warp, mirror, and refract viewer’s expectations, submerging us in a world of smoke and mirrors. Schoenbrun uses their characters like puppets, bending them into horrifying positions that push them closer and closer to the edge. They dance in the light of the screen, displaying the wounds of desire as they vie for attention on online forums and in dimly lit classrooms. They gleefully plumb the depths of Slenderman mythology in A Self-Induced Hallucination and of an uneasy online community in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Fan culture leaves behind a vast network of comments, theories, and identities, in addition to hushed cafeteria chatter. Some lore only survives under the cover of night, requiring VHS tapes to be smuggled like contraband when your favorite show airs after your bedtime. Who’s up? Who’s really behind the screen, and what do we want?
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