Mucking with Movies: ‘I Saw the TV Glow’

I’m home sick with the coronavirus, so I had to turn to the powers of streaming this week.

“I Saw The TV Glow” is one of those that got the dual theater release and a 20-dollar rental for anybody who wants to watch at home on Amazon Prime. I’m all for the double release when it comes to situations such as these. It’s cheaper for the distributor to throw it up on a streaming service while simultaneously giving it to theaters that could flip it for their profit in the bigger cities and people who normally wouldn’t get to watch have access. It’s a nice way of democratizing art.

The issue is that I’m acutely aware that the cinema experience can make or break a flick, as it is a sterile environment cleansed of distractions that presents its art in the most ideal way possible. I don’t know if “I Saw The TV Glow” would have sucked more or less if I had seen it in a theater, but I do know that it wouldn’t have changed the fact that A24 movies have a neon lights problem.

We’re in this weird phase of indie studios wanting all their zany productions to look more or less uniform. Maybe it’s the future, where the studio has as much of a discernable style as the director. But to be so one note! If I see another bubble gum color pallet mess passing over a young adult’s face I’m going to kick in one of those conveniently-placed vending machines they use for diegetic lighting. 

“I Saw The TV Glow” is a combination angsty coming-of-age horror-thriller that flies in cliches from the two genres and squishes them tightly into a horrific blob. It’s typical masquerading as atypical — all the best ideas of burgeoning filmmakers over the past fifteen years executed the worst it ever has. The dramatic gazes towards the top of the camera frame, characters with stiff stilted walks that slow a moving shot, and the use of liminal spaces are interesting methods that have been explored recently and that still haven’t overstayed their welcome but director Jane Schoenbrun does not seem to have strong enough thematic twine to tie it all together. 

I believe she was trying to institute a campy element into her surrealist landscape, but everything is played a little too straight to achieve that. As it lies undecided between “It Follows” and “The Cabin in the Woods,” it ends up being edge-lord nonsense. I love surrealism, I’ve made my poor mother sit through enough strange Harmony Korine and David Lynch to prove that, but it’s a tough temperature to try to get right. When you come up short in its pursuit, your creation can still be beautiful, sure, but in the words of William Morris, “Nothing useless can be truly beautiful.”

The TV show inside the movie, “The Pink Opaque,” was my favorite part of the flick. I’d have been much happier watching an hour and forty of that. I think there’s a little bit of purposeful action going on there; making the TV show the bored and confused main characters are obsessed with more interesting than their real lives was imperative to the plot and plays well into the largest themes that loom over the film. When the payoff to this duality comes, it is scintillating despite its predictability. For the first and only time, I got caught up in the world, but that didn’t last. 

As an allegory for the balance between worlds that comes with people transitioning genders, the film holds weight. An uncertainty of identity that can be pushed or pulled depending on who your family and friends are. It is an impossibly difficult time that I could never understand; so when art can do its job and distills lessons in an informative but non heavy-handed way, credit is deserved.  

But, it is the film’s main thesis that is such a turnoff to me. Modern art has a cynicism problem, where its purveyors are mired in an inferno and competing with one another on who has the best way to describe the fire. Ultimately, “I Saw The TV Glow” feels like an attack on the normality of life, how reality suffocates the imagination, and how growing-up’s practicalities will leave you suffering under indignation. This is a made-up notion for people who got into “Catcher in the Rye” while they were in 10th-grade English class. It’s such a lame defeatist idea, I hate that it continues. My wish for artists is to find pride in their lives and their work again, and perhaps, we will once more thrive. 

Critic Score: 3.9/10

Jack Simon is a mogul coach and writer/director who enjoys eating food he can’t afford, traveling to places out of his budget, and creating art about skiing, eating, and traveling while broke. Check out his website jacksimonmakes.com to see his Jack’s Jitney travelogue series. You can email him at jackdocsimon@gmail.com for inquiries of any type.