‘I saw the TV Glow’: Stuck in a rut of repression with dreams of change

Sign up for our Gay City News email newsletter to get news, updates, and local insights delivered straight to your inbox!. With only three films, Jane Schoenbrun has proven themselves a great poet of technological loneliness. Their budget rose drastically with their second feature, “I Saw the TV Glow,” which is distributed by A24, the current master of selling independent film to a wide audience. But their vision remains the same. The extreme alienation of their characters in “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” created by a dependence on screens and geographical isolation, persists in “I Saw the TV Glow.” At the time they wrote that film, they were still figuring out their own gender identity. Introducing “I Saw the TV Glow” at a screening last week, Schoenbrun remarked on the enormous changes in their life just in the four years between writing the script and the film’s release. “I Saw the TV Glow” represents something new: a confrontation with media’s re-shaping our brains in potentially liberating and dangerous manners, a depiction of the ’90s which peels away nostalgia, a vision of trans experience that doesn’t explain everything for cis audiences.

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