ADAM PIRON: Similar to A Self-Induced Hallucination and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a big idea in your work that also comes through in I Saw the TV Glow is about  experiencing some sort of emotional or spiritual communion with media.

JANE SCHOENBRUN: It derives from my own biography and being very much a child of the internet, and of television, and of the video store. To a point, I think it was excessive, dissociative, and very much a coping mechanism, as it is for a lot of folks from non-normative or divergent backgrounds, which can make it hard for them to emotionally invest in the “real world” around them. Whether that meant being a fan on a Buffy message board or writing my own fanfiction for people I would never actually meet in real life, I put so much of myself—the creative parts and the vulnerable parts that I wasn’t comfortable sharing in daylight, at school, with family, or even among my friends—into these anonymous spaces. 

I love the screen—I don’t want to say “image.” Obviously, I am working within a medium where the screen is both intrinsic to the actual form and means of production, but also it is rendered invisible in that there are plenty of movies that feature screens within screens. It becomes this assumed idea: we’re all interacting between a screen. I am fascinated by exploring that idea as a way to talk about a lot of different things, I but especially, in a core way, to talk about identity, and this duality, that distance between watching yourself and being yourself, that I, as a trans person, am constantly and probably eternally in the process of trying to close. 

With TV Glow, the film is particularly talking about television. One of the moments that, to me, is heartbreaking is where Owen (Smith) has just watched this piece of media that feels incredibly personal to him, that has deep emotional implications for his life, and then, we pause for a second and an executive producer title card pops up onscreen and it’s just some dude’s name. As a lonely, queer kid who hadn’t yet figured themselves out, these TV shows meant so much to me, these transmissions felt like they were made with so much love and intention and were talking to me directly. [But then you realize that] between me and those feelings there a lot of money and a lot of executives and a lot of middle-aged men. TV Glow is interested in a self-reflective or revisionist way in looking at fandom and our relationship as fans to our culture as a way to then talk about the ways that we are being taken advantage of.

AP: Part of being a millennial is this nostalgic memory of life before the internet, but then at the same time of coming of age with the internet, which creates a new kind of emotional reality. Just as this film is interested in the degradation of physical media and how it’s been transferred online,  a big part of your work generally is how characters undergo physical changes through this older, archival type of media presence. A transmission happens that creates a new hyperreality.

JS: I think it’s the media studies person inside me. We live in this world that’s hypermediated by fiction and screens and the way that we receive narratives. I’ve always been obsessed with that idea, and it feels like a natural place to be working from, both from a political and emotional perspective. It’s very much in A Self-Induced Hallucination, which tracks this arc of the internet changing from being this space that is perhaps a little  innocent, or at the very least dumb kids doing whatever dumb kids do together. We see this through this motif of the “Subscribe to My Channel” ads [which appear] at the end of videos. At the start it’s just kids who are lonely and want people to pay attention to them, then five years later, it’s Chris Hansen and NBC telling you to subscribe. 

Something has happened to the internet from my youth to right now that obviously has to do with capital and the corporatization of independent space and power. In TV Glow, we watch [Owen] from childhood until middle age, and his emotional arc is one of degradation, a slide down until the final moments. He’s becoming trapped inside himself, in the way, as a trans person, you do before you see the thing inside you that you’ve been hiding from. 

That is mirrored in the film is the degradation of media from this magical and holy experience in childhood, both my own and Owen’s, of going over to a friend’s house to watch this show that feels special to you. Even if it is actually a Canadian co-production and just a cheap budget, bargain basement, latex monster suit kind of situation, it feels like this magical, spiritual experience. Eventually we get to the present day and it’s just like everything is on streaming. It’s been bled of some kind of magic, which I think isn’t so much me being like, “Remember the good old days, 1994?” But is rather trying to utilize the way that our media has changed, that the screens of our world have mutated and multiplied, as a way to talk about this “cancer” that we see that is metastasizing inside Owen.