NEW YORK (AP) — The filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun is walking down a path in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, looking for the pond they sat beside while working on the script for the film “I Saw the TV Glow.”
Cemeteries aren’t often the chosen location for interviews but the place holds particular meaning to Schoenbrun. Built in the 1830s on a hillside overlooking New York Harbor, Green-wood is where Leonard Bernstein, Boss Tweed and Jean-Michel Basquiat are buried. But it was also a rural sanctuary to New Yorkers before any parks were built. People used to picnic here.
“It’s amazing that it’s here,” Schoenbrun says, smiling beneath a cloudy spring sky. “The level of seclusion compared to everything surrounding it is so crazy.”
For Schoenbrun, the draw isn’t the famous graves. Green-wood has for them been a safe haven for reflection and transformation. In their first year taking hormones, Schoenbrun met friends here who, while lounging on a hill, took regular photographs to capture their physical evolution. Schoenbrun’s first in-person meeting with Brigette Lundy-Paine, one of the stars of “I Saw the TV Glow,” was here.
Schoenbrun wrote the film in late 2020, just a few months into their transition. In that fraught moment of becoming, the script poured out in a manic rush.
“I remember staggering out of my bedroom after I finished it and walking up to my partner and saying, ‘I can only do that so many times’ — that level of spilling my guts on the page,” Schoenbrun says.
By the time “I Saw the TV Glow” was nearing production, Schoenbrun was no longer in the same head space. They came to Green-wood to make outlines and rekindle the “early transition terror” that had since passed.
“I was falling in love. I was having a more consistent feeling of comfortableness in my body in a way that I had never had,” Schoenbrun says. “And I was like, ‘(Expletive), I’m about to make this trauma movie.’”
“I Saw the TV Glow,” which A24 opens in theaters Friday, has since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival been hailed as an acutely intense psychodrama of self-discovery. In 1990s suburbia, an awkward loner named Owen (Justice Smith) encounters Maddie (Lundy-Paine), a cool, prickly older high school student who opens his eyes to a “Buffy the Vampire”-esque TV series called “The Pink Opaque.” It stars a pair of young women in battle with a supernatural villain named Mr. Melancholy.
Their obsession with the show — particularly Maddie’s — takes on a feverish quality. “The Pink Opaque” becomes something like a portal to another, more authentic self. “I Saw the TV Glow,” radiating adolescent angst and shaking with the tremors of body dysphoria, is to Schoenbrun a parable of pre-transition.
“What I think ‘TV Glow’ is about is the very unpleasant process of committing to throw yourself off a cliff,” says Schoenbrun. “I think repression exists because you kind of know that if you unrepress, there are going to be consequences and your life as you know it is going to no longer be your life as you know it.”
“I Saw the TV Glow,” poised on that cliff of becoming, is at the forefront of a new vanguard for trans cinema. Films like Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker,” Paul B. Preciado’s “Orlando, My Political Biography” and Alice Maio Mackay’s “T-Blockers” have crafted new movie forms and images that compellingly reflect trans experience.
“I Saw the TV Glow,” though, has been uniquely championed. A24, the boutique indie studio, is distributing. Emma Stone is a producer. Co-stars include Danielle Deadwyler, Phoebe Bridgers and Fred Durst. All of them ultimately responded to Schoenbrun’s unfiltered vision.