On Time and Queerness: An Ode to Low Brow Art in Jane Shoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow

In this undeniably queer masterpiece, unlikely friends Owen and Maddy attempt to uncover the nature of reality and, more specifically, time itself.

My most formative cultural experience as a Midwestern, queer youth growing up in the 1990s was the premier of the hit television series, The X-Files. I know I’m supposed to say something far more intellectual, but it was the X-Files, through and through. Namely, it was Dr. Dana Scully. It has always been Scully. It will always be Scully.

Splayed out on my father’s girlfriend’s bed while she snuggled against my side, nodding out from opiates, I saw Gillian Anderson in her role as Scully on the television for the first time as a teen. I discovered my queerness in that instant, *finally* feeling that coveted teenage pulse of lust and desire for the no-bullshit scientist-turned-FBI-agent. Even now, my intimate knowledge of the fictional character is so massive, I’d be embarrassed if I wasn’t so in love.

I know where Scully’s moles are on her body, for example. I know the topic of her dissertation— hilariously, a treatise on Einstein’s Twin Paradox, despite her being a medical doctor. In one episode, she threatens to shoot a man in the dick for calling her “baby”— arguably, the hottest moment in television history. She has a tattoo of an Ouroboros—in my estimations, the queerest representation of the nature of time that exists. I wrote about it, actually, in a book almost entirely dedicated to her. She has a daughter named Emily who was conceived, in part, by aliens and, sadly, later died…but no one really dies in The X-Files. If Scully had been alive during WW2, she would’ve been an anti-fascist spy for the Allied forces. In the 12th grade, she rode on the back of a pumper truck after getting into mischief with friends. She also had an affair with one of her college professors.  

The X-Files is not heady, it is not intellectual. By today’s standards, the series more closely resembles the values and conspiracy theories of right-wing QAnon followers. But Scully, nevertheless, remains in perpetuity my first love. She helped me understand my queerness, which is a radical thing indeed. To boot, the real-life actor who portrays her—Gillian Anderson, of course— has unapologetically referenced romantic relationships with other women, and so the entirety of the Scully/Anderson universe feels, to me, radically queer, radically unearthly, and beautifully monstrous.

Fast forward to (or reverse back… I’m not sure which… time has unraveled here) I Saw the TV Glow is equal parts an ode to low brow television and a love letter to the awkwardness and bifurcation that accompanies being queer and/or trans in a world that hates us. I Saw the TV Glow (henceforth ISTTVG) is also a horrifying warning about inauthenticity, about reverse character arches— that is, moving from the authentic, childhood wonder inherent in us all to a disembodied adult too breathless to stand in his/her/their truth.   

But don’t worry. Said warning comes with a caveat— there’s still time. There’s always time.

Writer and director Jane Schoenbrun, whose film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was my first encounter with their slow-burn style of horror, has created a masterpiece with ISTTVG. If I could sum up their work in a crude, cursory way, I would say it’s the opposite of edge-lord-adjacent, jump-scare shit. The terrifying aspects of Schoenbrun’s film are not incredible or insatiable monsters. They are, instead, the spaces in between, the liminal places so often associated with queerness that hang in the air like an infinite question mark, wrapping itself around the Ouroboros of time.  

In ISTTVG, that which burns slow—the proverbial monster—is the passive acquiescence of—and assimilation into— the mediocrity of American culture, namely our fetish for the joyless pleasures of the spectacular. In a brilliant twist, however, Schoenbrun does not conceive of the “spectacular” in the same way that (cis/white dude) scholars like Baudrillard and Debord do. For Baudrillard and Debord, the spectacle—that is, the images we use in society to mediate relationships between one another—is lampooned as superficial and anti-intellectual; everything from jazz to low-brow television is implicated. Had Baudrillard or Debord lived to see ISTTVG, the fictional series within the film called The Pink Opaque would have certainly qualified.   

For Schoenbrun, however, the spectacle is reimagined as all the insignificant, idiosyncratic moments in between our joyless, fleeting, ever-unsated pleasures. Moments like scooping up cash in a wind machine under a neon light that boasts, “You Are Dying.” Moments like traversing seemingly endless school hallways littered with empty platitudes. It’s almost like Schoenbrun is pleading with us to give-in to escapism, to find solace in the cheesy, liminal worlds of low brow television and low brow art more generally. It is not dissimilar from queer theorist Halberstam’s advocacy for “low theory” and the reclamation of failure as a potentially radical response to capitalism.     

Schoenbrun is not a nihilist, however, and ISTTVG is not making some false equivalency between the digital and “real” worlds. It is a trans allegory, to be sure, but it is also a remarkably clever metaphor for trauma and the peculiar way those of us with mental illnesses experience events in our lives as if we were watching it on a television screen.   

Mr. Melancholy, perhaps my favorite character because of the artistry and makeup design alone, is both monstrous and an obvious nod to the 1902 French science-fiction film, Le voyage dans la lune (also, I really, really hope his namesake is the 90s Smashing Pumpkins album—Schoenbrun, please advise!). I love the multitudes here— Schoenbrun clearly demonstrates their appreciation for the history of cinema while also critiquing the industry’s tendency toward gratuitous violence, particularly in representations of trans and queer folks. Mr. Melancholy traps his prisoners inside a horrifying fate—that is, a life of inauthenticity. He does this by instructing the wildly queer-coded, campy af villains Marco and Polo to feed his victims Luna Juice—an allegory for the role of Western media in shaping—or rather, force-feeding— the collective imagination images of trans and queer folks that are often horrid, disembodied, predatory, and objectifying.

To that end, the lack of violence against queer and trans people in ISTTVG, with the possible exception of emotional violence at the proverbial hands of a cheerleader, was a welcomed departure from the norm. It is here that Schoenbrun remains true to their promise of critiquing cinema and images; we are not retraumatized as queer and/or trans people in this space because this space, whether we choose to remain in the Midnight Realm or return to The Pink Opaque, was created with us in mind.

I Saw the TV Glow is in conversation with Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, too. In her manifesto on sceince, technology, and socialist-feminism, Haraway encourages the dismantling of false dichotomies like those of human/machine and nature/technology, as just two examples. By doing so, she argues, we transcend socially imposed identities just as Owen in ISTTVG uses escapism to imagine new, more authentic identities for herself. In much horror, including several beloved faves like CAM and even We're All Going to the World's Fair, Haraway’s dichotomies are reified— i.e., technology becomes the enemy, robots attempt to replace humanity, we are disjointed from reality in our online obsessions, etc. But in ISTTVG, technology is not something to defeat or overcome. It is, rather, intimately entangled with the experience of being human, and should be subsequently understood as an extension of human life, not a suspicious “Other.” Indeed, nothing about the character arches in ISTTVG imply anything about winning or conquering or the “right” way to live as a trans and/or queer person. It is, instead, a love letter to all of us who’ve journeyed hysterical through the banality of evil that is American culture, to all of us who found our own bespoke Dr. Dana Scullys because we had to, because our survival depended upon it.

It is a love letter to all of us who, like film historian Richard Abel said of Le voyage dans la lune, demand the inversion of hierarchical social structures so that we may hold up our oppressors in order to “ridicule [them] in a riot of the carnivalesque.”

I Saw the TV Glow is not only a masterpiece, it is an important cultural moment puncuated by the goals of Halberstam’s “queer failure,” a utopic vision of the future in which there exists “art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”

I am here for the quiet losses of simply surviving just as I am here for the liberation of self, that all too familiar struggle of opening wide open and peering into the glow inside.