[If you receive this twice, I’m sorry!! I “unpublished” because I wanted to check some things.]
Creatures, screen creatures, glowing creatures! Creatures of promise and fear!
I liked Jane Schoenbrun’s 2021 We’re All Going to the World’s Fair well enough. It had a cool look, the screenglow in the teen’s angst-darkened bedroom, and it played in unexpected ways with its central questions: On a genre level, is this horror or drama, i.e. is the creepy online game the main character is playing real or just imagination? And regardless of the answer to that question, are the connections she’s forging online “real”—lifelines, doorways, everything we mean by the word “friendship”? Or are they more like vaccinations against friendship, giving her just enough to keep her from succumbing to reality?
I Saw the TV Glow hits these same elements, but much harder and from several different angles. I was genuinely moved, disturbed, awed by it. The look of the thing is just gorgeous—that Fruitopia machine deserves an end credit. The neon-candy colors help the film play with reality: glowing colors might be screen dreams, or they might be chalk drawings on a sidewalk, or a stunning sunset behind the treeline.
And the story is haunting and polemical, making a really strong case for something while also touching some of what there is to fear in that thing. It’s about two teenagers (Ian Foreman and Brigette Lundy-Paine) who love the same TV show, “The Pink Opaque.” This mysteriously-named show is itself about two teen girls who bond on the psychic plane—a friendship forged outside bodily reality, in avatars. The TV show borrows from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and apparently also from “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” but I have no idea what the latter thing is and am pretty aggressively meh about the former; this isn’t a nostalgia-fueled film.
As with World’s Fair, but MUCH MORE SO, Schoenbrun lets screen-based connection look creepy and dissociative. The teens stare at the screen slack-jawed. They’re incredibly endearingly mopey, in general. Like, it takes them five minutes to drawl one word, so weighed down are they by life in the suburbs. And I’m ridiculously impressed by how well Schoenbrun shows you both the inner reality of teen angst, and the way it can look like silly melodrama. She picks a side, I think, but this movie is a real double-edged knife, hitting as humor when she turns it one way and anguish when she turns it the other.
Obsessing over “The Pink Opaque” distances the teens from their families. Not just from the lightly-sketched awful parents, who say stuff like, “Isn’t that a show for girls?” and glaze over in front of a horrifically laughing television, but from the main character’s mother, when she is reaching out in desperate sorrow and need.
Schoenbrun plays with that obvious, omnipresent, and imho basically correct critique of screen culture, the thing Cat Power sings about in that song with the man who’s “lost inside a screen”:
Watches a film about the evening sky.
It was someone else’s dream.
These kids don’t create the Pink Opaque; they don’t write fanfiction for it. But neither is it solely “someone else’s dream.” In the end, they interact with it in a visceral and heartfelt way. Lol I don’t want to give too much away. Let me throw out thoughts and references: I already knew going in that many people read this film as, not exactly an allegory of trans experience, but a riff on that experience. I’m not sure I would have seen that if I hadn’t heard it beforehand, but I’m glad I did, and once you have heard it you can’t really unsee it. (NB: This is a movie review, and I’m trying to write about what I think Schoenbrun is doing as an artist, not how any individual person interprets their IRL experience, nor what I myself believe.)
This isn’t an algebraic movie, “Solve for x where x = being trans.” It’s more like Us, a film with an unforgettable and multivalent symbolic language that can say a lot of things, but is definitely saying some things about race and class and Americanness. (There’s a reason the title is U.S., you know?) A lot of the awe inspired by the Pink Opaque comes from a dreamlike, hungerlike yearning for transformation. Will you enter your real life in the real world, or remained trapped in falsehood forever, just because your false body is home?
There’s a Paperhouse element here, and an extremely strong resonance with Oevqtr gb Grenovguvn (paste that here for spoilerous translation). And a vibe of, “What if Labyrinth, but you never have to come home?” If your reaction is, “But that’s the opposite of Labyrinth!”, yeah, a huge part of Glow’s impact is that there is no bridge. There is no way to reconcile home and magic, home and freedom, home and sublimity. That’s why it’s shaped so much like a horror movie, even though it isn’t.
Weird Catholic Book Day
is October 10. Not for any reason, I just happened to go off one day about this idea and that was the day it happened. You celebrate Weird Catholic Book Day by taking action to get weird Catholic books into weird readers’ hands. You can request that your local public library system add them to the collection (like this); you can sneak them into the parish library, or leave them on the sidewalk in a box with WEIRD BOOKS scrawled on the side.
You’ll have your own favorites, but my thing here is, you can find hope and wisdom in the Catholic faith through a lot of very weird, varied, and hard experiences. You can find something worth paying attention to. And there are books that will speak to those experiences, without propaganda. Frost in May, Boxers & Saints, Last Call, Pelican, Master of Reality, Redeployment, The Night of the Gun; Max Jacob, Edward P. Jones, Óscar Romero, Ursula de Jesús, Raïssa Maritain.
The books you needed; the books you wish you’d found sooner. Do a solid for someone else who needs them now.
A Piñata Is a Rogation Dragon for Your Birthday
Via Leah Libresco Sargeant, the phenomenal piñatas of Roberto Benavidez, inspired by medieval illuminations, Hieronymos Bosch, the Day of the Dead, and much much more. The NYT article gives the artist’s backstory and interpretations of his work—plus you can see how big they are!
What I believe is a screenshot from David Hall’s “TV Interruption Piece 1971,” created by Hall and used under a Creative Commons license.
I'll second both Redeployment and Pelican as great books!
Boo to allegories, and huzzah to symbolic tales with rich resonance!