Berlin Hidden Gem: ’90s Nostalgia, Media and Horror Collide in ‘I Saw the TV Glow’

From beefcake Calvin Klein ads to Dungeons & Dragons, 1990s pop culture is hitting peak nostalgia. But in A24’s I Saw the TV Glow, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun examines the decade with a fresh eye, weaving a trans coming-of-age tale into a suburban horror story and a tribute to ’90s teen television. 

Schoenbrun’s follow-up to 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the film follows Owen (Justice Smith and Ian Foreman play the character at different ages), a lonely teenager trying to find themselves in a body and world that both feel foreign. Owen’s life starts to change when they meet Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a slightly older queer teen who introduces them to a TV show called The Pink Opaque, about high schoolers battling supernatural forces. Owen and Maddy escape into the show’s fictional universe, which, while frightening in its own right, makes more sense than reality, and they bond deeply with the show’s characters.

“It’s a very strange phenomenon that I don’t think people take seriously, but certainly as a dissociated queer kid in the suburbs, many of my closest emotional relationships were with characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Schoenbrun says, referencing one of the iconic ’90s shows that lend mythology and allegory to the film.

TV Glow even features a cameo by Amber Benson, who played Tara Maclay, a beloved queer character on Buffy who some fans feel was ill-served by the show. “I was like, if I can put Amber Benson onscreen in my movie,” Schoenbrun says, “it’s almost this gift to myself and to others of righting a wrong.”

Nineties kids will find the film rife with satisfying nods to the era, from allusions to Goosebumps and The Smashing Pumpkins to a supporting performance by Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, who plays Owen’s terrifying, homophobic father.

While Schoenbrun incorporated such allusions partly to pay tribute to things they found beautiful in ’90s pop culture, their choices speak to the ways in which culture shapes identity and helps us make sense of the world.

“We are all ourselves, and we’re also conditioned by the invisible signals we’re receiving from all around us,” Schoenbrun observes. “At least for me, I think these glimpses of other worlds through a screen in childhood were often signals of some form of magic or otherness or possibility hidden in a way on the margins of the normative world that I was growing up in, that made some kind of promise to me. And I don’t think that this is an experience that only queer trans people go through.”

But it’s not just identity that’s being illuminated by all those screens that surround us — Schoenbrun says media has the potential to shape our reality. “I think we look for ourselves all around us as a species, and we’re looking to our parents to tell us who we are. We’re looking to society, we’re looking at our peers. But I think, especially in our media-saturated environment, we’re looking to the glow of the screen and we’re looking to fiction to help define our understanding of reality.”