“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” —Joan Didion
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was the kind of flawed-but-promising debut that makes you eager to see what the filmmaker responsible might do with a little more money and creative freedom. Be careful what you wish for: I Saw the TV Glow is an affected, self-consciously evocative sophomore feature with the adolescent sensibility of an actual sophomore. Following two alienated youths who bond over their shared love of a vaguely Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque program called The Pink Opaque before drifting apart (possibly because one of them disappears into the world of the show) and trying to find one another years later, it represents the latest attempt to make something profound of suburban ennui. What we have instead is the A24 equivalent of an endless cookie-cutter neighborhood where every house looks the same. Indebted most of all to Buffy itself — if inside-baseball terms like Big Bad and Monster of the Week don’t make the connection clear enough, the Amber Benson cameo certainly does — it also invites comparisons (none of them favorable) to the likes of Channel Zero, Beau Is Afraid, and even Are You Afraid of the Dark? In seeking to elevate the mundane to the mythic, Schoenbrun has merely demonstrated that other people’s nostalgia is about as interesting as other people’s dreams.
Also, Fred Durst is in it for some reason.
Oof.