I Saw the TV Glow (Movie)

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    Are We in a New Golden Age for the Movie Soundtrack?

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    Between “Barbie,” “Across the Spider-Verse” and now “I Saw the TV Glow,” directors are making the case for the film album experience.After watching “I Saw the TV Glow,” the new film from the director Jane Schoenbrun, I felt a sensation I hadn’t felt in a while: I need this soundtrack.The genre-defying movie is a surreal story about two high schoolers in the 1990s who become obsessed with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a rich film that draws on horror, ’90s television and Schoenbrun’s experience coming out as transgender. But it also boasts some incredible tunes, like a hypnotic cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by the artist yeule and performances from King Woman, Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, who appear onscreen as musicians at a club the characters visit.The full soundtrack has more to love: The swelling emotion of Caroline Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed” and the throwback rock of Proper’s “The 90s,” with lyrics about the TV show “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Listening, I felt like a kid again.That was just Schoenbrun’s intention. The director thought the film needed a “great teen angst soundtrack.” But they were also nostalgic for the idea of soundtracks in general. They remembered thinking, “‘Wait, where did those go?’ You know, because the soundtracks of my youth were such a huge part of what brought me to movies,’” they said in a video call.Citing soundtrack “canon picks” like “Donnie Darko,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Garden State,” which turns 20 this year, they admit these are “pretty obvious slash perhaps a little embarrassing” choices. I relate. I also had an iPod in the early 2000s filled with soundtracks, and one of the most frequently played was “Garden State.” The accompaniment to Zach Braff’s indie breakout — about a man in the midst of a quarter-life crisis who goes home for his mother’s funeral — was as much a cultural moment as the actual film, going platinum and elevating bands like Frou Frou and the Shins.Indeed, the beginning of the aughts felt like the last great heyday for the soundtrack. Think of the indie vibes of “Garden State,” the bluegrass foot-stompers of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” or even the pop rock of “Shrek.” (If you want embarrassment, just ask me how much I loved that soundtrack.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s Your Favorite Soundtrack? We Want to Know.

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      We’re asking readers to share the movie-related albums that they return to again and again.In my tween years, the soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever” was on repeat for months in my bedroom. This was via, ahem, an eight-track tape player. So, three or four cuts, clunky pause, three or four more, and so on. Listening this way was work, that’s how much I loved this music.Too young to see the R-rated movie itself, I only had a hazy — and, as it turned out, completely incorrect — idea of what it was about. Imagine my surprise years later when I discovered it was a drama, not the lighthearted ode to dancing that I pictured. (To put it another way: What if you were expecting “Barbie” and got “Oppenheimer”?) It’s not a bad film, but instead of the moves of John Travolta, it’s the sounds of the Bee Gees and Yvonne Elliman that are permanently etched in my memory.Some of the soundtracks I played incessantly back then, such as “Star Wars” (really more of a score, but still completely thrilling) and “Grease” (c’mon), were more or less universally popular; others (“Fame,” which I haven’t revisited since; no idea if it holds up) seemed like private obsessions. Years later, that’s how the “Garden State” soundtrack felt even though it became a cultural phenomenon.As you can probably tell, I’ve always loved soundtracks. There are the individual songs, of course, but somehow it’s the album-ness of the thing — immersing me in a vibe, and reminding me of where I was and who I was when I first heard it.My favorites (like “Purple Rain,” “Pulp Fiction” and “The Matador”) aren’t too surprising for a Gen X-er like myself. But with “Barbie” and other new movie-related albums in the last year, including the latest, “I Saw the TV Glow,” getting so much love from younger moviegoers, I got to thinking about different eras of film and music and wondering what other soundtracks I should be checking out.So I’m asking you, readers, what soundtracks do you obsess over? Why do you return to them? I would love to hear your thoughts. Fill out the form below, and your response may be featured in an upcoming story. We will not publish or share your contact information outside the Times newsroom, and we will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. More

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      ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Review: How We Used to Escape

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      An outstanding not-quite-horror film about being a fan just before the internet took over.We’ve forgotten how hard being a fan used to be. You had to labor at it in multiple media: scouring listings and keeping tabs on schedules, reading books of lore and compiling episode recaps. Pop culture was built around presence, real physical presence: To see the latest episode of “The X-Files” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” you had to show up at your TV when it aired. If you missed a key episode, you were out of luck, unless someone remembered to tape it for you, at least until it went into reruns or syndication. And if your taste ran to the niche, discovering that someone else loved the same thing you loved felt revelatory, like you’d stumbled upon a person who spoke a language only you could understand.The social internet, algorithms and streaming blew most of this up, shoving our favorites at us and making them available all the time. Some of the magic disappeared as well, the uncanny immersive quality. You can bury yourself in a binge-watch for a day or a week, but then it’s over, no long in-between stretches to hash out each episode. Sustaining a relationship with the world a show built is still possible; connecting with others over your shared love is preposterously easy. Something, however, has been lost.“I Saw the TV Glow” captures this obsessive, anticipatory submersion in a long-form weekly TV show, to the point where it ignites the same feeling. A lot of movies tell you stories, but the films of the writer and director Jane Schoenbrun evoke them; to borrow a term, they’re a vibe. Like “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” Schoenbrun’s previous film, this one isn’t quite horror, but it gives you the same kind of scalp crawl. In this case I think it’s the mark of recognition, of feeling a tug at your subconscious. It’s oddly hard to put into words.“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” was the tale of a lonely teenager living in the oddness of our internet era, where intimacy is free and plentiful and confusing and could be dangerous, or could be banal. “I Saw the TV Glow” dials that same tone back a generation, centering on a couple of lonely teenagers who find one another through a show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a mash-up show, instantly recognizable in its own way: It airs on something called the Young Adult Network (clearly a stand-in for The WB, the teen-focused TV network that turned into The CW) at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday nights, a time reserved for shows barely hanging on by a thread. The opening credits we glimpse suggest the show is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-adjacent (it even uses the same typeface), but with elements reminiscent of “The X-Files” and “Twin Peaks” — in all these cases, not exactly horror, but not quite anything else. (There’s also a band in the show, one that apparently performs a song in every episode, which plays expertly tuned mid-90s teen-show music; the musicians are Phoebe Bridgers and Haley Dahl.)“I Saw the TV Glow” is set in 1996, right at the moment when entertainment was about to dive over the cliff and become what media theorists sometimes refer to as convergence culture. Back then, TV was still a few years away from being participatory for most youthful viewers. The internet wasn’t mature enough yet for the majority of teens to really haunt it, and those who did were posting on the kinds of message boards and websites that would eventually come to define both the TV and the fan-driven internet of the early aughts. (“The X-Files,” for instance, which premiered in 1993, was one of the first shows with a developed online fandom; they communicated through a Usenet newsgroup.) If you knew how to find message boards and chat rooms, you might have bonded with other fans. But if you were just a kid at home in the suburbs, you were most likely planning your schedule around episodes.The story of “I Saw the TV Glow” mostly belongs to Owen (played as a seventh grader by Ian Foreman, and then from high school up by Justice Smith). He is nervous and anxious and sheltered, but he catches an ad for an episode of “The Pink Opaque.” He doesn’t know what it is, but he’s obsessed. One day, waiting for his parents to finish voting in the school cafeteria, he wanders into a room and finds Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading a book that recaps episodes of the show. Maddy explains the show to Owen: It’s about two girls, Tara (Lindsey Jordan, the musician Snail Mail) and Isabel (Helena Howard), who meet at camp and discover they share a connection that enables them to fight that most stalwart trope of ’90s TV dramas: the Monster of the Week. There’s a Big Bad in their world, too — the mysterious Man in the Moon named Mr. Melancholy. Owen is even more consumed.Owen’s father won’t let him stay up to watch the show, but Maddy and Owen concoct a way to make it happen. This is where “I Saw the TV Glow” starts to leave the realm of straightforward plot and slip-slide into some nether region at the intersection of fantasy, nostalgia, fear and longing. Escapism has always belonged to children’s literature, fantastical other worlds into which we might leave the ordinary behind and discover ourselves special. Owen and Maddy are trapped in their own worlds, but “The Pink Opaque” gives them the sense that a parallel dimension might be where they really belong.There’s a heartbreak at the center of this film that made me gasp to see it, an acknowledgment that sometimes it’s better not to go back to what we once loved because now, in the cold light of adulthood, it all looks very different. There are other layers, too: implications that awakenings around gender dysphoria and sexuality are tied up in the teens’ obsession with the show, though they barely understand. Even more broadly, the immense pain of pushing down your true self, and the brittle breaking of that shell, is woven throughout.But what’s most effective, and staggering, is Schoenbrun’s storytelling, which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare, weaving in sounds and lights and colors and the gloriously inexplicable. Teenage malaise, untreated, can sour into an adult psychic prison; the TV is just one way that we escape.I Saw the TV GlowRated PG-13 for some really trippy stuff. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More