BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
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LUSE: Suburban decay, delightfully creepy kid shows and brand-new metaphors for the trans experience - there's a new movie out that has a lot to say about all of these things.
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JUSTICE SMITH: (As Owen) What if I really was someone else very far away on the other side of a television screen?
LUSE: "I Saw The TV Glow" is a new film from indie powerhouse A24, and lucky for us, we've got the writer and director behind the film, Jane Schoenbrun.
JANE SCHOENBRUN: I think about my own youth in the suburbs, both very, like, nostalgic and also kind of haunted.
LUSE: "I Saw The TV Glow" is a coming-of-age horror film following two teens, Owen and Maddy. They're both outcasts in their 1990 suburban town, and their lifeline is a TV show called "The Pink Opaque."
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LUSE: "The Pink Opaque" is a late-night sci-fi show, about two teen girls with a psychic connection who fight off the monster of the week - think "Are You Afraid Of The Dark?" crossed with "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and "Goosebumps." It's creepy, kind of mystical and just a little too scary, which is exactly why they love it. As they grow up and the show gets canceled, Owen and Maddy's lives shift in unexpected ways.
SCHOENBRUN: Their obsession with this TV show almost becomes a fixation or a way of hiding from darker things in their real life until they've realized that perhaps the show is more real than the reality that they're existing within.
LUSE: Today on the show, Jane and I are getting into the new metaphors they've brought to the silver screen and why it's both compelling and potentially stifling to keep turning back to the past.
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LUSE: Jane, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
SCHOENBRUN: Thanks for having me.
LUSE: Jane, I have to say, I love the film. I really enjoyed watching it. Something I really appreciate about it is many of the movies today being made about identity feel more like explainers or essays. But you take a more emotional approach by really leaning into metaphor. The film shows how something feels as opposed to telling the viewer what something is. How did you land at that approach?
SCHOENBRUN: This is my second feature film. I made my first while searching for language to talk about a feeling that I had always had - why my life and my reality felt like it hadn't quite started yet. I ultimately, very organically through that process, had my egg-crack moment, which is a term that we use in the trans community for the moment when this thing that maybe you've subconsciously always known to be true, which is that you're trans, finally becomes unavoidable, and unavoidable in a way where you can't go right back into the closet and re-repress it.
And it was also, I think, an instructive, creative process in that I wasn't worrying about good representation - right? - when I wrote it. I was worrying about trying to articulate a feeling that, like, quite literally, I didn't think there was a word for - which is very different, right? Good representation feels primarily concerned with people who aren't from your background. It feels like - you know, in my case, good representation would be like making a film so that cis people could understand the trans experience. Whereas what I was doing as a trans person was just trying to articulate the things that felt oblique about my own experience.
LUSE: That's interesting. Explainers kind of presuppose that you have all the answers, that you understand everything about yourself or understand everything about your own experience. But trying to communicate a feeling, that's very different.
SCHOENBRUN: I think it's also the role of the artist to be interrogating things that feel unknowable or not yet known, right? It's like if I had all of the answers and I was giving you a lecture on the realities of the human experience, I don't think I would be an artist. I think I would be...
LUSE: (Laughter) A lecturer.
SCHOENBRUN: Yeah. Or a dictator.
(LAUGHTER)
SCHOENBRUN: To me, like, so much of the joy of art is about being with mystery.
LUSE: Being with mystery - I like that. You said in another interview that, to quote you, "staring at screens is probably the thing that we do most, that we make art about least. The screen becomes such a beautiful and malleable metaphor to talk about how it feels to be alive and especially to be alive in a world where you don't quite feel like you fit in." Talk to me more about that. Like, how did you want to use the screen to show that in this film?
SCHOENBRUN: In this film, Owen and Maddy see something on a screen that, as Maddy says early in the film, feels more real to her than real life. It's not that this signal that she's caught is necessarily like God's holy text. Yet she sees something in that signal that shows them a magic or a thing that they can emotionally invest themselves in, that they aren't finding in everything else around them that they're being told is real life. And the film is very much not coy about this - that's gay stuff.
(LAUGHTER)
SCHOENBRUN: The show, like a lot of shows from the early '90s, is, like, kind of queer-coded. It's about these two teenage girls who fight monsters. But it's about two girls who don't feel like other girls. And it's about two girls who have this special psychic connection that makes them a little bit different from everybody else around them.
And when I was 12 years old, I tuned into "Buffy," and it quite literally was my first love. I put so much of myself into that show through my adolescence to the point where I cared more about who Buffy was going to prom with than going to my own prom. And this is sort of the parasocial relationship that I was trying to get at through the work in the way that I think a lot of adolescents who don't fit easily into the, quote-unquote, "real world" will find these relationships through fiction. I think it's about this process, who makes who? Does our fiction make us, or do we make our fiction? And the answer to that question I think isn't so straightforward.
LUSE: One of the things that really struck me about Owen's relationship to the show, "The Pink Opaque," through one of the lead characters from "The Pink Opaque," Isabel, she kind of presents a vision for Owen of relation, possibly how to be in the world or possibly an aspect of his personality or being that he's, like, still wrapping his head around. But she's idealized in his mind. Like, when he's watching the show as a kid, she looks like a 25-year-old supermodel, right? But when he goes back and watches the show as a grown-up, he's watching it, and all of the characters from the show look like ordinary children. That vision of Isabel from Owen's childhood is perhaps even more important to him than how she actually was on the show.
SCHOENBRUN: And what's that about? That is ultimately about how love and identity and emotional investment in the thing is so much more about who we are and, like, the side of the prism of our lives that we're gazing from than it is about the actual thing. This TV show that was his only real connection to a life source that felt akin to love. It's been bled of something. And this ultimately became a way for me to talk about, like, yes, our relationship to media, but I think also in a wider sense, our relationship to nostalgia and our relationship to possibility and identity and the ways in which the same things that in youth felt so imbued with magic and possibility can also become traps if we don't evolve that possibility out of the screen.
I look back on the ghosts of my youth, a lot of complicated feelings about them, just how weird it is when time passes. Trans people have complicated relationships to the concept of time. And that's very embodied in the film.
LUSE: It felt like it was being made from the perspective of somebody who grew up in the suburbs as I did and watched a lot of the same cable TV obsessively that I did. And that kind of haunting quality does tinge many of my memories about growing up. And you make so many references in this film to Seminal '90s kids TV - Nickelodeon's "Pete & Pete," "Are You Afraid Of The Dark," "Buffy," "Alex Mack." When I think back to how they made me feel, a big part of that was I felt like they took seriously what it felt like to be a kid, like, the strangeness of being a child. What did they speak to for you?
SCHOENBRUN: There's always a weird TV show for kids on TV. You know, I do think that's a time-honored tradition that we still have today. But I do think there was something in the water in the early '90s. It was also hinting towards an underworld to the American suburbs that I had sensed at that point and that these shows sort of introduced me too. I think they were also, though, feeding us back an idea that the American suburbs could be a place of magic and possibility. But I think in another way, these were, like, corporate products from an ideology that was reinforcing something about the environment that I was being told was the epitome of normal and safe.
LUSE: Another thing I really appreciated about the film was the metaphor that you created to show what it feels like to be trans but not transitioning. Like, instead of stuck in the closet or stuck in the wrong body, like, you liken it to being buried alive. Talk to me more about this metaphor.
SCHOENBRUN: It was the first thing that I had when I started working on the film. It's not a perfect metaphor, but I do feel that a lot of the trans people that I know, we're constantly trying to find language. We're trying to find language to talk about this very ephemeral feeling that we call dysphoria. This feeling that I think has been misrepresented in a lot of the media about trans people. But the actual feeling of dysphoria and the feeling of being trans, but not quite accepting it yet or not transitioning and becoming yourself, it's an internal feeling of very deep, existential wrongness that we carry with us and that if we don't do something about it is going to rot us out and give us not only a shortened life, but a life that doesn't quite feel like a life. And so this metaphor became my attempt to talk about how that feels.
LUSE: My producer Liam, he said that this spoke to him as a trans person, but also that the experience of becoming a new person and living a new life because the old life was slowly killing you is something that a lot of people have experienced. That metaphor could easily apply to people who are going through divorce or recovering from addiction. Like, it's something that has a broad resonance.
SCHOENBRUN: Yeah. I do really like the trans author Torrey Peters' talks about the relationship between divorced women and trans women as some kind of spiritual union in the way you're talking about. And yeah, you know, it's funny because the film is obviously coming from a very specific context that, like, I am very proud of in that it is a movie made at a level and with, I think, a degree of honesty and candor that you don't often see from trans people talking about their own experiences. But on the other hand, in the same way that when I watch a film by, like, my favorite Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, I'm not - like, I understand every part of the context that he is speaking to from his existence as, like, an Iranian man born in the 1940s. I know that a lot of the context is going to go over my head, but that doesn't mean that we can't find commonalities between us.
LUSE: You also said in a previous interview something about TV static that I thought was so interesting, the kind of black and white scrambly static that used to show up on old TV sets and that glow that sticks around on the screen after you turn it off. It's something that shows up throughout the film. And you said in this previous interview that static is a kind of imperfection that's a beautiful wrongness. What does that static represent to you?
SCHOENBRUN: I think about a different time with something that feels the way that I feel about my own youth in the suburbs, both very, like, nostalgic and also kind of haunted. I'm a big fan of the theorist Mark Fisher who talks a lot about this term hauntology, which is kind of, like, the darker side of nostalgia, perhaps would be a simple way to put it. His theory is that after the Cold War, history, at least in, like, the American Western context, kind of ended. We no longer had a future to strive towards, the future has arrived, and we can just all enjoy stability. Of course, that doesn't hold. And of course, like, from 9/11 on, what I think we've actually been experiencing for much of this young century has been gradual decay. And Fisher talks about how increasingly we find ourselves returning more and more to the past. And that is, you know, like, "Stranger Things" and the 10 millionth "Star Wars" or Marvel movie, obviously, but there is a darker side to it, sort of like a psychic spillage that can happen, and I think that's where my work comes from - this feeling not of longing, necessarily, for the past in an uncomplicated, nostalgic way, but of feeling haunted by it as you would be haunted by a specter.
LUSE: I have one last question for you, and it's a little bit of a departure. You've said that Mattel, like, as in Barbie Mattel...
SCHOENBRUN: (Laughter).
LUSE: Mattel reached out for an interview for you to work with them, I'm guessing, and you turned them down. You said, to quote you, "The way that those companies right now are operating, the artist is middle management. The artist is completely disempowered, and the artist has to fit into a larger mission that has nothing to do with individual vision. Why is it so important to you to preserve your freedom and individual vision as a filmmaker and artist?
SCHOENBRUN: Because I don't want to be rich and depressed. That would suck, you know, like...
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SCHOENBRUN: My people, like, trans people, are not, like, rich and depressed. They're poor and depressed.
(LAUGHTER)
SCHOENBRUN: Or they're poor and doing their best. And I'd rather be one of them than be some isolated person in Malibu who has to go to a job every day that they hate. Although Mattel, if you're listening, "Barbie 2," I will make an exception. I will even take a meeting if you give me final cut, carte blanche. And just think about this. "Barbie" 1 - that movie ended at the gynecologist. Barbie had a sex change operation.
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SCHOENBRUN: What's more trans than that?
LUSE: Oh, my gosh. Oh, the places you could go with "Barbie 2." I would love to see it.
Jane, thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation.
SCHOENBRUN: Yeah, this was lovely. Thanks for having me.
LUSE: Thanks again to writer and director Jane Schoenbrun. "I Saw The TV Glow" is out in theaters now.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Hey, Brittany.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Hey, Brittany.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Hey, Brittany.
ALEXIS WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Hi, Brittany. This is your producer Alexis. And last week, we asked our listeners for great things to do for Mother's Day or memories around the holiday. We got a few responses, but I'm just going to share two with you. The first one comes from Marissa Baker (ph) in Chicago. She says, my husband makes a donation in my name to Black Mama's Day Bailout. I can't imagine a better way to celebrate Mother's Day than making sure other moms get to be with their kids.
LUSE: Ah. So thoughtful.
A WILLIAMS: And then this next one comes from Alan - and I believe it's pronounced Duzach (ph), but please correct me if I'm wrong - from Alameda, Calif. He says, when I was growing up - I'm 75 years old now - my mother was not a fan of Mother's Day. Perhaps it was because she was a down-to-earth, practical person and felt it was too commercialized, or - and I hope this wasn't the case - she felt she didn't deserve anything special. I loved her dearly and hounded her about what she'd like for Mother's Day. She responded, OK, what I'd really like and need is a can of motor oil. And that's exactly what I gave her.
The following year, I again begged the question. She said, since I grew up on a farm and enjoyed target practice, I'd like a 22 caliber rifle. Yeah. My siblings and I pitched in and bought her one. She was so darn happy. So much for brunch and flowers, huh? Thanks for helping me bring up this memory.
LUSE: Well, Alexis, thank you so much for relating those beautiful stories to me. Marissa and Alan, thank you so much for calling in with these incredible reflections. And, Alan, that is one heck of a story. I don't know how exactly a rifle would go over with my mom for Mother's Day, but you know what I say? Whatever Mom wants, that's what Mom gets. And while I'm not a mother myself, I think that mothering is one of the most incredible things that the human race is capable of. And I think celebrating that is just a beautiful thing.
However, I will say - OK, and this is me speaking from outside the mom club, OK? So take this with a grain of salt. I will say, I think the way that we think about Mother's Day celebrations - we might have it backwards. On Mother's Day, instead of, like, bringing mom breakfast in bed or taking her out to brunch, why don't we instead give mothers the day off to do what they want to do? I've seen a few TikTok videos where moms are talking about what their ideal Mother's Day would be. Usually, it involves maybe perhaps having breakfast with their family, but the real highlight of the day seems to be them checking into a hotel, possibly getting some type of massage but mostly ordering room service, maybe having a glass of wine or two.
I mean, I don't know. I don't have any kids. But when I think about, you know, an ideal day for me that involves no responsibilities and obligations, I don't know. I'm also seeing a hotel room. I'm also seeing maybe a four-hour nap. I'm also seeing a Nancy Myers marathon in a nice, cushy hotel bed. But that's just a little brain food for you to chew on as you're thinking about what you're going to do for your mom. Now, all that being said, I don't currently have hotel money for you, mom, my mom. So I hope you enjoy the floral arrangement you have coming (laughter).
Anyway, thank you so much to those who submitted their memories and suggestions for Mother's Day. Now, if you want to be heard on an upcoming Hey Brittany, I have a topic I know some of you out there can help you with. But to give you some background info, next week, we have director and author Miranda July on the show to talk about her new book, "All Fours." It is a juicy read. It follows a middle-aged woman on a journey of self discovery in perimenopause. So for the next Hey Brittany, I want to know from you all. What do you like about middle age? What do you hate about it? And if you're not middle aged, how do you imagine it? Let me know. I am over here trying to get the juice, trying to get the secrets. Fill me in. Send us a voice memo at [email protected]. That's [email protected].
This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.
A WILLIAMS: Alexis Williams.
LUSE: This episode was edited by...
JESSICA PLACZEK, BYLINE: Jessica Placzek.
LUSE: Engineering support came from...
KO TAKASUGI-CZERNOWIN, BYLINE: Ko Takasugi-Czernowin.
LUSE: Our executive producer is...
VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is...
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.
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