Jane Schoen­brun: ​‘I think of film as a medi­um that is going to dis­ap­pear eventually’

Most trans peo­ple grow up with­out the lan­guage to under­stand their own expe­ri­ences, and so could only see them­selves obscure­ly through strange res­o­nances and echoes in child­hood media. Jane Schoenbrun’s break­out film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair ful­ly embod­ied this process of cre­at­ing a lan­guage from spare parts, but their new film, I Saw the TV Glow, about two friends who see flick­ers of their queer­ness in a TV show called The Pink Opaque, goes fur­ther. It might well become the most wide­ly seen movie about grow­ing up with gen­der dys­pho­ria. Apt­ly, and some­what painful­ly, I spoke to Jane on Zoom from my fam­i­ly home in the sub­urbs where I grew up, in the place where I most need­ed a movie like this.

LWLies: I think most trans peo­ple have some ver­sion of The Pink Opaque, some­thing that spoke to our queer­ness before we had the words to describe it, but do you think there’s any­thing latent­ly queer in them? Or did we just have noth­ing else to speak through?

Schoen­brun: I think it’s in there because queer­ness is just a part of the human expe­ri­ence. Eve Sedg­wick talks about the dis­tinc­tion between homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as an iden­ti­ty and homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as an act or expe­ri­ence; some­thing more dis­creet than the whole­sale oth­er­ing that hap­pens when you say ​“I am het­ero­sex­u­al” and ​“That per­son is homo­sex­u­al”. To try to sequester queer­ness into a box some­where else, whether that’s a minor­i­ty group or even in the enter­tain­ment land­scape, as a sub­genre on Net­flix, I think that’s impos­si­ble and prob­a­bly born of a neu­rot­ic straight impulse that oth­ers and sequesters deviance of all kinds… All of this is just a heady way to say that there are flick­ers of gay shit in so much of what we read and watch.

As a trans film­mak­er mak­ing pop-cul­tur­al, some­what com­mer­cial work in a land­scape where trans peo­ple haven’t been able to artic­u­late transness in their own lan­guage, I feel real­ly pas­sion­ate about recon­tex­tu­al­is­ing and evolv­ing our lan­guage away from this oth­er­ing gaze. I’m inter­est­ed in hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions about things that feel trans. And when I go back to Buffy [the Vam­pire Slay­er, the inspi­ra­tion for The Pink Opaque], there are these themes of cho­sen fam­i­ly and feel­ing oth­ered, but even the tone and aes­thet­ic feel deeply queer to me. In I Saw the TV Glow Mad­dy and Owen are catch­ing some­thing in the screen, it’s not just them putting them­selves into it. Before we had the idea of ​“queer bait­ing” there were just sig­nals of oth­er­ness and a gaze of feel­ing queer that were sub­lim­i­nal­ly being pro­ject­ed and picked up by peo­ple who need­ed them, like me.

It feels like the idea of transness is becom­ing more explic­it in each sub­se­quent film. Are you inter­est­ed in con­tin­u­ing that trajectory?

I tend to think of it less in those terms than in terms of the mys­tery that I’m explor­ing in my life at each point. My next film is very much about my expe­ri­ence com­ing into my body as a trans per­son post-tran­si­tion and explor­ing sex­u­al­i­ty for the first time in an unre­pressed way. Where­as A Self-Induced Hal­lu­ci­na­tion is a clas­sic repres­sion movie, it’s a bit of a cry for help, with a flick­er of hope that the tul­pa, the self-induced hal­lu­ci­na­tion, can be some­thing lib­er­a­to­ry, some­thing as real as any oth­er fic­tion we’ve craft­ed our lives around. I think that was me reach­ing for the emo­tion­al and intel­lec­tu­al courage to come out to myself. And We’re All Going World’s Fair was a movie I wrote very much still in that process, but by the end of writ­ing it and while mak­ing it I had found the lan­guage, and then TV Glow was writ­ten in the volatile ear­ly peri­od of tran­si­tion. So it makes sense, based on what I was explor­ing, that the depic­tions of transness are get­ting more overt, but I’d hes­i­tate to call it more oblique, it was more about hav­ing the work mir­ror my own evolv­ing inquiry.

You men­tioned first explor­ing sex­u­al­i­ty, and when­ev­er Owen’s sex­u­al­i­ty comes up in TV Glow, he doesn’t seem ready to look at it. Do you think that comes from his strug­gles with his body or is he, in a deep­er sense, asexual?

I don’t con­sid­er myself asex­u­al, but I flirt­ed with the iden­ti­ty for a bit. My post-tran­si­tion jour­ney has been about heal­ing from a lot of trau­ma that made sex some­thing I want­ed to avoid. I had kissed one per­son and had sex with one per­son in my 34 years before tran­si­tion, and I nev­er had an expe­ri­ence with sex that wasn’t dis­so­cia­tive because when we have sex we’re bring­ing our own iden­ti­ty into it. I think about the dick pic as the pre­em­i­nent sym­bol of the fact that sex is about gen­der too: men aren’t just enjoy­ing the oth­er per­son, there’s some­thing par­tic­i­pa­to­ry, there’s some­thing of them­selves they’re bring­ing to it. And to me that was just hor­ri­fy­ing. So for Owen, he knows that to answer those ques­tions – do you like boys or do you like girls – would mean un-repress­ing some­thing in him­self that he’s absolute­ly not ready to un-repress. And so that latent ener­gy goes into some­thing he can be him­self with, a screen that doesn’t have to see him back.

Do you think there are dif­fer­ences between recog­nis­ing those feel­ings in a dis­tant TV screen as opposed to the more par­tic­i­pa­to­ry internet?

I think there are dif­fer­ences, but in both cas­es you get a form of role-play. In World’s Fair, we under­stand there is an ele­ment of per­for­mance that Casey is bring­ing to these inter­net videos, per­haps even a lot; we learn at the end of the movie that Casey isn’t even her real name. And Owen and Maddy’s rela­tion­ship to the show involves a sim­i­lar form of role­play­ing, even the process of sit­ting down to watch it. When Owen is watch­ing his first episode he isn’t think­ing ​“Well, that was a good episode of tele­vi­sion”, he’s enter­ing a dif­fer­ent space; he’s able to feel part of a more expan­sive real­i­ty than the one he’s able to access oth­er­wise. When the two share inti­ma­cy, it’s usu­al­ly in the form of role­play, like the tat­too scene, where there is an explic­it desire to transform.

In your movies char­ac­ters sud­den­ly van­ish, whether it’s Casey at the end of World’s Fair or Mad­dy in TV Glow, in a way that feels real­ly evoca­tive and spe­cif­ic to me.

I think of film as a medi­um that is going to dis­ap­pear even­tu­al­ly; after 90 min­utes those char­ac­ters you’re com­muning with are going to van­ish from real­i­ty. I want to make work that’s active­ly engaged with the ephemer­al space between unre­al­i­ty and the feel­ing that some­thing is real because when we watch a movie we’re enter­ing a space where real­i­ty begins to unteth­er, in some way.

On anoth­er lev­el, I’m mak­ing a film where all the char­ac­ters are part of a shared sub­con­scious, not to say that’s the only way to think of the work, but when Casey dis­ap­pears in World’s Fair and the view­er is left with JLB, I was try­ing to get at a feel­ing of dys­pho­ria I was feel­ing at the time, this trip from a child­hood bed­room to a lone­ly man’s. And sim­i­lar­ly in TV Glow, when you take Mad­dy and the TV Show away from Owen he has to try and reclaim that space for him­self. And per­haps at the end of the movie, when the lights go up and you’re back in your body, you won­der how you wres­tle with those war­ring parts of yourself.

I read that you made Jus­tice Smith in this movie and Ana Cobb in World’s Fair wear your high-school back­pack. Why was that object some­thing you clung to, that you found potent?

My inside joke with myself is that it’s like Sam Raimi’s old car that he would put in every sin­gle movie. I real­ly need to get it out of the stor­age unit where it’s being held, some­where in New Jer­sey, so I can put it in the next thing I make. I’m the type of per­son who will only replace an object when it’s absolute­ly bro­ken and the straps on my high school back­pack nev­er quite snapped. At one point a pen explod­ed in one of the com­part­ments and every time it rained the back­pack would leak through its pores and I would look down and my hands and real­ize that they were cov­ered in ink. But per­haps more than just say­ing that Casey and Owen are me, it’s that the lit­tle per­son walk­ing through high school with this back­pack on is still the me that’s mak­ing these movies.

Dur­ing Maddy’s long mono­logue, there are con­stel­la­tions pro­ject­ed over the scene and I noticed Aquar­ius cross her face, does astrol­o­gy have any mean­ing to you?

I’m not super into astrol­o­gy, and it often makes me feel guilty. It’s very much a queer obses­sion, so some­times I feel a lit­tle alien­at­ed from my com­mu­ni­ty. But I do remem­ber my pro­duc­er Sam Intili, who was one of my first post-tran­si­tion trans friends, very ear­ly on ask­ing me my sign and when I told them I was an Aquar­ius they were like, ​“Of course you are, you are a born Aquar­ius”. And that was one of the first times in my life where I felt like the label I had been assigned actu­al­ly matched who I was.

I Saw the TV Glow is show­ing as part of Sun­dance Lon­don 7 – 9 June 2024. A UK release will fol­low lat­er this year.