I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024)

Jane Schoenbrun's magnificent debut feature We're All Going to the World's Fair was a definitive tragedy of cultural emptiness. Its lead character's cynical mining of a fictional arcade game as a replacement for a personality, as well as a bevy of niche internet content creators' eagerness to do the same, pointed to, as I wrote in 2022, "a culture that's been completely drained from all sides, has even run out of the fumes of past successes, and is now running on the fumes of past failures. To paraphrase Daniel Plainview, we're a milkshake that's been drunk up."

Their second film, I Saw the TV Glow, not only is a brilliant film itself, but lays even another layer onto World's Fair in its use of a retro pop culture reference point as a gateway to self-realization. Where World's Fair despaired at its characters grasping for human connection through pop culture that's been reduced to ashes, I Saw the TV Glow creates a piece of young-adult nostalgia that finds two lost souls and binds them together.

When 12-year-old Owen (Ian Foreman) sees a commercial for a Saturday-night young-adult show called The Pink Opaque, his life is changed. Then he sees 14-year-old Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading an episode guide for the show, and asks her about it. His parents won't let him stay up to watch it. Maddy invites him to sneak away one Saturday night so they can watch it. Soon, the show becomes the conduit for both of them to discover themselves in ways they've otherwise been unable, and Owen (played as a teenager and grown-up by Justice Smith) is led to confront... something about himself that the show gives him an avenue to confront.

I say "something" because the movie does not express Owen's dilemma explicitly. It doesn't express it because Owen cannot. He has no emotional language to deal with it apart from what The Pink Opaque gives him. It most closely parallels the transgender experience--Schoenbrun is trans and has been open about how the isolation in their work springs from being trans in an unsupportive environment--but is not completely exclusive to it. When Owen is asked whether he likes girls or boys, he replies, “I dunno. I think I like TV shows.” He doesn’t know who he is, and the show is the only way he’s gotten close to finding out. 

Repression is the evil at the center of I Saw the TV Glow. Owen's home is not exactly conducive: Mom (Danielle Deadwyler) is loving but fragile, and often needs Owen's protection more than vice versa; and Dad (Fred Durst, who's very good) is aloof and dismissive. It isn't long before Owen is given the ultimatum of setting out on his own with only Maddy by his side, or retreating into the world of the devil he knows. The movie has clearly been delivered by someone who has tried the second option, and Schoenbrun’s portrayal of a closeted life here is as unnerving as anything in World’s Fair, or for that matter, Skinamarink (a movie that was championed by Schoenbrun on its festival circuit, also by a queer filmmaker, also about a child waking up to realize that his parents cannot help him).

It's a risk for Schoenbrun to include a fictional TV show within their movie, as art-within-art is often less credible than its characters claim it to be. That is not the case with The Pink Opaque, which feels as real to us as it does to Owen and Maddy. It's a blend of Are You Afraid of the Dark? with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a horror anthology show on the Young Adult Network about two young girls (Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) who meet at summer camp and discover that they have a psychic connection. They live "on the other side of the county" from one another, and after summer camp they only communicate psychically. There's a "Monster of the Week" format a la The X-Files, as well as a "Big Bad" called Mr. Melancholy, a sinister Man-in-the-Moon who constantly hovers over the two heroines, a visual nod to the imagery of Georges Méliès's "A Trip to the Moon" as quoted by The Smashing Pumpkins in the video for "Tonight, Tonight" (covered by Jordan's musical alter ego Snail Mail on the soundtrack). 

It's the sort of show that early-to-mid millennials like Schoenbrun (born in 1987) and myself (1982) remember as being more genuinely scary than its tweener marketing seemed to suggest. But what appeals to Owen and Maddy is not just the scary monsters, but the idea that there's a kind of friendship that transcends an unsympathetic world. That even in Mr. Melancholy's world, there's someone out there who gets you. I'd have watched that show.

But just as we become comfortable with the idea that The Pink Opaque will be our savior, Schoenbrun pulls the rug out and immerses us in pain and confusion. Owen's few moments of clarity are buried, both literally and figuratively. Maddy disappears, and so does The Pink Opaque, in a crushing final episode sequence featuring a performance from Emma Portner (as a character I will not reveal) that is among the most visually arresting I've seen, and truly scary. 

Schoenbrun reminds us that as much as pop culture can offer us connection, friendship, commonality, it can be a scapegoat as well. It's the "real" world that morphs into the nightmare, and it becomes clear that what Maddy has offered Owen is not a TV show but a way out: of the closet, of town, of an unloving home.

In the end, Owen is submerged into a fantasy nightmare, but not the one we expect. Smith's and Lundy-Paine's deeply felt performances anchor the movie as their characters pass each other in the night: she going out, he heading further in. Her posture gaining more composure and confidence, his shrinking to the point where he is both figuratively and literally suffocating. A choice Schoenbrun makes which seems at first to be too on-the-nose is to have Owen break the fourth wall and narrate directly to us, but as the movie goes on we realize why it is Owen telling us this directly rather than showing us. We realize why Owen only hears what Maddy is telling him through the lens of a TV show.

I think the key is the central scene at the Double Lunch bar, where there are two musical interludes that function as Owen’s pivotal point, kind of like the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Dr. The two songs, respectively by Sloppy Jane and King Woman, parallel Owen's state in the final scene: first a sedated, passive acceptance, then a guttural primal scream.

**** out of ****

Note: I Saw the TV Glow is rated PG-13. This is correct, as there are young people not represented sufficiently in media who will feel very seen by this movie.

UNFROSTED (2024): The toaster pastry exposé that the woke left doesn't want you to see

There's a moment in Jerry Seinfeld's 2002 documentary Comedian where we see an up-and-coming standup by the name of Orny Adams receiving notes from Seinfeld's close associate, George Shapiro, on his comedy. Adams, portrayed as the heel of the movie against Seinfeld's consummate professional, resists the criticism, insults Shapiro, insists that his jokes are funny the way he wrote them. 

I thought of that moment a lot while watching Unfrosted, Seinfeld's goofy supposition about the creation of the Pop Tart. Seinfeld, I assume, thought it was funny the way he wrote it, and I assume no one had the clout to tell him the truth. It is a movie severely in need of a note, and the note should have been "Stop."

Tongue-in-cheek docudramas are in vogue right now: spit into a Roku and you'll hit at least three seriocomic narrations of some innovation or another of varying significance. The iMac. The Blackberry. The Flamin' Hot Cheeto. I vaguely remember a movie from a few years ago about the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. Not the wiper itself, mind you--someone else did that--but the thing that makes it intermittent.

However saturated the market is, a somewhat ironic retelling of Kellogg's legendary breakfast treat's inception might actually have been an interesting idea, but that's not what Unfrosted is. Instead, director/co-writer/producer/star Seinfeld has spun what are presumably a few true details into a broad comedy of anachronisms, slapstick, and anthropomorphized commercial characters. He populates the movie with almost every comic actor alive. It's less like its docudrama and biopic brethren than it is an overloaded overbudgeted action comedy like The Cannonball Run. And like that movie (and the windshield wiper) its effectiveness is intermittent.

At least one critic has already deemed Unfrosted the worst movie of the century. It isn't, and it's not even the worst of the young year: the aftershock of Matthew Vaughn's dizzying, flavorless and brightly colored Froot Loop of a comedy Argylle still lingers. It would be very difficult with this cast for Unfrosted to come up completely empty. But with this much fruit pectin hurled at the wall, more should have stuck. If it isn't the worst movie of the century, it's bad in a way I never imagined it could be.

Bob Cabana (Seinfeld), a high executive at Kellogg Inc., run by the eponymous Edsel Kellogg (a made-up character played by Jim Gaffigan), happens upon a couple of street urchins in the rival Post company's dumpster. The little rascals are snacking on some jelly from an experimental treat. Cabana tastes it, and it's delicious. Right away he commissions a similar venture from Kellogg, and enlists the help of Donna Stankowski, a NASA technician (also not a real person).

Okay, I thought: he's making a point about how corporations capitalize even on their refuse. That would have been an interesting movie: putting Pop Tarts alongside Bunch'a Crunch, Oreo bits, broken lasagna, and all the other products that amount to packaged garbage. But nope, that's not followed through. In fact, it seems Seinfeld, along with co-writers Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Dave Marder, has made every effort to avoid any cultural significance whatsoever. Characters enter the film with only a passing resemblance to the real life figures they represent: Amy Schumer as a cunning Marjorie Post; James Marsden as a bright and buzzy Jack Lalanne; Bobby Moynihan as a Mario-esque Chef Boyardee; Jack McBrayer as a hesitant Steve Schwinn (of the bicycles). References are made to the Cuban Missile Crisis and January 6th, without much substance. I don't know why they choose to portray Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) as a hostile drunk, or legendary Tony the Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft (Hugh Grant) as a prissy self-centered hack. Someone thought it was funny, I suppose.

A few disparate moments are amusing. I like the two scrappy kids (Bailey Sheetz and Eleanor Sweeney) who keep getting involved in the operations. As two Kellogg employees, Ronny Chieng and Sarah Cooper (remember her?) have some good lines. There's an in-character cameo appearance from Jon Hamm and John Slattery that works because there's some funny writing in it, and Seinfeld & co. don't simply rely on their appearance for a sole laugh. As President Kennedy, Bill Burr breaks through the hacky joke of the situation (JFK likes girls???) and gives an actual good comic performance.

I'd invoke these moments as whispers of what could have been, but to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm, "could" doesn't necessarily mean "should." Unfrosted will leave no cultural footprint, has no social relevance, and has no real reason for existence other than to be funny for 90 minutes, which it mostly is not. Seinfeld, in his recent emergence as an anti-PC activist, has claimed he wanted to make his movie the opposite of Barbie. Mission accomplished, sir.

** out of ****

Note: Orny Adams is still working and he is very funny. Some of his shows are available on YouTube.