For the director of I Saw the TV Glow, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was just the start

There is an honesty to I Saw the TV Glow’s depiction of growing up as a lonely, fantasy-obsessed kid in the ’90s that makes it resonate. And that’s true regardless of whether you, like writer / director Jane Schoenbrun, were a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The film’s mind-bending story centers on Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). The two outsiders spark an unlikely friendship over their shared love of The Pink Opaque, a fictional fantasy / horror series that feels like a twisted mashup of The Adventures of Pete & Pete and Are You Afraid of the Dark? Between its angsty, lo-fi atmosphere and pivots into explicit B-movie horror, almost every frame speaks to how large an impact Buffy had on Schoenbrun’s young imagination. But you can also hear Schoenbrun channeling the ideas of queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as the film explores what it really means to see one’s self in fiction.

When I spoke with Schoenbrun recently, they explained that they wanted I Saw the TV Glow to reflect a queerness that was “very inherent in the undertones of a lot of those ’90s TV shows.” Networks didn’t always have the guts to be open about it, but Schoenbrun said those shows created a moment that’s worth remembering because it’s “where a generation of queer people first recognized themselves.”

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Important things first. What’s your favorite episode of Buffy?

Oh my god, you know the right questions to ask. I’d say the two that vie for the top position are the musical, “Once More, with Feeling,” and the season 2 finale, “Becoming, Part Two.” But I think “Becoming” wins out. I love the musical, and I’m ready to rewatch it literally any day of the week. But “Becoming” was a formative text for me, and it embodies everything I love about Buffy and everything the show meant to me at the time. 

I found Buffy at the end of season 1, and throughout my adolescence, the show was this really important thing for me that I couldn’t really talk to other people about or express how much I loved because I was scared of getting made fun of. There’s this line in I Saw the TV Glow that looms large: “isn’t that a show for girls?” And I was very conscious of that kind of judgment growing up. It kind of created shame within me about how obsessed with Buffy I was.

“Becoming” is actually a word that I’ve started using in place of “transition” because I think it’s much better. [Late French philosopher Gilles] Deleuze uses that term a lot, and one of his big ideas is that we’re all constantly in a state of becoming. I like “becoming” better than transition because it nods to the fact that you’re not going from one discrete beginning to one discrete ending but, rather, you’re always in the process of arriving. 

It’s so easy to read a very intentional kind of textual — not even subtextual — queerness in “Becoming” looking back on it now. How tuned in to that queerness were you as a kid, though?

There’s that beat where Buffy comes out to her mom about being a vampire slayer, and Joyce says, “Have you tried not being a slayer?” Buffy talks about how she wishes that she could be like every other girl talking about boys or doing homework, but she has to save the world again. The episode hit for reasons I didn’t entirely understand at the time. I just felt so much empathy for this girl who needed to become an adult too fast — who was more mature than her mom in that moment and knew that taking care of her responsibilities meant that she was going to feel very alone in some central way. 

I think that speaks to Joss Whedon really knowing how to write a fight scene that also can make you feel something, which you don’t see all that much anymore, especially in current Marvel movies. The new rule of the blockbusters is that all of the emotional stuff happens in the first two hours, and then you have to sit there and watch machines smash each other up for 45 minutes. But “Becoming” has this beautiful sword fight between Buffy and Angel, where he’s like, “Take away all of the things in your life, what’s left?” And Buffy grabs his sword at the last moment and goes, “I am.”

Even though I couldn’t fully grasp it, it wasn’t hard to see flickers of a queer or trans experience in that affirmation of selfhood in the face of absolute isolation from your friends and family. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

It’s fascinating to see how different Owen and Maddy’s connections to The Pink Opaque are. They both love the show, but Owen always feels almost like he’s being pulled along on this ride with Maddy. Talk to me about Owen and Maddy as two sides of the same coin as people who are recognizing pieces of themselves in media.

I wrote this film in the early stages of my physical becoming / transition maybe a year or two out from my own internal egg crack or realization of self-identity. I wrote it in the very unpleasant stage of leaving home — leaving behind all of the things that I had thought of as making my life stable and real but that were actually repressing and keeping me from growing toward the person I needed to be. 

The movie is torn between and sympathetic to these two perspectives — pre-egg crack and post-egg crack. Owen is a person who wants to hide from that glow, or this signal that’s coming for them and showing them that the person they are isn’t the person that they are. Throughout the movie, we see Owen as this person who will do everything he can as he deteriorates to avoid really recognizing that in himself. Whereas Maddy is the part of me that, by sheer force of will, unearthed this resolve to march forward toward the unknown and all of the inherent pain in it. There’s this great love between those two sides Owen and Maddy represent because there is still something kindred at the center for both of them. 

I tried to mirror this in [The Pink Opaque characters] Isabel and Tara. It’s like this metaphor of there being this show starring these two girls who fight monsters and save the world. It’s like Buffy almost gets cut in two. Maddy tells us in some exposition about the show that one of them is a scaredy-cat who’s afraid of her own shadow and the other is this tough badass. And in my mind, those are two aspects of one’s pre- and post-transition selves.

We see The Pink Opaque change in tone and production values over time as Owen grows up, and it works so well to illustrate how we start to see things that we loved as children differently as adults.

An idea that’s pretty core to my work and almost like a Rosetta stone through which to translate TV Glow and [my previous film] We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is just asking yourself about the film’s relationship to realism at any given moment. Both films have these elements of fourth-wall-breaking postmodernist expression, and on every layer of these stories, we’re somewhere on a spectrum between artifice and something that feels more real. With World’s Fair, especially, the question isn’t necessarily, “Is this real? Yes or no?” But, rather, “What is both real and not real about this?”

That framework informed how I crafted TV Glow, which is so much about memory and the way that a television show can feel one way when you’re a kid and another when you revisit it later in life. But it’s also the ways in which life can feel both magical and utterly devoid of magic at times. With Owen, what’s tragic about that moment at the end of the film when he’s watching this weird, shitty kids show version of The Pink Opaque on Netflix is how he describes his feelings. It’s not just, “This was lame, and I’ve outgrown it.” He says he feels embarrassed, and what he’s actually dealing with there is shame. That’s maybe one of the deepest expressions of dysphoria in the film. 

Both I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair work as standalone features, but they’re also the first two pieces of what you’ve been calling your Screen Trilogy. Has your vision for the third installment of this larger project grown or shifted?

The third piece is the biggest one. These first two films have used screens as a metaphor about the space between spectator and screen and an articulation of dysphoria — that feeling of being a spectator in your own life rather than on stage. Casey says it at the beginning of World’s Fair in one of her videos when she’s describing her “symptoms” from playing the World’s Fair challenge. And Maddy says it in the planetarium when they’re talking about the process of burying themself alive. Both characters are talking about feeling as if they were watching themselves on a screen from all the way across the room. 

Where we leave Owen in TV Glow is actually almost like the very beginning of a journey where that distance might begin to close. That’s not something that happens quickly because, in a world where trans people are so externally branded as imposters by the culture around us, how can you ever be fully healed? 

Public Access After World is a trilogy of books I’m writing that are essentially my Dune. It’s my epic and me trying to do Buffy, Lost, or Harry Potter. I’ve created this huge mythology about a giant cast of characters with a story that spans centuries and sprawls across alternate universes. It’s got a scope that a 90-minute film couldn’t hold, and it’s about transition, becoming, and truly closing that gap between self and screen until you feel like you’re approximating some form of real life.

And would you even want to see it on the big screen?

I hope to adapt it to some kind of visual medium eventually, though I haven’t decided whether that’s television or a series of films yet. But it feels like the culmination of this cycle I’ve been moving through. And right now, I’m just trying to get it on the page in a way that I can be proud of.