A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, June 21, 2025

I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

Justice Smith and Jack Haven in I Saw the TV Glow

Cast: Justice Smith, Jack Haven, Ian Foreman, Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan, Danielle Deadwyler, Fred Durst, Conner O'Malley, Emma Portner, Madeline Riley, Amber Benson. Screenplay: Jane Schoenbrun. Cinematography: Eric Yue. Production design: Brandon Tonner-Connelly. Film editing: Sofi Marshall. Music: Alex G. 

Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow uses the horror movie genre as a springboard into a fascinating and enigmatic fable of identity, gender and otherwise. Teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Jack Haven) form a bond over a TV series called The Pink Opaque, finding in it an alternative reality to that of their suburban home town. In time, Maddy comes to take that alternative as the true reality and tries to escape into it, while Owen remains grounded but troubled as he grows older. Hallucinatory visuals provided by Eric Yue's cinematography and Brandon Tonner-Connelly's set designs immerse the audience in what could be just a story of the effects of pop culture on impressionable minds, but in a larger interpretation is a parable about the problems of feeling different in a conformist culture. 

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