“I know how it’s going to end now. I’m going inside the video, through the computer, into the screen.” – Casey, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
“What if I really was someone else? Very far away on the other side of the television screen” – Maddy, I Saw the TV Glow.
A tulpa is a mystical concept that’s rooted in Tibetan Buddhism where an imaginary entity becomes real and gains sentience if enough people validate its existence and give it power. It’s an idea that runs rampant in horror, albeit typically with individuals and monsters, rather than planes of existence. Tulpas always involve fiction being brought into reality once they gain enough agency. Humanity has a natural curiosity and appetite for delusion, whether it’s something like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, or a more sinister idea like Slenderman. However, who’s to say which of these concepts are comforting and which are menacing? These delusions serve different purposes for different people, which can become a fascinating exploration of identity and desire.
Jane Schoenbrun is a filmmaker who’s deeply interested in society’s relationship with media and the tulpa-like experience that’s triggered when fiction invades real life, and vice versa. Their soothingly anarchic filmmaking has wrestled with comparable themes in each of their works. However, Schoenbruns’s latest feature, I Saw the TV Glow – which is also their most fully realized work – deconstructs and evolves this running commentary on fantasy, reality, and escapist storytelling. This helps elevate I Saw the TV Glow – as well as Schoenbrun’s entire filmography – to greater heights that are the powerful culmination of an ever-evolving relationship with identity and media. I Saw the TV Glow is a staggering accomplishment, but this text grows much richer when it’s viewed in the larger context of Schoenbrun’s first two feature films, A Self-Induced Hallucination and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. One could label these works as a deeply personal trilogy that examines the blurring of reality, fiction, and identity.
Each film in Schoenbrun’s “Self-Induced Hallucination” trilogy follows lost individuals who escape into media as a safety net, only for someone else to try and co-opt their narrative as this protective shield becomes a sinister force of nature. These protagonists – whether it’s Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser from A Self-Induced Hallucination, Casey (Anna Cobb) from We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, or Owen (Justice Smith) from I Saw the TV Glow all share an emotional and spiritual connection with media. They don’t just find solace in their respective media passions, but they use it to disassociate from reality. It becomes a healing coping mechanism when the real world is too much to bear or too alienating to understand. Outcasts can retreat and feel accepted in these virtual spaces. These are worlds where individuals can fully be themselves due to the anonymity and avatars behind them. Schoenbrun consistently uses this as a way to discuss and dissect identity, duality, and how to reconcile these extremes. This reaches its cathartic apex in I Saw The TV Glow, which mirrors Schoenbrun’s own understanding of their trans identity and who they really are.
A Self-Induced Hallucination is a fascinating experiment of a film that most people don’t even know exists and has rarely received public screenings (although it can be watched in its entirety, thanks to Schoenbrun, on The Internet Archive). The documentary is completely comprised of hundreds of YouTube videos that discuss, unpack, praise, and question the internet’s infamous Slenderman boogeyman. A Self-Induced Hallucination goes deep down this apocryphal rabbit hole as its online subjects lose themselves in the blurred space between fiction and reality that’s been created.
So much of the online Slenderman discourse is heightened fiction, but these stories and their growing mythology still led two 12-year-olds, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, to stab their friend Payton Leutner 19 times as a sacrifice to this virtual specter. Some documentaries are criticized for their intervening narrators and storytellers that manipulate their footage’s message. The opposite is true in A Self-Induced Hallucination as Schoenbrun lets their material speak for itself with no controlling voice over. In doing so, A Self-Induced Hallucination becomes the perfect introduction to Schoenbrun’s point of view. It’s a scrappy debut film, but its message is deafening. It’s a movie that plays even better after I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair have been seen and deciphered.
Schoenburn’s follow-up feature and their first narrative film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, elaborates upon Hallucination’s themes through its twisted trajectory. The film also examines a viral online phenomenon — this time the fictional horror augmented-reality game, “The World’s Fair Challenge,” instead of Slenderman — but they’re both cut from the same creepypasta cloth. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair even mixes its unique idea with Bloody Mary-esque rituals that pull from real life. Casey, a lonely teenager, finds a sense of purpose and community in the World’s Fair Challenge that brings her in contact with a fellow online user and fan, known only as “JLB” (Michael J. Rogers). Casey also loses sight of herself, and existence as a whole, when she increasingly commits to this “game.” Curiously, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair asks the question of whether JLB is more dangerous than any online challenge.
In I Saw the TV Glow, a confused boy named Owen becomes activated and reborn upon his exposure to a young-adult supernatural TV show, The Pink Opaque, that may be more than just a piece of fiction. In fact, it might be the realest thing in the world. It might actually be the world. Owen’s screen-based baptism is accompanied by another Pink Opaque fan, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), and these two embark on diverse-yet-intertwining journeys where fantasy and reality become indistinguishable. For Owen, it’s like somebody has sat on a TV remote and turned the world’s volume up to 100. Owen, just like Casey, Anissa, Morgan, and the hundreds of Slenderman video channels before him, finds beauty and meaning in this blurred space.
There’s a sequence in I Saw The TV Glow where Owen undergoes something incredibly personal during The Pink Opaque’s series finale. It makes him feel seen and whole. This epiphany is immediately undercut by the executive producer title card that interrupts and co-opts Own’s experience. His love for this television show is being taken advantage of, commodified, and exploited. This betrayal is also explored in A Self-Induced Hallucination as individuals get absorbed into the Slenderverse and in World’s Fair with how JLB takes over and appropriates Casey’s relationship with her online viral phenomenon.
It’s perhaps only fitting that Schoenbrun experienced a similar scenario in real-life during their youth when they used to frequent online fan forums for Scream. Schoenbrun and other online forum members would create Scream fanfiction where users were present in each other’s stories and turned into fictional versions of themselves. They’d even get killed and become casualties to narrative plot twists. Schoenbrun’s experience is less vicious than that of Casey or Owen, but it’s still a case where individuals rewrote and took control of each other’s narratives where reality blurs together with a beloved fictional space.
In all of Schoenbrun’s texts – but particularly I Saw the TV Glow – the magical and once-pure nature of childhood becomes a cancer that corrupts and destroys memory, identity, and reality. There’s no safety in nostalgia and, if anything, nostalgia is the trigger for this harmful metastasis as characters learn that they can never go home again because that home no longer exists. The building may still be there, but the wallpaper, layout, and architecture are different and abnormal. Schoenbrun’s filmography examines that the preservation and inherent degradation of media can result in a changed relationship with this media, but also their own identity. This is most pronounced in I Saw the TV Glow as Owen literally transforms and his body decays by the end of the movie as he rejects his destiny. However, there are hints of this in both of Schoenbrun’s other films, whether it’s mental and psychological degradation or just a growing complacency and confusion over one’s self and where reality and fantasy begin and end.
A Self-Induced Hallucination builds upon this by its intentionally naïve presentation of the Internet as something that starts as a playful and fun virtual space to how it’s become a dangerous, influencing, grooming force. The “Like and Subscribe” closings to each video, which the film poignantly includes, is the apex of this process and how this humble request for validation and an emboldened identity has now become the norm online and a self-destructive feedback loop. Casey engages in the same process in World’s Fair as she searches for meaning, identity, and validation. She makes online videos, just like those who are deep in the “Slenderverse” that beg for validation and community, even if she doesn’t explicitly ask for a larger audience. By the time that I Saw the TV Glow comes around, Owen is the living manifestation of this experience. He doesn’t have a YouTube channel or internet persona, but this passion has invaded and taken over his life and without the right community and support then this false front of reality will suffocate him to death and snuff him out of existence. Owen may not realize it, but he needs this validation to survive, just like the protagonists in Schoenbrun’s other films. This previously innocent and healing passion becomes a poisonous elixir.
It’s surely no coincidence that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’s Casey pledges that she’ll disappear into the screen and nobody will know what’s happened to her, which is ostensibly what happens to Maddy in I Saw the TV Glow before her final act return. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair does conclude with Casey gone, while JLB attempts to control the narrative and insist that he’s continued to see her. The audience is left to doubt whether these off-screen interactions have actually happened or are JLB’s attempts at gaining ownership of Casey’s story.
I Saw the TV Glow does in fact feature Maddy’s return, but Owen has no interest in telling her story or putting words in her mouth. It’s almost as if he’s scared to talk about her and give her narrative power in the process, not because he doesn’t believe it, but because he’s terrified that he’s missed his own opportunity to escape the Midnight Realm and return to reality. Both films hinge on a central character’s disappearance, but the way in which this absence becomes a longing sadness in I Saw the TV Glow is what’s significant. Casey transforms and becomes what she’s destined to be, whereas Owen — who gains clarity but fails to act — is resigned to a suffocating death.
I Saw the TV Glow’s final act almost functions as a bizarro version of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’s conclusion. In the latter, JLB insists to Casey that the World’s Fair isn’t real and that he’s worried about her well-being. Casey deflects and pretends that she’s aware of this and that her videos – and entire existence — are just elaborate subterfuge and an extension of the game, by proxy. Casey pushes this narrative as a defense mechanism once her safe haven is threatened and erased. I Saw the TV Glow takes the opposite approach wherein Owen is told that The Pink Opaque isn’t just a TV show, but, in fact, his reality and that he’s from this “fictional world.” This time around, the protagonist protests and worries about this interloper, rather than the other way around.
Owen is presented to have the control and authority, yet it’s ultimately revealed that Maddy is right and that he’s been living a destructive fantasy that might seem innocuous for now, but is slowly killing him. It’s a chilling subversion to Schoenbrun’s past film that argues that not only is the World’s Fair real after all, but that we’re all destined to perish if we don’t go there. It evolves from a fantasy to an essential truth. Slenderman, the World’s Fair, and The Pink Opaque aren’t the self-induced hallucinations — it’s everything else that is. These escapes and communities are necessary for survival. It’s not the “delusion” itself that’s important, but rather humanity’s desire for such a thing. It’s a staggering place for this trilogy of films to reach, but one that’s organically attained through Schoenbrun’s own journey of self-discovery where they’ve been willing to look inward and embrace the static, rather than hit the mute button.
