How Do You Make a Genuinely Weird Mainstream Movie?

Seconds into talking about their new movie, Jane Schoenbrun cannot help but bring up Freddy Got Fingered. Back in 2001, the comedian Tom Green's sole directorial effort—a work of avant-garde grossness meant to capitalize on his unlikely fame as an MTV talk-show host—was so universally despised that it essentially killed his career. "As a child of irony-poisoned internet culture, it's a personal favorite," Schoenbrun, who uses they/them pronouns, told me. They joked that Green's mindset while making the film must have been "My stock is really good right now, so I'm going to spend it all."

Right now Schoenbrun's stock is also really good. I Saw the TV Glow, their second feature, is being released by A24—a big step up from their micro-budgeted debut, We're All Going to the World's Fair. "It's like I'm aware of what the sellout options are, and then I'm also aware of what the Tom Green-suicide-mission options are—and I feel like I'm constantly trying to do both at the same time," they said.

I predict there will be no Golden Raspberry trophies (Green won five for Freddy Got Fingered) in Schoenbrun's future. I Saw the TV Glow is a major work—a frightening and complex exploration of childhood nostalgia, adult regret, and the ways our identity is shaped by pop culture. But it retains all of the creepy specificity that made Schoenbrun's debut so electrifying, with uncommon human tenderness bumping right up against mutated, half-formed monstrousness. Scale has not smoothed out Schoenbrun's idiosyncratic wrinkles—and whatever the future holds for them, "selling out" does not seem to be part of it. "Mattel asked me for a meeting at Sundance, and I was like, 'I value my life and dignity,'" Schoenbrun said with a laugh, remarking on the toy giant's post-Barbie expansion into cinema, which includes planned movies based on toys such as Polly Pocket and Hot Wheels. ("I don't think they'd make my Candy Land," they added, referring to the popular board game, which is actually owned by Hasbro. "My Candy Land has a lot of milky, creamy fluids.")

In an era when every buzzy indie director could be a meeting or two away from making a superhero movie, this disdain for modern Hollywood blockbusters is refreshing. Though Schoenbrun's style can be challenging, their films feel alive and contemporary; We're All Going to the World's Fair, for instance, taps into the disquieting world of online "creepypasta" communities and manages to viscerally capture the experience of late-night YouTube browsing. It's no wonder a company such as Mattel might be intrigued; for all the distancing strangeness of Schoenbrun's films, they're current in the exact way that would perk up an executive's ears.

I Saw the TV Glow is perhaps a little more accessible and straightforward—a tale about Owen (played by Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), disaffected teens who bond over their obsession with a '90s genre TV show called The Pink Opaque. Slowly, their reality begins to blur as villains and metaphysical concepts from the program seep into the real world. The dreamy narrative was directly influenced by Schoenbrun's own experiences. World's Fair, which is about a character seeking to transform her body through a strange online game, was written before Schoenbrun came out as trans. I Saw the TV Glow was written during their early months on hormones, and is powered by those specific, unsettled feelings.

"By the time I made [I Saw the TV Glow] … I was in love for the first time in my real body," Schoenbrun said. "That's the thing about transition … and I mean this quite literally: I wrote [the movie] as a child, I made it as a teenager, and I'm releasing it as not-quite-a-grown-up." Schoenbrun is in their late 30s, but transition often means going through a second coming-of-age, and they joked that their current mental age is around 24: "I'm trying to figure out how to be an adult."

In the film, Owen has a tenuous grasp of his own identity—a sense that's further stirred up by The Pink Opaque. But I Saw the TV Glow is not the kind of perfunctory narrative of self-actualization that Schoenbrun might get pitched in a studio meeting. "Owen's arc in the movie is one of deterioration, [to] a point where maybe he can start to become a thing that he briefly noticed in childhood but then lost for half of his life," Schoenbrun said. Owen's narrative isn't digestible or triumphant, and his investment in The Pink Opaque is more disturbing than empowering. Though Schoenbrun knows they're considered part of what they called "the LGBTQ umbrella," they still don't want to forget that trans people often face an unwelcoming reality in America. "I'm very cautious of assimilation," they said, acknowledging the tensions that artists must navigate in the industry.

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Schoenbrun is working outside the kinds of traditional structures that define so much of Hollywood storytelling; at the same time, it's hard to avoid the external influences that come knocking with any bigger production. So how does someone like Schoenbrun make something particularly radical on the scale demanded by mainstream moviemaking? "The narrative of the sellout looms," Schoenbrun said. "Having to be in some way a shill for a system is expected of any level of artist."

That balancing act feeds into the story within the film, where a show airing on network TV (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and many other cult shows from the '90s) is parsed for secret, perhaps unintended messages by its most devoted fans. I Saw the TV Glow adds further layers of wink-wink self-awareness. It features a Buffy actor (Amber Benson) in a small role, as well as the Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst—an early-aughts musical star and an avatar of that era's gendered toxicity—as Owen's disdainful father, Frank. "I'm always thinking about the era of popular culture that … I was first exposed to—that post-Tarantino Scream era," Schoenbrun said. "Even Buffy is incredibly self-referential; it's genre that's aware of itself as genre."

"I don't want to say that TV Glow is watered down or speaking in a commercial vernacular that I'm uncomfortable with," Schoenbrun continued. "But I definitely was like, I'm making this teen-angst thing; I'm looking at the Donnie Darkos of the world for reference." At the turn of the millennium, Donnie Darko managed to be an instant cult hit, arriving as a small studio release in an era of Hollywood bombast. Still, for a moment, as they calibrated the tone of their movie, they wondered if they were pushing too far into the territory of a show such as Stranger Things, which is almost excessively reverential of the 1980s. To Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow embodies a sort of "identity crisis"; it uses the narrative language of more commercial film and TV shows while striving to avoid formulaic conclusions.

Though I Saw the TV Glow was inspired by Schoenbrun's life, they believe it'll speak to viewers in unpredictable ways. And for all their suspicion of Hollywood's more corporate side, Schoenbrun can't help but fantasize about new ways to mess with audiences' expectations. "I said no to the Mattel meeting, but then I was like, 'Wait, actually, if you give me Barbie 2, I'll consider it,'" they said. They brought up the end of Greta Gerwig's film, where the title character, having transformed from doll to human, makes her first appointment at the gynecologist's: "That is a deeply trans place to be; let's talk about what that looks like. Mattel, I'm open to it."

David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.