After watching “I Saw the TV Glow,” a new film directed by Jane Schoenbrun, I felt a feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time: I need this soundtrack.
According to the criteria of
The film is a surreal story about two high school students in the 1990s who become obsessed with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-type television show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a rich film that borrows from horror, 1990s television, and Schoenbrun’s experience coming out as transgender.
But it also features some incredible tunes, like a hypnotic version of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by Broken Social Scene in a yeule voice and performances by King Woman, Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, who appear on screen as musicians in a club visited by the characters.
The full soundtrack has even more to love. Listening to her, I felt like a child again. That was precisely Schoenbrun’s intention. They thought the movie needed a “big teenage angst soundtrack.”
Citing “canonical choices” from soundtracks like “Donnie Darko,” “Los Eccentricos Tenenbaums” and “Tiempo de Volver,” which turns 20 this year, they admit that they are fairly obvious choices and “perhaps a little painful.” I identify. I also had an iPod in the early 2000s full of soundtracks, and one of the ones I listened to most often was “Tiempo de Volver.” The accompaniment to Zach Braff’s independent film—about a man in the midst of a quarter-life crisis—was as cultural a moment as the film itself, going platinum and elevating bands like the Shins.
It wasn’t that the soundtrack was anything new — say that to “The Graduate” (1967), “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) or “Purple Rain” (1984) — but as streaming transformed the business of the music and diverted attention from the albums, the soundtrack lost its validity.
The “I Saw the TV Glow” LP arrives after the pop delights of the “Barbie” soundtrack, which earned Billie Eilish and Finneas two Grammy Awards and an Oscar for “What Was I Made For.”
“People usually don’t want to listen to the whole album anymore, they want to pick songs and put them in playlists, but something about ‘Barbie,’ people just wanted to relive the whole experience,” said Mark Ronson, the album’s co-executive producer. of that movie.
For Schoenbrun, the experience of putting together the soundtrack was a creative endeavor in itself: They chose the artists, many of whom are queer, with the idea of encoding scenes of musicians they believed were worthy of teenage obsession. They made each artist a 10-song Spotify playlist as inspiration.
Schönbrun then listened to the presentations in a different order. “I really felt like, ‘Oh, I’m giving myself the best gift of my life,’” they said. “’I can make a mixtape from scratch that doesn’t exist yet.’”
When Schoenbrun was working on the “TV Glow” soundtrack, they said their producers asked why they were so obsessed with the music. “The way I would think about it is that the soundtrack, if it works, reminds you of the movie and makes you want to revisit it,” they said. “And the movie, if it works, reminds you of the soundtrack and makes you want to revisit it. It becomes less like ‘something funny I watched for an hour at the movies’ and more, I think, especially in a specific form of teenage angst, a part of you, a place to return to.”
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