Sphaera: Cannes Edition

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma premiered on May 14th and opens in the US on August 7th.

By Eric Kohn

It’s hard to imagine another filmmaker more engaged with the current moment than Jane Schoenbrun. The filmmaker has engaged with questions of trans identity, Internet lore, and simulation theory with their initial features We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opened the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival as if to cement Schoenbrun’s master plan: From breakout filmmaker to established auteur at the ultimate auteur festival, Schoenbrun has plotted a trajectory to breakout status by navigating a series of professional and personal changes.

Here, Schoenbrun guides SPHAERA through the past decade of their experiences and how they perceive the world today.

Watching From the Sidelines

Early in their career, Schoenbrun was an associate programmer director at IFP — now known as The Gotham Film and Media Institute — helping filmmakers with grant applications.

Jane Schoenbrun: Those years I spent at IFP were like film school. I got an early front row seat to early David Lowery, Shaka King, and so many others as they were figuring out how to build an auteur career in this landscape where there aren’t that many people under the age of 60. I’m really thankful that I got to learn how the industry worked and study it before it became time to make moves that would set me up to have the kind of art career that I want to have. I wanted to be there not as a bridesmaid but as a bride.

A New Chapter

Schoenbrun last went to Cannes 10 years ago as a film representative for Kickstarer.

JS: I was there last in 2016, exactly 10 years ago, taking meetings as the film rep at Kickstarter. I was so fucking depressed. While I was at Cannes, I was talking to my partner and said, “Why am I this sad at Cannes? I shouldn’t be this depressed.” That was what convinced me I needed to make some fucking changes and quit my job. I need to see about being an artist.

No Compromise

Schoenbrun’s breakthrough feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, premiered at Sundance in 2021. The movie was reportedly made for about $15,000.

JS: I understood when making World’s Fair that I needed to make that movie for basically nothing. I had to make something bold, and not like a normal shitty Sundance movie. I’d just seen so many friends go through this process of making really cool short films and then getting their first feature “notes and agent-ed” to death. They were drained of any personality or originality. I understood that in America, in the commercial film system, if I wanted any chance of doing something authored that was actually representative of the work I wanted to make, the first one had to be completely on my own.

A Star Power Boost

Schoenbrun’s breakout, the $10 million Lynchian fever dream I Saw the TV Glow, played at Sundance’s midnight section and was released by A24. The story of two teens who bond over their mutual obsession with a TV show from their youth — and then get lost inside it — the film quickly became a treasured text in the trans film community. The movie boasted Emma Stone among its producers. It would not be the last time Schoenbrun got movie star support for their work, as Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma includes a producing credit for no less than Brad Pitt.

JS: When you do something small and critics say it was cool, that allows you to spend that hype to keep doing it on bigger levels. For TV Glow, it was very clear to me that I had a movie I fully believed in. It had to be a wail, a shout. I needed adults in the room to be like, “You know who I am! It’s vetted! Trust me, I know we don’t make a lot of surreal movies by trans girls, but I endorse this.” It’s market shit. It’s not the same as the creative process. It happens outside the creative process.

I remember on TV Glow, I was on a call with Emma Stone, when we were pitching the movie over and over again, she was like, “It’s crazy how you just have to explain yourself over and over again to these people and tell them what the movie is and why you should make it. You shouldn’t have to do that.” And I know that, but when you’re a leftist trans girl trying to make honest work in the hellscape of Hollywood, there’s got to be something lost in translation. You better have some powerful people vouch for you. We’re trapped inside the belly of this awful machine. “The machine is bleeding to death,” to quote Godspeed! You Black Emperor.

The Genre Factor

In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a queer filmmaker takes on a new gig directing the latest entry in a slasher franchise. While not a traditional horror movie itself, Schoenbrun’s latest work engages with specific horror tropes.

JS: I think I’m just lucky that horror comes so naturally to me. I’m sure there are filmmakers who are cynically sticking horror into their work because they know it’ll help the movie be commercial. I think there’s truth to that. I certainly am a beneficiary of the horror bump. I grew up obsessed with horror movies and it’s the language which comes most naturally to me in talking about the stuff I’ve been trying to talk about with these movies.

With this movie specifically, which is very much about the lineage of the slasher movie – and also about sexuality and coming into one’s own body post-transition — if you read about the lineage of trans cinema, the slasher monster from Norman Bates in Psycho to Leatherface, it was never a doubt that the best way for me to talk about that process of remaking one’s own image needed to be done in the language of a slasher remake.

Following the Online Trail

Schoenbrun’s early work, which included the online experimental variety show The Eyesplicer, interrogated Internet subcultures. Now some of that world is finding its way into the mainstream, as evidenced by the upcoming A24 horror movie Backrooms.

JS: Everyone in Hollywood now is like, “I’ve got my new liminal space horror!” OK, I’m gonna go film the fucking alley behind my house and have a liminal horror project, too! No, I would never have the stamina to make something that’s the corporate version of what I do. I would just get bored and quit.

When we were doing Eyesplicer, FX launched a show that used very similar language. And when World’s Fair premiered at Sundance, somebody told me that one of the streamers was telling people they wanted people like it, but commercial. People were always like, “Meet me halfway, make something that’s bled off what makes it unique or uncompromised.” I’ve followed my inner muse and been artistically rewarded for it too many times now. I’d know immediately if I was selling out or betraying the inner voice.

I don’t think I was reading the tea leaves psychically in terms of where things were going to go. I wasn’t a kid who grew up on Fellini movies. I grew up on the Internet, YouTube, the videostore and the WB. The Internet has been doing liminal space for a long time. There’s a lot of Salad Fingers in my work, a lot of South Park in my work, and whatever schlocky horror shit I was renting when I was 13.

Seeing Strange Times

Schoenbrun isn’t sure if we’re living in a simulation.

JS: I really like Paul Preciado on this. He has a book about how dysphoria is not an individual condition or disease. It’s not something to be pathologized as this discrete population of people who have this individual issue. Dysphoria is a worldwide condition. As our world becomes more and more unreal, that unreality manifests a tension and sense of discomfort that we all feel. The glitch becomes the norm as we look around at a world that maybe 100 years ago made sense — at least to a certain class of people in America. Now I think we have to create more and more of an effort to convince ourselves that there isn’t something deeply wrong and rotten at the core of it all. I have an individual application of that in my transness, which is one way in which the world around you doesn’t match the world that everyone is telling you to be in. That is a condition of society. As long as we continue pretending that we’re living in those boom years after WWII — as long as we’re clinging to power and economic structures that aren’t serving anyone and clearly destroying the world — we’re all going to be feeling more and more unreal.

Schoenbrun is wary of AI slop and the current state of Internet discourse.

JS: It just feels like landfills. The modern Internet and these corporate social media sites have been so polluted with bots. This lowest-common-denominator language of interaction that we all hate is so clearly predicated on addiction and feeding people stuff that’s really bad for them in the hopes that they’ll get enough clicks and frack our attention for a dollar. It can’t last.

My take on AI is that I’ve seen it so many times before. I remember transmedia. I remember VR. There’s a cool thing, a magic trick, that AI can do. The deification of it into this inevitable evolutionary end goal is just capitalist, con artist shit. We get fooled over and over again into thinking the Internet will make the world into an amazing place. No, you’re just going to open up markets, bleed some money, and keep fucking the world up.

The Antidote

The antidote? Make something unclassifiable.

JS: I don’t usually use ChatGPT, but I asked it to summarize Teenage Death and Sex at Camp Miasma before there was much out there aside from a plot description. I thought it was much lamer than the actual movie I made. People wouldn’t want to watch it. I do think it gets to the heart of something in this whole dynamic: the toxic relationship between art and capital. Commerce wants from art the one thing that it can’t commodify, which is love. They need us. We bring them our souls.