Jane Schoenbrun wins at Cannes with ‘Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma’
Jane Schoenbrun has now made three films about people getting thoroughly and spectacularly mugged by the media they consume.
After their debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which left its protagonist stranded inside the dissociative sludge of internet horror, and the sophomore gut-punch I Saw the TV Glow, which turned estrangement from the body into one of the most agonising metaphors for gender dysphoria, Schoenbrun has established an unmistakably personal lineage.
Their latest Cannes-winning Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma completes that unofficial media-nostalgia triptych.
So far, Schoenbrun’s films have luxuriated in the narcotic comforts of mediated worlds, in that borderland where movies, television and digital flotsam become more intoxicating than ordinary life, especially when encountered at the wrong age.
Camp Miasma takes that preoccupation of being psychologically colonised by media and pushes it from the cerebral confines of media theory towards unbridled horniness. It is, in other words, a film about cinephilia — that affliction of wanting to have sex with a great film.
