Rugrats Go Wild (2003)

“You are all characters in a movie.” That line will surely echo in one’s head when they exit Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the latest outing from I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun. It’s because that line could plausibly be applied to three different sets of characters. The first, who it is literally directed to, is the characters in the film, who sort of become characters within another movie inside this movie that may or may not exist. The second, the characters in the fictional “Camp Miasma” series that serves as the impetus for the main character’s journey.

But the third set is most interesting. That third set is the audience. Just like in Schoenbrun’s previous film, the lines between fiction and reality are so effortlessly blurred that it makes the audience question its own sense of place within reality. In a literal sense, we are real. In a more meaningful sense, we are characters in a movie. Because, at the same time, reality is less real than we seem to think, and the movie is more real than we realize.