Amanda Overton | T / 2008

the homoneurotic world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amanda Overton (screenwriter and director) T / 2008 [6 minutes]

 

This film takes place in the future, in a dystopian society where government has controlled the lives of it citizens (any day soon), and now reinforces strict gender binaries and demands heterosexual behavior through memory deletion and reprogramming.

     Jade (Jenn Page) finds herself almost in a trance staring at a statue of a woman, and then as the general announcement of the 9:00 hour of the family Freedom act commands her to seek shelter since the neighborhood task force is about to restore safety to the streets, being forced to scurry away, set on the run as two soldiers (Jeff Hersh and James Crawford) march in lockstep behind her.

     Suddenly arms pull her in, a hand placed over her mouth. Almost as if she is being kidnapped, the other being, also a woman, Kiley (Abby Eiland), drags Jade inside an apartment obviously belonging to Kiley, whom we quickly recognize works as a photographer.

      There, behind doors, she gently strokes Jade’s face, and after a few minutes, Kiley returns the gesture, a bit terrified by her own actions, but obviously lost in the sensual moment. Almost immediately Kiley attaches a device to her temporal lobe, a spot critical in hearing, memory, language comprehension, and emotional processing.

      Over the next few moments, Jade experiences blips of memory from the past when she sees herself kissing the other woman and making love. It is quite apparent that before the governmental reprogramming efforts, these two women were lesbian lovers.

      Even as they come alive again, momentarily reliving the past, there are pounds on the door, demands to open up. Kiley quickly hides Jade in a backspace behind the door and opens it, as the task force breaks in having acquired the “deviant.”

      Weeks later Jade encounters Kiley now as a patient, having been fully divested of her memory, being dragged along the halls as Jade passes by. Only a slight smile of memory is what Jade can permit herself. Her friend has obviously given up her own life so that Jade can repossess the past of their deep love.

      Overton, now a noted television writer with series credits for Marco Polo, Severance, Edge and other popular works, notes that T was her first film at the University of Southern California as a student, shot on 16mm film. She admits, “I had not clue what I was doing!!” Yet her talent was obviously visible in this short sci-fi film.

      The biggest question of this work is what the “T” of the title represents: truth, the telling or transmitting of it, transgender, or perhaps just the image of the “T” itself, like a body shouldering the history of the past. We can only hope that Jade can someday nab Kiley back our of the conformity of this brave new homoneurotic world and reveal her their past all over again. In other words, the clue to salvation lies in discovering just how successful are the government’s attempts to wipe all memory from the individual mind.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).