Back to selection
“This Field Beneath the Field Kept Showing Up in My Dreams” | Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow
I Saw the TV Glow, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively?
Just past the far end zone of the high school football field in my hometown of Ardsley, NY there’s a short but steep fenced-off decline down a hill towards a second, smaller field: a baseball diamond with a big outfield of grass that, in my admittedly hazy memory, was always overgrown and un-mowed. This field beneath the field kept showing up in my dreams during the time I was conceiving I Saw the TV Glow. I often don’t remember my dreams, and so when I do, I’ve learned to listen to what my subconscious could be trying to tell me.
A few months later, while I was deep into the writing process, I took a day trip alone up from Brooklyn to my suburban hometown and spent an afternoon wandering around that field beneath the field and some other hidden places like it that had seared in my subconscious. These unremarkable landmarks of my youth, still-existing places that only meant something to me because they were the perimeters I was allowed access to as I was learning what it meant to be alive, to be me. I remember feeling self-conscious that afternoon: I was now visibly trans, walking alone across little league fields and high school parking lots, scoping out the exteriors of basements where I used to watch TV with my friends decades earlier. I felt like people must be looking at me with suspicion. What purpose did someone who looked like me have now in these places? I half-expected the cops to show up, but nobody really bothered me or even seemed to notice my presence. Later that afternoon, driving on the residential roads I still know by heart (and always will), a line of dialogue popped into my head. Ultimately I couldn’t find a way to work it into the script, but what the heck, why not share it now? I thought, and imagined the characters in my film thinking, as well, “What a strange place to first see God’s shadow.”
See all responses to our annual Sundance Question here.
