John Early and Theda Hammel psychoanalyze the sordid characters in Stress Positions

Do you remember the summer of 2020? You might not want to, but unless you’re particularly gifted at repressing memories, you mostly likely do. It was a season of fear, of paranoia, of guilt. It’s also the season of Stress Positions, the debut feature from writer-director Theda Hammel, in which she stars with comedian and personal friend John Early.

Taking place largely on the Fourth Of July, Stress Positions places a group of Brooklynites, largely millennials, under a microscope as social, political, and personal tensions drive them damn close to insanity. Early plays Terry Goon, an archetypal gay millennial living in a run-down brownstone known as the party house. Once a trophy husband to the older, wealthier Leo, his soon-to-be ex-husband has instead found someone younger and hotter. While running out the days in the party house, Terry watches over Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), his 19-year-old, half-Moroccan, model nephew. Hammel, meanwhile, plays Karla, Terry’s friend from college, who lives with her girlfriend, Vanessa. Vanessa more or less stole the story of Karla’s transition to write her financially successful first book. Also, a strange older woman named Coco lives on the top floor of Terry’s house—she came with the sale.

The film delivers all of this information in its first few minutes via Karla’s narration, and we’re quickly onto watching this motley crew ricochet off each other. Stress Positions is both slapstick and philosophical, hyper-specific to a certain time and location but easily recognizable to anyone who lived through the past few years. Here, speaking with The A.V. Club, Early and Hammel strip their characters down to their most base urges and make a good case for (at least temporarily) quitting Twitter.

Theda Hammel: It’s just sort of the way it happened. I could glorify it a little bit by saying it’s important to try and capture or sketch something about that moment before it is totally obliterated in memory—through a wish to forget it, not just through simple amnesia, but through a really No, I’m not thinking about that ever, I’m not going back to that time. That’s how the movie ends up functioning, at the end of the day. But the truth is, when I started writing it, it was early 2021. It seemed like, not a present reality, because we weren’t in the heat of it at that point, we weren’t in lockdown, things had opened up, but it seemed very fruitful. I thought that there would be dramatic potential there that was maybe being unexploited in other movies relating to that topic.

AVC: I love the dialogue in this movie. It’s immensely quotable—I wrote down how you refer to Fire Island as a “beach retreat for the children of Sodom,” which I thought was great. Was this all in the script? Were the two of you riffing before the script came together? Was there discovery on the set?

John Early: I’ll answer that so Theda doesn’t have to. There was no riffing. There was no improvisation. This is a really, really scripted movie, and that was very very exciting for me as someone who has been making, kind of, comedic content largely through improvisation, which is a euphemism for “unpaid writing.” I think Theda and I both had kind of a theater background. This came from a very theatrical approach. There were long rehearsals, especially of the birthday scene. Because it was such a fast shoot, as most indie shoots are, we really had to be very, very prepared and precise. It’s the very element that made me so excited about this movie and [I] wanted to share it with Neon. There’s a literary, theatrical quality to the script, and it was really important to honor that and not get into improv mode.

TH: I’ll just say, to give John—I don’t wanna say “his flowers,” because I hate that expression—but John was fully memorized weeks in advance, which is so beautiful. Everybody should do that for everything. It’s made it so great, we were so prepared, and so easy to work with. Memorize your lines, please.

JE: Memorize your lines!

AVC: How much time did you actually have to film it?

JE: Three weeks?

TH: No, four. It was like 23 days total, of which 20 were in the house, and only three were elsewhere.

AVC: I was curious, also, because a lot of this is heavily narrated in voice-over. What was the decision behind that? Was it a practical thing for shooting, or was that something you always wanted to do?

TH: I’ve always thought that voice-over is a wonderful thing in movies. I’m debating whether to continue to use it as heavily, but the two things I’ve made, voice-over has been extremely effective. First of all, when a movie starts, and you’re looking at an amazing image right away, there’s a part of me that goes, Oh, go away. What are you doing? This is not how it felt with old movies. There’d be an overture, or something, and you’d be welcomed into the movie with music, or some sort of… I feel like there’s something about a voice-over that goes, Look, I’m going to talk. Why don’t you get settled? And I’m going to ease you into this movie a little bit. It’s a gesture of hospitality that I like having in the movie. And then the thing is that it just doesn’t stop talking, really, or one voice stops talking and another voice takes over. But that comes from two things. In its original form, the script was like a long monologue about Terry by Karla. In its earliest drafts, it was not a prose thing, but it was a descriptive monologue, where it was describing this character. It was different than going Once upon a time, there was a character named Terry Goon. Or writing in the script, Terry Goon, a mess, bursts through the door with his head—you know what I’m saying? He is, every bit of him, a Brooklyn millennial. Instead you go, Wait til you hear about this fucking guy that I know. You won’t believe what he’s up to. I don’t know—that’s a nice mode. I guess that’s how it gets its way into the script, and I just didn’t have the presence of mind to take it out.

AVC: That is interesting, because we don’t really hear a ton about Terry from Terry. We’re mostly hearing about him from Karla’s POV. But I think Terry as a character is very interesting—his performance of put-upon-ness. It’s partially true because of the time this takes place, he’s caring for his nephew and everything, but it also is maybe in his own head a little bit.

JE: Well, I think, especially during the time in which this movie is set, we’ve kind of structured a society around degrees of suffering. Kind of the Twitter discourse framework that we’re all looking at the world through. I think Terry is someone who built his identity on like gay liberation and gay marriage.

TH: It gets better!

JE: It gets better, yeah. I’m with her. That was the first note I wrote in my journal. We were talking about the character; I’m with her. It was such a perfect kind of focusing thought. I think as his identity markers are becoming less and less culturally significant, he starts to kind of amp up this performance of charity. His back pain and a kind of maternal caretaking thing to compensate for the way he’s falling out of the culture.

TH: That’s so well said.

AVC: Are either of you on Twitter? Or were you on Twitter in 2020?

JE: (Laughs) We both were on Twitter.

TH: I am very much on Twitter, but I have to say that I did do a hard, lead balloon block of Twitter immediately as soon as the pandemic started because of the comedians. Literally, because the comedians started posting front-facing videos of themselves in their apartments, being like, Let’s make lemonade out of these lemons! Let’s make content about it! And I was like, If I have to see a single more second of this, I’m gonna fucking slit my throat open, and I’m gonna end it. That block stayed in place for about three or four months, and that was how I was able to start writing. That’s what happened, but believe me, I know what Twitter’s like.

AVC: I can tell you’ve had some experience, based on the movie. That period depicted in the movie is what actually got me, I think, addicted to the app in a way that I hadn’t been before. Because it was my primary source of information—it was like a slot machine. It felt like that.

JE: I think social media is a tool largely to—at least, you know, the way human beings use it—it’s a tool to avoid ambivalence. It’s a real fast route out of facing any ambiguity or ambivalence. I think obviously the beginning of COVID was such a confronting time. It was just death, externalized. Social media was a really quick way to avoid that feeling and to establish consensus about How We Feel About Certain Things That Are Happening Right Now. And how you’re supposed to feel. That kind of paranoia, the desperate need for someone else to tell you what to do, for some sort of paternal, firm hand, I think is really present in the movie.

TH: Nobody in the movie is on Twitter in the movie, but everybody has a consciousness—except maybe Bahlul—shaped by Twitter.

AVC: You’ve mentioned that one of the big ideas of Stress Positions is trying to figure out what to do with this guilt that you’re feeling during this summer, whether it’s white guilt during the George Floyd protests or it’s guilt that you’re getting other people sick. But none of the characters, to me, necessarily portray outward guilt, it’s more sublimated into their actions with others.

TH: Here’s how I think guilt plays out in the movie. There’s one character who feels none, and that’s Leo, Terry’s ex-husband. No guilt, no shame, no principles, nothing but fun, hedonism. Unrepentant. Then, there’s Karla. I think that Karla is less dwelling in her guilt, but not to the extent that Leo is.

I would say that Terry and Vanessa both feel guilty in a similar way. They feel that they’ve done wrong to somebody close to them. I think in Terry’s case, what he feels is that in addition to his self-pity over his marriage that’s failed, he feels guilt about his relationship with his sister, in my interpretation of it. His sister is somebody who went off on her own, that Terry couldn’t be there for, or couldn’t have a relationship with her, and now he has no family really. There’s no husband, there’s no sister, there’s no parents—I mean, that’s an off-screen story. The one potential redemption he could have is with this nephew, this family member, who maybe he could do right by, in a way that he couldn’t do for his sister. He could become a good uncle, where maybe he wasn’t a good brother, or he wasn’t a good husband. Terry is trying to mend a wound, in his own way.

Vanessa feels the guilt in a different way, in that it’s not dramatized explicitly on screen, it’s just alluded to, but Vanessa’s source of guilt, in addition to the generic white guilt that someone like Vanessa feels, is that she wholesale stole her trans partner’s life story and put it into fiction in a pretty insulting way. And made enough money from it to pay for an apartment in Greenpoint. So she has permanent, unresolvable guilt about that, that she’s trying to address by letting that partner live rent-free in that apartment with her, even though it’s so clear that they don’t get along and they need to break up. Her gesture is like, No, like a saint, I’m going to let you stay with me and I’m gonna say that I love you and I’m gonna say that this relationship is… I think she’s shaped by guilt in that way. When Karla encounters Bahlul, she basically sics Bahlul on Vanessa knowing that Bahlul is gonna maybe poke at that guilt.

And then the final thing I will say on the subject of guilt, is that those are anxious guilt complexes. They manifest as anxiety and neuroses. Coco has a different order of guilt, because Coco’s level of caring is more sincere. Coco is somebody who has genuine love in her heart, I think. And is genuinely curious and invested in this beautiful young person. For that reason, she feels all the more acutely, I think, the guilt over maybe spying on him a little bit, or coveting him a little bit. Being romantically drawn to him, rather than just purely maternally, benignly helpful to him. I think that that guilt affects Coco ultimately by the end of the movie, in an almost operatic way that none of the other characters have enough sincere genuine feeling to experience.

AVC: I was curious about that characterization of Terry—at the beginning, it does feel, I don’t want to say stock character, but that Brooklyn millennial type that you mentioned. I thought the reveal that he was, I guess you could say bigoted during the 9/11 hysteria, that was a really interesting thing to pull in.

TH: He’s a new atheist, yeah.

AVC: How do you—as an actor, writer, director—take these characters from thematic plot things, like This is a phenomenon I want to address, and then make them feel like real people that you might meet out and about?

JE: I think it is really important as an actor to be really curious about the themes that a character is absorbing, maybe what social, political themes they represent. I think it’s very, very helpful to discuss all of that so that you subconsciously absorb it. But at the end of the day, I think no matter what we think of ourselves, in terms of where we land archetype-ly, generationally, politically, our day-to-day is—we’re pigs. You know? We’re pigs, hunting for truffles. We’re petty, and we’re irritable, and we’re hungry. I think, for me, it was important, on an acting level, truly when we were shooting, to not worry about those larger conversations that Theda and I were absolutely having. It was one of the great pleasures of my life to work with a director as smart as Theda, who also happens to be one of my greatest friends, who actually wanted to talk about these things. That never happens. But when action was called, I think was important that the motivations be purely immediate and petty. Theda also, going into this process, was very into the idea of always having some sort of element of distraction. We talked about that a little bit, and that was very helpful for me. I don’t think I’m that successful in pulling it off in this movie.

AVC: Can you expand on what you mean by distraction?

JE: Like, trying not to have this laser-focused intention of This is what I feel and This is what I need. I think the kind of ephemera of COVID was perfect for this. You’re always kind of cleaning down the takeout, or always trying to deal with the wifi. The Bluetooth isn’t working. You’re spraying things down. I think acting from a place of distraction so that you don’t end up, as an actor, in a vain way, trying to embody the politics of someone. Distraction, actually trying to find little bits of real-life distraction, is what prevents it from becoming paper dolls.

TH: My point of view is, just in my own experience writing, there is a real risk of trying to make people too complex in service of “reality.” In service of verisimilitude or the appearance of reality. What I really want is a two-dimensional character with a sort of mystery in it that comes from the actor. Or something that maybe is unexplained. I don’t necessarily know that I succeed across the board with this, but I feel like Bahlul, for example, is pure innocence. And Terry is pure guilt and anxiety. And Karla is pure sabotage, and Leo is pure sleaze hedonism. I find that actually, if you just do a two-dimensional thing, proudly, like if you embrace caricature slightly, you don’t have to always act it at the register of caricature. I certainly don’t, John doesn’t, Qaher doesn’t. The actor, though, brings their full person to it, and that’s where the depth comes from. And then, also, in the interaction of those two-dimensional characters, you can create a big polyphony and a lot of parallels and a lot of contradictions. That to me is my preferred mode of writing. That’s why the movie does have these elements of caricature in it. I just feel like it gets you moving better. It makes things happen.

AVC: That’s fascinating. I didn’t want to call it caricature, because some writers would be offended by that.

TH: Oh no, I love it. It’s really important to me. It’s essential.