The following conversation is a work of extreme truth. Filmmaker Theda Hammel, known for being one half of the podcast Nymphowars, sits down with interviewer Charles Carrall, barely known as one half of the podcast Vanity Project. Together they discuss Hammel’s first feature film Stress Positions, which debuted at Sundance earlier this year and will be screening as part of Sydney Film Festival 2024.

Set in the summer of 2020, Stress Positions is a reminder that incessant company is just as bad as solitary confinement. Quarantining in his ex-husband’s dilapidated Brooklyn brownstone, Terry Goon (John Early) finds himself cooped up with his extremely attractive nineteen-year-old Moroccan nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash). With the help of best friend Karla, played by the director, Terry and Bahlul are bound to find out the answers to their most pressing questions: Where is the Middle East? Are all male models anorexic freaks? And who fucked the delivery guy? 

In preparation for this interview, Charles assembled a set of questions from a cohort of Nymphowars’ most noteworthy guests. None of the public figures mentioned below agreed to be a part of this interview. All of them thoroughly enjoyed Stress Positions. 

Note: the following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Charles Carrall: Hi, Theda!

Theda Hammel: Hi! How are you?

CC: Yeah, good! Such a privilege to talk to you. I watched Stress Positions in the last 24 hours. Loved it. 

TH: Wow.

CC: Such a huge fan.

TH: Oh great, amazing.

CC: Still have not forgiven you and Macy for making a mockery of Janet Mock.

TH: Say no more. We paid a price.

CC: So, to begin with, I have this question from Ellen DeGeneres about your new movie Stress Positions. She went on this long rant about how she understood the struggle of your characters because she knows what it’s like to be trapped in a prison where everyone’s gay. Basically, she wanted me to ask you about the Downton Abbey upstairs-downstairs of it all, and what compelled you to write a story about people living on top of one another in a sort of dollhouse?

TH: Well, that’s a very insightful question from Ms. DeGeneres. A house is, I think, a metaphor by definition, just like it’s not a contrivance. You have these floors that are stacked on top of each other, and the experience of living in each of them is very different. If you’re in the basement, you feel all of the floors on top of you. If you’re in the middle, you may feel a little bit of that pressure from somebody above you. But you’re also worried about making too much noise for the people below you. And I think there’s something inherently voyeuristic and god-like about being on the top floor; you can look down and see everything, people know less about you. So I think it just invites that kind of metaphor. Thank you, Ellen.

CC: And do you have a preference? Upstairs, downstairs?

TH: I guess I think that I would probably live on the top even though it wouldn’t be my preference. It’s always where I seem to end up, and the Coco character who lives on that top floor is a figure of identification for me as the director, just given how much voyeurism plays into her experience, the fact that she is almost like a sort of filmmaker character. She has her own cameras, she has her own screens.

CC: Totally, and she remains in this unspoken position at the end of the hall, which a director kind of takes the position of usually. 

TH: Yes. 

CC: Pulling strings.

TH: Absolutely. 

CC: The wonderful Tori Amos told me that her favourite part of the film was when the homeless man watched porn on Vanessa’s phone and started jerking off on the street. She asked me to ask you about the phrase “Fiction is freedom.” Artists lie all the time in their work. And I guess she wants to know: did you ‘elevate’ the truth when writing the film? Is Stress Positions a work of freedom or imprisonment?

TH: There’s a lot there in Tori’s question.

CC: Indeed.

TH: My feeling about that slogan in the movie, “Fiction is freedom,” is that it’s a slogan that’s put forward as a justification for lying and deceit, by a character who is very fond of lying, maybe to herself and others. But it’s received as a very inspiring and liberating sentiment by the person who is hearing it, who doesn’t necessarily know the full extent of what she means by it. And so the more naïve character takes that as licence to unlock their imagination, especially with regard to themselves and their own gender identity. 

As far as my writing experience was concerned, I don’t find fiction very freeing, especially filmed fiction, because it’s constrained in so many ways. It’s especially constrained when it comes to the characterisation of otherness, because you’re not necessarily free to make as much of a mockery of someone different from yourself as you would be somebody like yourself. So there’s a lot of tension there around how much freedom you actually might not have when creating a fiction. And I think that that tension is more like the story of the movie, that the characters are imaginatively constrained in their relationship to otherness. 

So there’s a lot of tension there around how much freedom you actually might not have when creating a fiction. And I think that that tension is more like the story of the movie, that the characters are imaginatively constrained in their relationship to otherness. 

—Theda Hammel

To tie it all back to Tori’s favourite moment. There is, for example, an ethical conundrum. A very small one that I ran into with this character on the street who happens to be having a hard time, who I think is credited as like, the friendly neighbourhood lunatic who is very benign, who is actually looking out for people, you know, and doing his best but just happens to be addicted not even to pornography, but to the glowing screen. He’s seeing the TV glow on that little screen.

CC: Can’t blame him. 

TH: And I was a little worried about how that character comes off in the movie, but I didn’t have to take a look at myself, and what the actor was doing, and say that this belongs in this universe, this fits this universe, and this is the exact kind of thing that I would allow in a movie. And I’m almost helpless to do otherwise.

CC: Well, yeah, have no fear if he was ever meant to be in the film, because Tori actually really loved it. 

TH: Thank you. That’s amazing. 

CC: As you’re saying, there’s a tension between a more imaginative story and a story that’s very thinly veiled as something based on truth. And to supposedly be able to ‘elevate’ the truth, transforming and turning it into something fictive, moving it into that limbo space is really compelling. And then also there’s the elevation that’s taking place within the building in the film, people are moving up and down constantly, ascending and descending. I thought it was clever.

TH: I think that, you know, that line, “It is an elevated truth,” comes in the movie from the writer character who has taken her life experience and basically written [a] work of crummy autofiction. The crisis of autofiction is that if you write from your own subjective standpoint—which you should, in theory, have full copyright to—you have a full claim to the position that you’re in. But you can’t write about that position without incorporating everyone within one, two, even three degrees of separation from yourself. So you haven’t actually found solid ground, and that character has made a pretty offensive characterisation of somebody close to her—the character that I play, Karla, in the movie, which may also be accurate. It may actually sort of be accurate, but it still causes trouble between the two of them. So maybe “elevated” is a euphemism for something else.

CC: Yeah, it feels euphemistic. I guess it kind of reminds me of [Maggie Nelson’s] The Argonauts and the whole question of that text and its merits.

TH: Yes, that’s on the mood board.

CC: Your enemy Ann Dowd wanted me to ask you about your artistic process. Her question was, “Between actress”—it’s kind of a lame question—”Between actress and directress, which position did you find more stressful and why?”

TH: That’s a very well posed question. And it makes sense coming from Ann. I didn’t find acting in this movie to be very stressful relative to how stressful I found it to direct it. I felt that it was, broadly speaking, pretty pleasant to act in the movie since I had been able to tailor the part to myself and my own idiosyncrasies. It was not as pleasant to watch myself on-screen, to watch every second of the rushes and to see every ghastly angle and weird facial expression. So ultimately, you know, like Ann Dowd, I would prefer to just live the simple life of an actress, but I don’t see that happening.

CC: I recently learned that Ann’s husband (I don’t know if you know this, his name is Larry Arancio) is an acting coach and he’s worked with all these actors, but he has worked closely with Lady Gaga for the last few years. I guess we have Ann Dowd’s husband to thank for that.

TH: That doesn’t surprise me at all. Checks out.

CC: Andy Cohen wanted me to ask something that was actually kind of inappropriate about one of the characters, Bahlul, and I decided I’m not comfortable. 

TH: Okay, thank you. 

CC: Instead I thought, thinking about Andy Cohen, we should probably talk about what I would like to call ‘fag limbo.’ There’s this great monologue in part two—which I love, maybe my favourite part of the film—where Karla incinerates the gay meat rack and Fire Island. And I wonder if you think gay men are capable of happiness? If they deserve it?

TH: I think that they do deserve it. I think that it’s a really stressful position to be in. Some people seem very reconciled to it, and they are probably not latent trans women. But I do find that a contemplation of gay life became much less fraught for me as soon as I could separate myself from it. On the topic of elevated truth, I mean, Karla is somebody who makes a good speech, but also seems to want to get back to that world somehow, so I don’t take her speech fully at face value. I think that she makes a big case basically saying, “I’m normal now, I’ve entered society.” Whereas Terry is living in gay society, “pig society,” and if you just take this step and become a woman, you could be like me, a normal person. But, meanwhile, her behaviour doesn’t conform with that. She seems pretty excited to get back over to that house, to that party house. 

CC: Oh, she’s desperate to do so. 

TH: And so I think that she’s being a little self-deceiving there, and it’s a little bit of a posture. It is a good speech and Bahlul is very convinced by it.

CC: Totally, totally. He’s impressionable. 

TH: Yes. 

CC: There’s truth to it, though. You need women in society in order for it to be made real, otherwise it’s just pig society.

TH: I think that a culture without women ends up creating facsimiles of women. You see that happening on Fire Island.

CC: Caitlyn Jenner did not have a question for you.

TH: She didn’t watch the film.

CC: She did, actually. She told me she loved the car crash scene—no surprises there!

TH: Brought back good memories for her.

CC: That’s right, 2015. She said, and I quote, “You got the shot, baby!” I don’t know…

TH: Thank you, Caitlyn. 

CC: So, she didn’t have a question, but I have one. And my question is, yes, “not everybody is trans” as Terry says in the film, but what do you think the world would look like if they were? Would the world be a better place? Would it be just as bad?

TH: I think the thing is that Terry is a character who could have maybe transitioned and didn’t. And so when he says “not everybody is trans,” what he is basically saying is “I made the right decision. Don’t make me feel bad for not doing this.” Like, “I stuck by my guns and I have to live by it.”

CC: I made my gay guy bed, I have to lie in it.

TH: And what he would hate to see is one more soldier fall to the enemy. And to have this young person with their life still ahead of them and hope and idealism, youth and beauty still on their side, to make a decision that maybe he failed to make—that’s how I see it. And what I would say generally is that the thing with transness, trans representation, trans actors in trans roles, a trans movie or a trans narrative, I would just always stress the fact that we don’t know who in other circumstances would have transitioned or could have. If you want to call the people that could have and maybe would have loved to transition trans people, we don’t actually have a strong sense of who they are throughout history or who they are at present. So, I kind of like to think of Terry as a trans character in that way. Against his wishes.

If you want to call the people that could have and maybe would have loved to transition trans people, we don’t actually have a strong sense of who they are throughout history or who they are at present.

—Theda Hammel

CC: Against his own choices. I guess for Terry, it would be a tragic thing to see a beautiful young male model become a beautiful young female model. One less beautiful male model in the world. 

TH: It would be horrible. 

CC: That would be horrible. Finally, fellow Australian Sia sent in a question, it’s a bit long-winded, she said, “I’ve always said that healing is difficult. Your character in the film, Karla, is a healer of sorts, surrounded by a collection of people suffering. Bahlul with his broken leg, Vanessa’s vegan, Terry kind of wants to fuck his nephew. Is there hope for any of us? Can we heal? Or are we trapped in hell together?”

TH: I think in life, it’s important for us to believe in our ability to improve or to heal ourselves. But I think in our storytelling, that it’s important to confront the fact that maybe that’s not as possible as we would like it to be, and that maybe through this we could have a cathartic experience realising our own limitations. And so I think that in life, yes, in fiction, maybe no.

CC: I like that. One last thing, I was looking at the credits, and I have to ask you, your COVID compliance officer’s name was Karlo Corona?

TH: Yes. He had no choice but to pursue that line of work. Yeah, that was one of our COVID compliance people. He was born into it.

CC: He was born for that role. They call it name determinism I think, when your name determines the kind of life you have. It’s just a profound example.

TH: Well, these are great questions.

CC: Thank you. Yeah, I’ll tell them all that you appreciated their questions. 

TH: It was a delight.

Stress Positions will screen at the 2024 Sydney Film Festival on June 8 and 9.

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Charles Carrall is a writer and critic from Sydney, Australia. He makes up one half of the podcast Vanity Project.