If Stress Positions is taking the pulse, mood, and outlook of LGBTQ social worlds today, its prognosis is rather bleak.
Stress Positions, the 2024 dramedy co-written, directed by, and starring Theda Hammel, is a rather rare example of a U.S. film exploring life during the COVID-19 pandemic. This atypicality seems reinforced by the film’s relative lack of success: polite if unenthused reviews landing at a 71% critical average on Rotten Tomatoes, with a far lower audience score, and nary a mention in the sizable amount of digital ink spilled on commemorating the best of 2024 cinema. In his negative review of Stress Positions David Rooney opined “nothing aged faster than COVID humor…I’m over it,” as if the film’s proximity to the pandemic lends it an inherent radioactivity. To give the detractors some credit, I am not sure how much I enjoyed Stress Positions. Its dialogue is barky and dissonant, with a talented ensemble that never quite seems to gel together. But regardless of its general mediocrity, Stress Positions deserves attention in its bait-and-switch obfuscation, less as a treatise on the COVID-19 pandemic than an acerbic pulse check on queer and trans cinema in an era of neoliberal multiculturalism. The film focuses on queer and trans life after marriage equality and the resulting changes in visibility and social prominence of the 2010s, with the pandemic’s crisis exposing discontent and growing pains already deeply in need of mediated contemplation. The pandemic becomes a setting utilized by the film as a space of dissatisfaction for things as they are, and imagination for possible worlds to come.
Stress Positions is a story about Terry Goon (John Early), an early-thirties divorcée, but his placement at the forefront of the film’s advertising and narrative structure masks its more diffuse ecosystem of stressed-out queer Brooklyn residents that hold its focus equally. Under the anxious haze of social distancing and apocalyptic feeling, Terry is living in a cluttered, decaying Brooklyn townhouse owned by his rich ex-husband Leo (John Roberts, AKA Linda from Bob’s Burgers, here playing a character as detestable as Linda is delightful), a long festering investment opportunity Leo never got around to developing, which has since devolved into a dusty, desolate “party house” for all-night drug-addled frivolity. Staying with his uncle on account of his broken leg is Terry’s nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a young model from Morocco newly living in New York City. Terry’s social circle is ravenous with interest in Bahlul, particularly his best friend Karla (Hammel), a loud, sardonic trans woman who works in physical therapy. Karla is dating Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), a timid Brooklyn writer with a successful first novel under her belt. The women’s relationship fearfully navigates an unresolved tension: that Karla believes the novel to be essentially stolen from her own experiences, spun into a profitable enterprise without her consent.
Orbiting this group are Terry’s upstairs neighbor Coco (Rebecca F. Wright), a Trump supporter and COVID-denier who “came with the house,” and masked delivery worker Ronald (Raheem Ali, co-writer of the film) who shuttles between locked-down citizens in abandoned streets. The group navigates the existential quagmires of summer 2020 alongside their own heated relationships, with things coming to a head at a frantic 4th of July celebration crashed by a returning Leo and his new lover. Various hijinks ensue, epiphanies are discovered and side-stepped, relationships flounder and start anew, and a massage gun passes around the ensemble as a veritable Chekov’s gun of narrative consequence.
Hammel has said that Stress Positions is a film about “millennial decline,” the cynical desperation of an “aging youth culture” finding its past dreams and fantasies of itself downgraded in a tedious and mundane present. Showcasing the faulty promises of woke millennial exceptionalism, Terry, Karla, and Vanessa take turns throughout the film playing the white Ugly American to Bahlul’s disaffected Moroccan Gen-Z, finding (to their own surprise) that despite their progressive posturing, they don’t know all that much about the world. In a winning joke, Terry and Vanessa are shown separately – and to neither’s knowledge – watching the same YouTube video series explaining “What is the Middle East?” so they don’t look ignorant around Bahlul.
As a comedian, Early has made a career off expert satirization of bourgeois liberal self-performance, and the exasperated, exasperating Terry fits beautifully in his wheelhouse. The clanging of pots and pans for medical personnel and crisis workers in 2020 is presented as an equally daunting chore to everything else on Terry’s agenda, the optics of good liberal citizenry on level footing with surviving a global pandemic. Early has perfected a sarcastic riff on the specific physicalities of COVID-era social regulation with a one-handed “pull that [mask] up please?” plea/gesture that is dazzling in its queasy accuracy. But while Terry at first appears to be the kind of send-up of white gays that Early has played before, his character sharpens over the course of the film from a satirical take on white gay masculinity to an examination of its embodied effects as a cultural system.
The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic paused queer nightlife, with the resultant erosion of social ties in community spaces generating isolation and depression for many LGBTQ people. Stress Positions makes an early visual reference to this phenomenon when the viewer finds Terry disposing of an enormous disco ball. We learn via Karla’s narration that this is part of a larger sweep of the house to remove evidence of Leo’s hard-partying lifestyle, in effort both for Terry to rid his space of reminders of his ex-husband and to shield Bahlul from such flagrantly gay accessories (part of Terry’s own prejudiced assumptions about the Muslim world). Terry manages to squeeze the enormous ball out of a narrow doorway, the hundreds of tiny, mirrored panes creating sparkling shadows on the townhouse steps. Stumped for any other way of disposing of the ball, Terry settles for rolling it towards the basement apartment entrance and covering it with a large sheet. The film’s slowed-down attention to the laborious nature of Terry’s struggle with the disco ball resonates beyond its pandemic context. The disco ball is huge, ungainly, and clumsy. The cumbersome residue of a party held long before the events of the film by wealthier, happy-go-lucky gays, the disco ball is now left behind as a fumbling irritation.
Throughout Stress Positions, it feels as if we have arrived too late to a party, the affective milieu of flat soda and stale potato chips aging on an abandoned snack table. We learn over the course of the film that Terry first met Leo as his intern, working in an unspecified corporate environment amenable to young gay professionals rising through the ranks of global capitalism. With their divorce came Terry’s total expulsion from his prior career path. We see the early days of their relationship, including their wedding, in the home movies and picture slideshows the bedridden Bahlul projects onto the wall of his room. Late in the film, an injured, exhausted Terry hobbles slowly beneath the projected image stream of his and Leo’s wedding photos, a before-and-after illustration of the hopes of mainstream gay integration into American normativity: a happy dream for the privileged few, but a cruel prank on those left outside the charmed circle of this imagined happiness. Here the film exhibits a neoliberal offer of queerly-inclusive stability that is undermined by the frayed socio-economic unrest simmering just outside its facade.
Terry’s plight reveals a lonely world whose loneliness was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the plot is primarily organized around Terry’s actions, Stress Positions subverts his authority as a central character by highlighting not just one framing narrator, but two. Karla and Bahlul both narrate in voice-over as if speaking directly to the audience. This effect pushes the viewer slightly away from Terry, but also indicates the closed-off nature of Karla and Bahlul’s respective internal monologues, further underscoring the loneliness of Stress Positions’ milieu. Moreover, the preponderance of technological mediation in the characters’ lives—voice recognition technology, Bluetooth speakers, the ambient presence of internet saturation—colors the film with a sense of alienated distance.
Dethroning Terry as the center of the narrative emphasizes the dueling narrations offered by Karla and Bahlul as notable retorts to the privileged position of cis gay men at the center of LGBTQ media representation and production. In a moment of the film that has been positively singled-out by multiple critics, Karla complicates the so-called “wrong body” thesis of trans identity with a broader suggestion of trans identity’s roots and goals. Bahlul asks “You felt like a woman inside?” Her response: “No. Nobody feels that way. I wanted to kill myself, and this sort of helped.” Karla is the character to most savagely decry mainstream gay male culture, referring to it as a “hell” and “pig society” rooted in economies of youth and body tyranny, taunting Terry with his semi-expulsion on both accounts. As a film by a trans woman director/writer/actor, Stress Positions at times feels like a polemic from the trans world criticizing cis queers’ stranglehold over LGBTQ politics and culture. Terry is characterized as weakly falling for gay male toxicity, while Vanessa, as the film’s representation of white queer cis women, is depicted almost vampirically, consuming difference beyond her own world as a form of cultural satisfaction. This would all make for an incredibly targeted attack on the limitations of cis queer allyship if it were not for the film equally holding Karla in its crosshairs. After all, how long can a person simply sit on the sidelines in critique, quipping but barely making an effort to change, before their life is wholly, tragically linked to the same toxic system they condemn?
If Stress Positions is taking the pulse, mood, and outlook of LGBTQ social worlds today, its prognosis is rather bleak. The “bitter pill” nature of its storytelling perhaps explains its minimal impact even in the independent film box office, the film’s perspective simply too dour for a mainstream LGBTQ culture often fixated on positivity and sweeping queer dissent under the rug. But its negativity can be taken as a call for change and regrowth, a realization that current LGBTQ cultural worlds and forums are not meeting our needs and must be changed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door, a book-length essay on gentrification and queer/trans urban life published around the same time Stress Positions takes place, expresses a similar lament for a fantasy of queer life in the city that is receding against neoliberal political realities. Sycamore writes “The dream of the city is that you will find everything and everyone you never imagined. Does this possibility even exist anymore?” Such a question hangs over the film in simmering anxiety.
Stress Positions’ other dissenting narrator, Bahlul, appears to hold onto this “dream of the city.” Quietly enigmatic, Bahlul spends the duration of the film tentatively allowing the exotic fantasies put onto him by the film’s white characters. But in his internal narration, Bahlul reveals an attentive, curious contemplation of the same odd circus surveilling him, weighing the contrast of queer New York City life he imagined versus its reality. Bahlul repeats the phrase “I have an uncle in New York” like a kind of prayer, a hopeful tie to queer dreams realized in a cosmopolitan utopia, one gradually dissipating as he mulls over the archive of home movies in Terry’s townhouse.
What Bahlul exactly wanted out of New York City—alongside his own relationships to gender and sexuality—are explored without clear label in the film, allowing his queerness to avoid totalizing frameworks and instead speak to a loose, emergent journey of sensual discovery. As someone who wanted the dream of the city, where “you will find everything and everyone you never imagined” in contemporary out-and-proud LGBTQ life, Bahlul had the misfortune of arriving just as the world shut down in crisis, his broken leg an echo of queer NYC’s strained, limping vitality during the pandemic. But Stress Positions begs us to consider: with this social world to welcome him, would it really have been any different? Did he miss out on that much? What is newly clear without the distorting haze of an over-priced boozy Brooklyn brunch? After all, Terry is late as well, as are all the characters; hunting for increasingly-scarce pleasure on the outskirts of the promised glories of rainbow liberalism.
If anything, Stress Positions’s antsy world of queer and trans neurosis aims to mount a kind of exorcism, taking the “stress position” of the global pandemic as an intake of breath and a clearing of the mind. It’s been reported that many people’s sexual and gender identities transformed over the course of the pandemic, the reigns of cis-heteronormativity loosened a bit in the moment of crisis. Even for many people already identifying as LGBTQ, the COVID-19 pandemic was a moment of seismic self-reflection. In a piece for The Washington Post titled “The Queer Quarantine,” a trans and gender nonconforming person named Justice remarked, “For the first time ever, I was forced to be still […] I’ve been able to experience love in my own identities in ways I never knew were possible.” Pandemic cinema like Stress Positions attempts to bottle this moment of forced contemplation to consider the ties that bind us. It asks, how can we seek out a world that fits us with radiance and comfort?
This question feels intensified by the new mounting crises of queer and trans life that augment and build on the uneasy affects hosted by Stress Positions. Governmental efforts to erase transness from documentation, official histories, and public spaces evidence a world whose legal structures cannot be relied upon to produce and sustain queer and trans communities. Queer and trans cinema’s role, beyond a safe-feeling critique of normativity’s foibles, should point us towards the new terrains of essential change and reformation in the ongoing efforts to create queer and trans worlds. To this end, Stress Positions performs a sobering pulse check.
Sean M. Donovan (he/him) is a critic and scholar of LGBTQ media cultures with a PhD in Film, Television, & Media Studies from the University of Michigan. He is currently at work on a book on queer media and nostalgia.
Photo by Canela Pontelli on Unsplash