Tara Stillions Whitehead is a multi-genre writer and filmmaker from Southern California teaching film, literature, and writing in Central Pennsylvania. Recent publications include cream city review, Monkeybicycle, PRISM international, Jellyfish Review, and Pithead Chapel. She is the recipient of a Glimmer Train Award for New Writers, and has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journal Award and Pushcart Prize. Her story collection The Year of the Monster is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press.
Her story, "Inciting Moment," appeared in issue 103 of The Rupture.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Andrew Farkas about rape culture, the intimacy of second person point of view, and Hollywood displacement.
Please tell us about the origins of "Inciting Moment." What sparked the initial idea and caused you to start writing the first draft?
This story was originally part of a chapbook titled Not for Syndication, which was ultimately absorbed by my forthcoming collection because of its relevance to the theme of latent monstrosity, something that I associate with celebrity fetish and the Hollywood rape culture that I worked in during my early 20s. The stories in the sequence are titled after traditional plot points for the purpose of subverting narrative expectation. An "inciting moment" is when the protagonist officially embarks on a journey to fulfill a dramatic need. For the protagonist in "Inciting Moment," the journey doesn't begin until she goes through the process of losing her financial security, dignity and desire for intimacy. At the end of the story, when she has her "first industry epiphany," we are at the inciting moment, and the dramatic need is actually the absence of human desire—well, the love of another person anyway. That's where the subversion comes in. That's where the theme of monstrosity lies. I'm openly critical of Hollywood grooming culture, and it has taken me just over a decade outside of it to see that loss is where a lot of success stories and tragedies begin.
I don't mean for it to sound like my whole film and television industry experience was tragic. Even though I grew up with adversity, I went into my career with a brand of academic privilege. I graduated with a B.A. in Production from the School of Cinema-Television at University of Southern California, which was at the time the most elite, famous, and cutting-edge film school around—I mean, I was in a fifty person cohort that included The Fonz's son Max Winker, "This Is America" and Atlanta director Hiro Murai, Chef's Table creator David Gelb, and many other now-successful artists. I don't mean to name drop, but it helps give context for how lofty my expectations were.
But film school is nothing like the industry. There's a sometimes interminable period of disillusionment that happens for a lot of women who enter into production, regardless of success. I worked hard and ascended to a DGA assistant director quickly, within a year of graduating, and I was so young and so abused. I have no fear using that word now, but for a long time, I did. I recently published an essay in cream city review about being assaulted on Two and a Half Men and the resulting cover-up. I had to work with my abuser, a millionaire who continues to create shows many people love, continues to enjoy impunity. I was working as an assistant to the executive consultants on The Big Bang Theory at the same time, and because it was in its first season, there was room for me to grow if I could hold out. I don't know. Maybe I could have been a supervising producer, maybe a staff writer. There's a lot of maybes, and none of them happened because I refused to accept the requisite complicity. I refused to be groomed, refused to shut down completely like the character in "Inciting Moment." I left. So, to answer your question, the story came from a decade's worth of hindsight. It's a portrait of what it could have been like if I'd been able to divest myself of the desire for true human connection.
Although I, personally, am in love with second person point of view, there are people (even now) who are put off by it. Why did you choose second person for "Inciting Moment" and what do you think it does for the story?
It's so funny you ask that because I have been following the current Twitter storm over the second-person POV, and I have to admit that I have been intentionally reluctant to chime in because—yes—I use a lot of the second-person POV, especially when it comes to my post-Hollywood discourse and texts revolving around transgressive characters. I suddenly feel a huge responsibility to say something profound about the second-person POV, haha.
I have a story forthcoming in the new and exciting Vox Viola, and in it, the narration switches from third- to second-person. The story self-reflexively states, "When it's happening to you, the story shifts into the second-person." And what I mean by that is second-person is deeply intimate. It is like the literary equivalent of having sex on the first date. It's taboo. It's a thrill. It's not the suggested method for a long-term relationship with the reader (a novel, let's say). There's a lot to live up to with the second-person. But, it has a tremendous ability to ambush the reader. I tell my creative writing students that second-person, present tense is the most immediate and urgent means of coaching your reader through something they would otherwise not do without the protection of diegesis. That's it, actually. Second-person POV is a form of coaching the reader through something they haven't experienced before.
I'm not trying to say that the narrator in "Inciting Moment" is a snowflake. I mean, the story is a version of a popular mythology about moving to LA to make it big—sell all your stuff, move into a craftsman in the hip part of town, sustain on air and adrenaline—but the emotional journey, or rather, the process of losing one's emotional self, is where the singular experience of the story is focused, and I think you really have to coach most people through dehumanization. Second-person is the most equipped for that rhetorical aim.
Here you describe Hollywood as a combination of high culture and artistic travesty and the main character as "a palimpsest of strangeness appropriated from strangeness." Since these two ideas are closely aligned, your protagonist appears to have found their rightful place. Why is it, then, that your main character feels displaced, perhaps permanently so?
Displacement is the driving force behind Hollywood strangeness (as I experienced it). It's the cultural equivalent of an alcoholic in active addiction: Millions of self-deprecating egomaniacs vying for singularity, for the elusive branding of "I'm original, but in a familiar way." The protagonist in "Inciting Moment" is recognizable. Her effort to be interesting is so overzealous, it's embarrassing, and this is most apparent in her excitement over Bukowski's penis drawing in the pocket door. She reveals it to get the man to sleep with her, but it's already obvious that he is going to sleep with her. It's a non-negotiable part of the narrative that we have seen before. By the end of the story, when the man upstairs is lonely and high and crawling through her window, the protagonist has accumulated enough strangeness to achieve estrangement, which is why I was drawn to LA. I wanted to escape my unbearable self and completely transform into anything else, the less familiar, the better.
Ironically, I didn't truly escape myself until I left Hollywood, got married, had kids, earned my MFA, and got sober. One might say that my perspective of Hollywood's ennui and angst is outdated, and maybe it is.
However, I recently produced my first show since working on The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men in 2008, and the director, who has worked with everyone except God, told me that he had read "Inciting Moment" and that he liked that I used big words. "Like palimpsest," he said. I was in the passenger seat of his convertible, drinking coffee, going over our shot list and call sheet as he drove us over the Hudson to the private studio of a man I had worked with back in LA, a man who had asked me to come from Pennsylvania to help produce an anti-Hollywood show.
An hour later, inside the studio, the director and the man were heckling me about being a college professor with an MFA who teaches screenwriting and fiction to undergrads and uses words like "transgressive" and "palimpsest." "What the fuck does that even mean?" these men laughed. Both have worked almost forty years in the industry. Both never went to college and consistently brought it up alongside their celebrity anecdotes, such as being the idea man behind Little Richard officiating Tom Petty's wedding, or marveling at how by virtue of a stage Rodney Dangerfield could switch from falling down drunk into brilliant stand-up mode—the list goes on.
After we completed principal photography, I had an altercation with the man who sought me out to produce this show. When asked what I thought of the cut of our first episode, I told him that it needed work, that the content was brilliant but the technical presentation was not great. The man, who had started the conversation with a recap of how bullshit his recent trip to L.A. was, with a preamble of how much he "loved me" and our creative partnership, especially after he didn't stand up for me when I was assaulted under his nose at Warner Bros., responded with, "Not great?... I'm sorry, but what have you created that has come even close to what I have? Nothing. Not great? You have no fucking opinion."
More of the same.
One could argue that it's not Hollywood that does the displacing, that it's the person who abandons ship for shore—a mirage just beyond reach of the drowning. If that's the case, then the illusion of success is one hell of a mirage that people risk their personhoods for, and many who make it to shore are so disoriented and baffled by their own survival that they believe themselves to have become gods.
Money has a role in that delusion, too. And being white. And male.
What have you been reading recently that you might recommend?
I've been reading a ton over the quarantine, a lot of which has received good press, too. If you're looking for something that will hypnotize you with beautiful sentences and devastating brutality, I would recommend Garth Greenwell's Cleanness. It takes place in Bulgaria, but I was consistently transported to my time studying at FAMU in Prague. Another writer whose sentences are worthy of praise is Amy Hempel, and her recent collection, Sing to It, destroyed me. It was well worth the fourteen-year wait. In terms of poetry, I've found myself studying the interplay between narrative and estrangement in Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic, the coup d'éclat that is Jericho Brown's The Tradition, and the darkly resonant coming-of-age poems in Todd Dillard's Ways We Vanish.
I also read a ton of literary magazines and have spent a good deal of time going through the back issues of Fairy Tale Review, which was, up until recently, free for the public to access.
What are you writing these days?
In February, I signed a contract with Unsolicited Press, who will release my debut collection The Year of the Monster, so I have been working on first-round edits, which are due in August. However, in the process, I have accumulated what I think is a hybrid chapbook about stories we don't tell our children but should. I have two kids, a seven- and five-year-old, and they inspire me to want to be more honest and more aware in my writing, and the stories in this newly formed chapbook reach for honesty, which for me involves acknowledging past darkness and future light. As I mentioned above, I got sober a few years ago, so recovery has become a dominant theme in my writing. My essay in cream city review was the first where I explained that I'm no longer a drunk trying to walk a straight line, that I'm trying to be right-sized and loving, and that was pretty freeing.
I'm feeling really free right now, in spite of being in quarantine, losing my summer workshop gigs, and handling the uncertainty of what fall will look like. The freedom I feel has definitely impacted my form. I've recently published prose poems in Pithead Chapel and Gone Lawn and have some experimental essay/script narrative forthcoming in Writers Resist. I've stopped trying to place expectations on who I am as a writer and have let myself follow the content to the form, even if it means pushing boundaries and navigating my own discomfort. I'm in a period of writing that is exciting, where I feel full of discovery. This, too, shall pass, I know, but I'm going to hold on to it for now. I'm going to enjoy this freedom while it lasts.