Tale Told Twice: Medusa

Faith Zapata of faith's core retells "Medusa" in "Look Back"

In the fourth installment of Tale Told Twice, in which we share a retelling each month, Faith invites readers to question what they know about Medusa, reimagining the myth in modern day Hollywood to interrogate who we villainize and what truly makes a monster. Please enjoy this retelling, and read on for an interview with the author, included at the end.

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Look Back

The cameras find me everywhere now. Lately, I’ve been noticing more and more the way they lower slightly whenever I look directly at them — as if the men behind them are afraid I might reach through the lens and tear something essential from their bodies. 

And maybe I would, given the chance.

Before everything happened, I moved through the industry with my eyes cast downward and trained to look grateful. Studio executives called me ‘promising’ and ‘refreshing’, but what they meant was malleable. What they meant was: she doesn’t ask questions yet. I’d been signed on for a three-picture deal that my agent said would change everything, and I believed her because I had to. She called it career-defining. 

“This changes everything,” she’d said, squeezing my shoulder in that maternal way she sometimes did when bringing me good news.

I remember all too well the exact moment when I realized I’d been wrapped up into something I no longer recognized. Standing in my hotel bathroom after a wrap party, the fluorescent lighting made my skin look sickly. I remember gripping the edge of the sink, knuckles white with fear, trying to understand what had just happened by the bar. The studio head — Preston — had cornered me there, one hand on the wall beside my head, the other on my waist, explaining in careful detail what my career trajectory could look like if I was ‘smart about it’, and what it might look like if I wasn’t. 

“I think you understand what I’m saying,” he’d said, watching my face carefully. I nodded because nodding was what I had been trained to do. He seemed satisfied with this response and patted my cheek before rejoining the party. In the bathroom mirror afterward, I could barely recognize myself. 

Who was this woman, who could be spoken to that way, and would nod in response? My gaze flitted toward my hair, which had been styled into loose waves by someone paid to make me look more approachable. Mission accomplished, I guess. In a fit of silent rage, I gathered it in my fist and impulsively cut it off with some complimentary sewing kit scissors. The blunt ends curled wildly, untamed. 

I looked feral. I looked awake. 

The next morning, security footage from the hotel corridor was leaked. It showed enough. His grip on my wrist as I tried to leave, my body language signaling extreme discomfort. It didn’t show everything, but enough. My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. 

Thea called while I was still in bed, staring at the ceiling.

“We need to get ahead of this, Med,” she said without greeting me. I could hear her furiously typing in the background.

“Ahead of what?” I asked, even though I already knew.

“I’m already getting calls for comment. The studio’s communications team has been in touch.”

“Why don’t we just tell them what happened?” I said.

The silence that followed contained multitudes. Thea had been my publicist for three years. She’d held my hair back when I was sick at the Golden Globes after-party last year. She knew my parents’ names and my coffee order. 

“It isn’t that simple,” she finally said, breaking her silence. “There are ways these things get handled.”

In that moment, I understood that whatever was coming next had already been decided without me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just let me handle it,” she said. “Trust me.”

By afternoon, the press releases had been drafted. The studio was ‘deeply concerned’ about my ‘wellbeing’ following ‘erratic behavior’ at recent events. They hoped I would ‘seek the support needed during this challenging time’. Thea’s agency expressed similar sentiments. Not one mention of Preston or the footage. They turned me into something unstable and mentally unwell without using those exact words.

My sisters called hourly, almost violent in their protectiveness. “Come home,” Steph said, her voice tight with anger. “Just for a little while.”

“Deuce, they’re making you look insane. It’s disgusting,” Riley added, trying to wear me down by using her childhood nickname for me. “Maybe Steph’s right. Come back for a bit.”

“I’m staying,” I told them both.

At my first photoshoot after the incident, the photographer kept asking me to look more vulnerable. To soften my expression. I stared unflinchingly directly into his lens instead. He lowered his camera after thirty minutes of this, uncomfortable.

“I can’t really work with... whatever this is,” he told his assistant when he thought I couldn’t hear.

Those photos never ran, but there were others that did. Ones where I looked like myself. Unsmiling, direct, unyielding. The media called it ‘intense’ and ‘confrontational’. They made it sound like I’d become something dangerous, when really, I’d just stopped pretending.

My unwillingness to look away didn’t only affect my career. The director who had laughed when Preston made those comments suddenly found the funding for his next project withdrawn. The producer who had rendered me ‘difficult’ in a blind item had his past text messages mysteriously published online. The columnist who suggested I was ‘obviously mentally ill’ watched his reputation plummet after his private emails were hacked. I never claimed responsibility. I didn’t need to. The power was in looking away: from them, from what had happened, from what everyone pretended wasn’t happening every day in every single corner of the industry.

This morning, I saw Preston outside Chateau Marmont. For a moment, our eyes met across the sidewalk. His slid away first, walking faster as he pretended not to see me. I watched him hurry past, feeling nothing but mild curiosity at how small he suddenly seemed. Not exactly petrified, but diminished. Hardened into irrelevance just by being seen for what he truly is. I raise my left hand to touch my short curls — now my signature look, according to the same magazines that once praised my girl-next-door appeal — and I continue walking. 

The cameras still follow me, but they tend to keep their distance. They’ve learned what happens when I look back.

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An interview with the author, Faith Zapata of faith’s core

Why is Medusa a tale that has stuck with you? 

I’m just a big Greek mythology lover to begin with — I mean, my most popular song on streaming platforms is literally about Apollo and told from the perspective of one of his mortal lovers. But I’ve always been intrigued and fascinated by Medusa’s story in particular. I know that Greek mythology generally is extremely unhinged, but the way she wound up being the one who was punished for an assault that was done to her just always stuck out to me like a sore thumb. And the fact that her assaulter, Poseidon, was able to walk away unscathed just felt like such a mirror reflection of incidents that occur in our real world. Probably because things like this surely happened back when these mythologies were being recorded. 

What inspired you to retell Medusa in this way? 

I wanted to provide a sense of justice for Medusa, and create a narrative where she wins in the end. Where her abuser comes out of the story with some kind of punishment and scurries away like the tiny, little man he really is. The ancient Greeks were very creative storytellers, but just like majority of the original writers of old fairytales and mythologies, unfortunately incredibly misogynistic. I wanted to help flip the script for the poor girl. 

What do you think is gained by retelling the tale from this perspective?

Ever since I first read of her tale as a little girl, I always felt severely unsettled by her ending. So much so, that I even had nightmares about it sometimes. I think that outside of my overall goal of writing this character into a reclaiming of her narrative, writing this also helped heal the part of my inner child that was deeply unfulfilled by the ending of the original story. So, I guess I did this for Medusa and for little Faith. I hope they’re both happy.

Stay tuned at the end of May for our fourth installment of Tale Told Twice with another amazing Substack author!