A Note on My Absence and New Content Coming

Hello, all you wonderful readers of Unstrung Nerves, should you in fact exist. I’ve been in some less-than-awesome mental and emotional places since my last article published nearly three months ago, in the grips of depression and writers’ block and more. I’ve struggled to write and even more so to feel like anything I’ve written is worth publishing.

It’s hard to pinpoint just what’s changed recently, but I can say that the tragic passing of a public figure I look up to intellectually, Michael Brooks, has pushed me back into the sphere in which I feel happiest and most contented, and perhaps as importantly, where I see my future. Ironically, my depression has kept me from engaging in the very activities that might help me pull myself out of it.

In that vein, I am planning several new pieces. The first (though they may be published in any order, or not at all) is a piece I call “Destroy All Monsters”, an introspective look at my own writings and the role of a progressive/leftist film critic that goes beyond simply naming things as problematic. It’s a piece that was very much influenced by Michael Brooks.

Secondly, I’m planning at least one essay if not two (or more) on the representation of police and policing in film, and specifically how film props up the incredibly racist system of policing in the United States. The first is a kind of odd double feature pairing Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent satire RoboCop with Quentin Dupieux’s Wrong Cops, probably the funniest movie of the 21st century and yet also a scathing indictment of the impunity given to a bunch of creeps with guns.

I am also looking at publishing several essays I had previously written, including a take on what I call “post-Cronenbergian body horror” (i.e. films like The Neon Demon and Get Out), an essay on the intersection of disability, incarceration, race, and cinema, and a piece I call “Transgender Nostalgia”, which, as I note in the essay, is essentially an oxymoron.

Lastly, I’m working on an article on space in the works of John Ford, because lately I’ve been unable to get Stagecoach out of my head. Watch for these and more. Thank you for reading.