Author: Eleven Groothuis

Eleven is the founder and editor-in-chief of Unstrung Nerves. She's a neurodivergent, trans weirdo who obsesses over David Cronenberg and will occasionally change up their pronouns, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. They've written for places like Autostraddle, Bitch, and TransAdvocate in the past. She's sometimes on Twitter @13minus2.

Ink Isn’t Worth Anything To Me: Phantom of the Paradise

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

When Swan asks the Phantom to sign his contract in Phantom of the Paradise, he pricks Phantom’s finger with a pen, saying “ink isn’t worth anything to me”. Swan’s demonic pact needs blood. He, as he says, is “under contract too”: he’s signed a deal with the devil to stay eternally young, with an image to age in his place a là Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. After trying to commit suicide, The Phantom and Swan become tied together, and when The Phantom destroy’s Swan’s image, the Phantom goes with him.

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Transgender Nostalgia

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

If you follow the logic of They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, the documentary on Orson Welles and the attempt to make his final film, then the Netflix release of The Other Side of the Wind is a vindication for the embattled auteur. And it may well be, but that’s not what I’m interested in. Nor am I even interested in the particulars of the way that this zombie of a film lurched back to life, interesting though that story undoubtedly is. To me the film raises the issue of memory and the way the past comes back to haunt us.

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Larry David’s Neo-Noir Hellscapes

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

Fargo turns 25 next year, and the Coens’ 1996 opus not only retains all of the power that I can only imagine it held upon release (I would have been 7 at the time), it actually ages better every time I watch it. More than any other film, Fargo lives in my brain like a parasite; the only film since with that kind of power is, fittingly enough, Parasite.

Fargo‘s brutality, much like Parasite‘s, invariably rests on the brutality of things to come. Starting with a long, snowy drive set to Carter Burwell’s menacingly spiraled score, the film dwells on the moments  of quiet clarity that become puncuated by violent entanglements. Fargo both predicts the future and violently shatters its own predictions: the best laid plans, et cetera, et cetera. The tension between Jerry Lundegaard’s machinations and the outcome is only beginning as the film branches fractally outward into a series of thwarted intentions.

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Destroy All Monsters

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

Night of the Living Dead

Back in 2013, I wrote a piece on Tumblr that “dissected”, so to speak, what I considered a deeply transphobic joke Rob Zombie made during his (excellent) performance at Mayhem Festival. I’m not only not going to re-publish that piece, I’m not even going to link to it because I’m so ashamed of the narrow-minded priggishness and oversensitivity the piece displays; I lunged at the supposed infraction like a politically correct zombie. I had only come out as trans the year before, and at the time I was much more vulnerable to my own internalized transphobia, which is why the throwaway moment shook me so much. Besides which, I think in retrospect I lashed out as a way to feel better about my own internalized self-hate. There’s a strong case to be made that “call-out culture” is really a way of making the canceller feel better about themselves as opposed to effecting change in any meaningful way.

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A Note on My Absence and New Content Coming

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

 

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.

Creature of the Wheel

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

Michael Moore has a new film: Planet of the Humans. Directed by Jeff Gibbs but executive-produced and promoted by Moore, the film publicly bears the much more famous name, in both publicity for the film and criticism of it. I’ve been browsing critiques this morning while listening to White Zombie’s Astro-Creep: 2000 on repeat and trying to get this Underworld Breach deck to work on Arena and honestly just doing everything to avoid having to watch what some sources suggest is a pile of cold garbage: from a factual and political standpoint. As a fan and admirer of Moore, I’m disappointed he would put his name on something like this. But then, like the opening sample of Astro-Creep says, “perhaps you had better start from the beginning,” Eleven. Unfortunately, I think that involves me actually watching this movie and then coming back to the article.

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The Faculty

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis
One of the major preoccupations of the teen film is the sociology of cliques and groups: how groups form, how groups remain entrenched in exclusive social circles, and, perhaps most importantly, how the boundaries between groups can be crossed. John Hughes’ 1985 film The Breakfast Club is emblematic in this regard: the narration that opens and closes the film makes clear that high school, for these characters, exists in terms of sharply drawn boxes that contain them: the brain, the basket case, the criminal, the athlete, the princess. The entire premise of the film is the erosion of those preconceived boundaries.

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Sweeps

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

“Men in tight dresses make lousy victims.”

—Law & Order: Trial By Jury, “Boys Will Be Boys”

In a 1972 episode of Hawaii Five-0, “Didn’t We Meet at a Murder?”, a “homosexual transvestite” (another character’s words) commits suicide after being blackmailed into committing a murder. It’s an early example of a trans spectrum person in the loosely knit genres of police procedurals, cop dramas, and detective shows, and it predicts two of the major tropes in which trans people would appear on such shows: as villains (usually killers) and as victims (usually being killed). This essay will explore transgender appearances in these ever-popular genres: as villains, victims, and in rare cases as investigators. In all cases, the real relationships between trans communities and the criminal punishment system is obscured by an emphasis on interpersonal violence and a misplaced trust in the system to operate fairly and justly towards trans people.

I begin with an analysis of the wide array of transgender characters in this genre-set, focusing on the victims and villains who make up the overwhelming majority, analyzing the common tropes and how those tropes affect perceptions of trans people. In the second part, I explore in more depth how the fictional relationships in these shows compare to the real-life relationships between transgender people and the criminal punishment system.

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Nothing is True: ‘Naked Lunch’ and Film Noir

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

“Exterminate all rational thought.”

Bill Lee in Naked Lunch

“The stuff that dreams are made of.”

Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon

We can’t exactly pin down film noir. Or perhaps it’s better to say it isn’t desirable to pin down film noir. Paul Schrader suggests that noir is not “conventions of setting and conflict” but rather “more subtle qualities of tone and mood” (582), and that film noir is “first of all a style” (591). James Naremore asks if it is “a period, a genre, a cycle, a style, or simply a ‘phenomenon'” (9); he concludes (or rather, resists concluding) that “film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema; in other words, it has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse—a loose, evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies” (11). Continue reading “Nothing is True: ‘Naked Lunch’ and Film Noir” →

A Delicious Mind-Controlling Dessert-Like Organism: Fictional Advertisements and ‘The Stuff’

Posted on by Eleven Groothuis

In the interest of getting my brain up and running for the day, I present a list of some of the best fictional television commercials. Why? I don’t know, exactly, but the idea popped into my mind as I was driving to the coffee shop where I’m sitting right now. I think the best fictional television commercials satirize the advertising industry as well as television and consumerism more broadly. For example,

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