There’s a new wave of film that’s emerged since the onset of this global pandemic: films to watch under quarantine. Unlike most film waves or movements, this is not something that’s taken the form of new film productions but the revisiting or reworking of pre-existing films for a time of crisis and isolation. Thus this new plague cinema refers to the new patterns of viewership that have arisen during the coronavirus, and, more specifically, the sheltering-in-place that has taken place in response to the pandemic.
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.
[In the interest of making sure this site has content, I’ve been reposting a few things I’ve self-published on places like Medium and Tumblr. The original can be found here.]
Every new story or essay in late March 2020 is inevitably about the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. I can’t avoid that the same way I’m avoiding human contact by “social distancing”, a life-altering phrase that’s also basically guaranteed to wind up as the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question in the year 2040. So while I’ve been teasing this essay in my head long before the pandemic struck, it has, like every other concept on Earth, been twisted by current events. Not necessarily in a bad way, though, as sick as most of us are of reading about coronavirus. What started off in my mind as a silly and frivolous piece about how Criterion and Arrow are raising the bar on home video packaging has become a piece on how inanimate objects can bring us comfort in times of trial and loneliness.
Continue reading “Steel This Book: Criterion, Arrow, and the Golden Age of Home Video Packaging”
[Here’s something I wrote in 2015; I’ve changed a lot as a writer and thinker, but I like this piece still. All images taken from the film in question.]
There’s a trans character in the 1994 American comedy Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, and the film reveals her trans status in a scene clearly meant as a parody of 1992′s The Crying Game, down to the set dressing. As trans woman Tanya (Anna Nicole Smith) undresses in front of Frank (Leslie Nielsen), we switch from Frank’s eyeline to one that shows him in profile and casts her out of frame. Only her shadow remains.
Continue reading “The Transsexual Shadow: Spectacle and Absence in ‘Naked Gun 33 1/3’”
[Here’s a piece I wrote on Tumblr way back in 2016. Enjoy. Images taken from the film in question.]
Here’s a bit of a trans cinema easter egg, courtesy of the opening titles of David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en. The sequence, designed by Kyle Cooper, is a chaotic, unstable series of images that detail the obsessive work of serial killer John Doe. At once methodical and erratic, it encapsulates the mind of the character and is quite justly considered one of the greatest title sequences of all time. In it, we can glimpse (however briefly) Doe working with pages of a book that deal with transsexuality.
[Reposted from my Tumblr page.]
The most prominent thought I had as I watched Sebastián Lelio’s Oscar-nominated A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantástica, 2017) was how literate the film is in transgender cinema compared to other transgender films I watch. As Marina (Daniela Vega) is thrust through a gauntlet of transphobia following the death of her boyfriend, the film doesn’t merely replicate the common tropes of both transgender cinema and transgender life; it seems to understand that they are tropes, that what’s going on in Marina’s life is a set of recurring phenomena throughout both life and, perhaps more importantly, media representations of trans people. I can’t help but compare the film to the also-Oscar-nominated The Danish Girl (2015), another film that ostensibly serves as a social issue film centered on a transgender protagonist. On its face, A Fantastic Woman is much like The Danish Girl: a straightforward social issue drama that puts a trans woman and her troubles on display for a majority-cis audience to feel good about being on the liberal side of the issue. But I hated The Danish Girl and loved A Fantastic Woman, largely because The Danish Girl was constantly enveloped by tropes the filmmakers didn’t seem to understand and A Fantastic Woman not only seemed to understand the tropes but work against them. If The Danish Girl was a clueless attempt at transgender advocacy, then A Fantastic Woman may be the opposite: a commentary on films like The Danish Girl and how films go about depicting transphobia in the first place.
Continue reading “The Look, Confounded: A Fantastic Woman is a Film About Films About Transphobia”