But what a fondness! Infamous screenwriter Joe Eszterhaus felt it interesting enough to mention in his memoir, Hollywood Animal. A recent New York article, commenting on a photo shoot in which Tarantino is photographed fondling Diane Kruger’s feet, shouted, “Okay, Okay, Quentin Tarantino Has a Foot Fetish, We Get it!” But is that all it is? A prurient preoccupation with feet, a kink Tarantino is helpless to throw onscreen in a combination of titillation, explanation, and popularization? Perhaps not. The Village Voice, eschewing the shock and exasperation that generally comes bundled with a discussion of Tarantino’s quirk, explored it a little more deeply: “It's not just that he's a foot fetishist, but that he takes what he cares about—personal, quirky stuff—and transforms it into art.”
Directors are famous for their motifs, and Tarantino is no exception. His fascinations – genre films, off-kilter sequencing, and 70s culture among them – define and occasionally pigeonhole him. Just as each of these directorial choices come to shape the movies he makes, so too does his fondness for feet. No mere fetish writ large, Tarantino’s examination of the toes and soles of his actresses is far more interesting.
Pulp Fiction launches right into things, as gangsters Vincent and Jules famously discuss whether giving a man’s wife a foot rub is cause for defenestration. The message is clear right off: whether throwing Tony Rocky Horror out of a window for touching Marcellus Wallace’s wife Mia’s feet was justified is not really the issue; the issue is whether touching a woman’s feet equals sex. Later, the film does its best to convince us that it is: when Mia Wallace first appears, we see her dancing barefoot to Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man”. The finale of this sequence lingers on a close-up of Mia’s toes sunk seductively into a deep-pile carpet. Mia is beautiful and her dance is seductive, but it is this image that underlines the scene – the job of the audience is to understand that the soles of her feet are meant to be as erotic as seeing her naked.
Later, in what is arguably Pulp Fiction’s most famous sequence, Mia bullies Vincent into entering (and winning) the Jack Rabbit Slim’s twist contest. It’s no mistake that while Vincent remains in socks, Mia – now aggressive – dances barefoot once again. It is here that we first get a glimpse of feet symbolizing something more than sex for Tarantino. Mia stripping her shoes off is an act of power here – seductive, yes, but in the service of winning her the trophy she wants. During the twist contest, we are allowed only one close-up of her gyrating feet. Any more, Tarantino seems to say, would be to rob the sequence of its power, degenerating it to something like pornography.
Of course, pornography is very much on the roster in From Dusk Till Dawn. Though not directed by Tarantino, it was written by him and stars him, and offers and intriguing evolutionary step in this aspect of Tarantino’s development. In one scene, Salma Hayek, as erotic dancer Satanico Pandemonium, moves seductively across a table toward Tarantino’s Richie Gecko. Bikini-clad and wearing a writhing snake around her shoulders, Pandemonium lifts her foot to Gecko’s face, pouring alcohol down her thigh and inviting Gecko to lap it off her toes. That Pandemonium is revealed to be a vampire recontextualizes this scene, echoing Jonathan Harker’s seduction by Dracula’s concubines. The theme of consumption mixed with sexuality is key in vampire stories, and it is no mistake that later, Pandemonium drinks more literally from Richie Gecko, transforming him into a vampire. This classic horror movie trope of sex (in this case, toe-sucking instead of intercourse) leading to death will be explored in far more detail in Tarantino’s later Death Proof.
The image of alcohol and feet re-emerges in Jackie Brown, a movie concerned above all things with age. When Bridget Fonda’s Melanie first appears, several shots focus on the soles of her bare feet, prettied up with toe rings; as it is later suggested that she is “past her prime,” the toe rings – along with her skimpy outfits and garish fake tan – serve to accentuate her desire to cling to her youth. The first close-ups of her feet frame them next to a glass of alcohol sipped intermittently by Robert DeNiro’s Louis Gara – seen here grizzled and old. The proximity of girlish feet next to this man’s alcohol underlines their drab Lolita relationship, and serves as foreshadowing to its violent conclusion. Whereas Salma Hayek’s bare foot – dripping with alcohol – symbolized her power over Tarantino’s character, here the power dynamic is reversed. Following a brief and blunt sex scene (recalling – and perhaps exploiting – DeNiro’s boudoir scene with Jodie Foster’s child prostitute in Taxi Driver) DeNiro’s character shoots Fonda in broad daylight.
In these early Tarantino films, his focus on feet is almost purely sexual, though suggesting themes of more symbolic importance. Sex is either presaged or entirely subverted by the fetishization of feet. However, by the time of Kill Bill, the focus shifts. Early on, Uma Thurman’s Bride character awakens from a coma partially paralyzed. Before she can embark on her “roaring rampage of revenge,” she first has to get her feet moving. A close-up of Thurman’s bare feet fill the screen as she commands herself to “wiggle her big toe.” Epic importance is attached to this moment; this is the Bride’s first major act of independence since being shot in the head by Bill years prior. In this context, a woman’s feet are as much symbolic of her power and strength as her swordplay; it is important that Lucy Liu’s character removes her shoes before her climactic battle with the Bride.
In Kill Bill, Volume 2, we again see The Bride’s feet in flashback, before her later violent retribution. During her talk with David Carradine’s Bill – before his attempt on her life – we see her in sandals, the tops and sides of her feet exposed. Bill appears in loafers, and there are several shots of both pairs of feet approaching one another. The dynamic here is clear: Bill has caught The Bride unaware, putting him in control … though his control is not total. Though he shoots her, she lives; it may not be that much of a stretch to suggest that her covered soles are a symbol of things even Bill is not allowed to see.
Death Proof, Tarantino’s half of the Grindhouse experiment, pushes all of the director’s interests to the extreme. Here, his love of dialogue that has no bearing on the plot or story of the film at times detracts from the momentum, and his interest in subplots as epic as his plots can be trying. His interest in feet, too, is explored to unprecedented degrees. Tarantino has described Death Proof as a slasher film, and in slasher films, the killer tends to target teenagers who have dared to have premarital sex. Death Proof follows that logic with a Tarantino twist: instead of sex, we are privy to long, sensual shots of young women’s feet.
The film opens with a bright shot of feet crossed at the ankle resting on a dashboard; this is meant to be as sexual (and iconic) an image as a scantily-clad woman writhing on the hood of a car. Our first glimpse of one of the film’s sexy leads, Sydney Poitier, is of her walking barefoot through her apartment, with many shots tracking her at foot level. Later, she appears with her feet dangling off a porch during a rainstorm, the water sluicing sensually between her toes, bringing to mind similar scenes of skinny-dipping in earlier slasher movies. Immediately before she is murdered, we see Poitier’s foot dangling out of the window of a car: bare feet equal sex, and sex equals death.
In the second segment of Death Proof, a sleeping Rosario Dawson is spotted by the slasher-killer Stuntman Mike; her feet, too, are dangling out a car’s window. While she dozes, Stuntman Mike runs a finger over the heels of her feet. This act is the height of repugnance, meant to imply attempted rape. Stuntman Mike’s twisted mentality sees this accidental sensuality as reason to murder. It is no accident that, later, Dawson and her friends take their revenge on Stuntman Mike by stomping him to death. The shoe, truly, is on the other foot.
Inglourious Basterds is a tricky, intricately plotted foreign film hiding inside a brash Tarantino genre-bender. Over the course of the film, we learn that Diane Kruger’s actress Bridget von Hammersmark is working as a double agent for the Americans within the Nazi ranks. During a climactic scene, she is nearly killed and just manages to escape with her life. Christopher Waltz’s Hans Landa, a brutal Nazi officer who has uncovered her high-heel shoe amidst the wreckage she escaped, tracks her down, and in an unbearably tense perversion of the Cinderella story, matches the shoe to her foot. One foot is already broken, symbolic of her sudden diminished usefulness; her other, exposed by Landa, literally and figuratively explicates where her loyalties lie. Far from being a sexual symbol – though there is an element to dark sexuality in this scene, as there was in the similar scene in Death Proof – here, Diane Kruger’s bare foot reveals her secrets and makes her vulnerable. Her feet broken and exposed, von Hammersmark is powerless.
However Tarantino’s “quirky, personal stuff” first emerged onscreen, it is obvious that his passion for feet has become far more interesting than kink or fetish. As symbols of sexuality, of power, of vulnerability, his actresses’ feet are as versatile as any other signature at Tarantino’s disposal. One can’t but be intrigued as to what his next step will be.
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