Saturday, September 22, 2007

Toe-tally

I just saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Death-Proof' ... Let's call it a freaky foot fetish fest. A peek inside Tarantino's obsession with women's feet. 'Pulp Fiction' barely touched the tip of QT's foot obsession as Travolta and Jackson expounded on whether giving a foot massage to another man's wife was akin to a sexual experience or not. Then later we jump to 'Jackie Brown' where Bridget Fonda's toesies were on display in her beachside condo, before she was later offed by DeNiro for merely annoying him.

The opening shot in Death Proof features a girl's feet up on a dashboard and is the beginning of a footsie love - hate extravaganza. The only other filmmaker foot fetishist I can recall from my undergrad film class was Luis Bunuel, and he isn't the one on the tip of everyone's tongue. Tarantino's commingling of foot obsession with misogyny, e.g., killing the women whose feet were erotically displayed earlier in the films is a psychological attempt to control his obsession by eradicating the source of it. Misogyny often roots in men hating women because they cannot have them, cannot control them, cannot control their lust for them or squelch the fetish that both excites and repulses them. But in this case, I believe this isn't a man who wants a woman's toes in his mouth, but a cock. And this man needs to come to terms with cock and leave women's feet 'out of the picture'.

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