Footnote on Quentin Tarantino's 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'

Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate and Margaret Qualley as Pussycat

in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Quentin Tarantino's penchant for bare female feet in his films has been well-documented - one might think of Uma Thurman, as Mia Wallace, in Pulp Fiction (1994), or Bridget Fonda as Melanie in Jackie Brown (1997) - and for those who share this particular fetish Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) doesn't disappoint.    

There are multiple foot shots and both Margot Robbie, as Sharon Tate, and Margaret Qualley as Manson Family member Pussycat [1], have their shoes off for a considerable amount of screen time (1 min. 26 seconds and 1 minute respectively).

 

Tarantino has naturally been asked about this and, in recent a GQ interview, said:

 

"I don’t take it seriously. There’s a lot of feet in a lot of good directors' movies. [...] Like, before me, the person foot fetishism was defined by was Luis Buñuel [...] And Hitchcock was accused of it [...]” [2] 

 

It's interesting to discover that Tarantino doesn't take accusations of being a foot festishist seriously - which isn't quite the same as denying his podophilia. And he's right to point out that other directors have also been accused of the same thing.  

 

I think film critics who complain that Tarantino's shots of feet don't serve any narrative purpose, either don't know (or don't understand) the history of cinema and its inherenty kinky aesthetic (founded as it is upon exhibitionism and voyeurism, for example). 

 

Nor might they know that the real Sharon Tate loved going barefoot in public and when she went to restaurants where this might be a problem, she would put rubber bands around her ankles in order to create the illusion that she was wearing sandals.  

 

And so, to suggest that Tarantino just includes these shots for his own sexual pleasure is, therefore, ignorant and insulting to him as a director. 

 

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, for example, the scenes in which Tate puts her bare feet up on the back of the seat in front of her at the cinema and Pussycat puts her bare feet up on the dashboard of the car being driven by Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), tell us something significant; namely, that whereas Tate has successfully stamped her mark on the silver screen, Pussycat and her fellow Manson Family members will merely leave a nasty stain on popular culture, like the mark left by a squashed bug on a windscreen.

 

As to why it is that the soles of Tate's feet are dirty, whilst the soles of Pussycat's feet are clean in comparison, well, I'm no Christian Metz, but perhaps Tarantino is suggesting that the former will have her sins forgiven and her feet washed clean by the tears of love and laughter she inspires in others [3], whereas Pussycat, who has deliberately chosen to take the path of evil and follows in the devil's footsteps, is deceptively clean and attractive on the outside, but corrupt of soul and filthy of mouth [4].     

Notes

[1] The character of Pussycat is a composite figure inspired by several of Manson's real followers, including Ruth Ann Moorehouse, whom Manson frequently sent into the city to entice men with money back to Spahn Ranch, and Kathryn ('Kitty Kat') Lutesinger. 

 

[2] See the interview with Tarantino by John Phipps in GQ magazine (3 Sept 2021): click here. 

[3] To watch the scene with Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate at the movie theatre in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), click here. 

 

[4] To watch the scene with Margaret Qualley as Pussycat hitching a ride from Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), click here. 

 

 

Again to Nowhere and Nothing Again: The Multiple Death-in-Life Masks of Charles Manson - A Guest Post by Símón Solomon

With the 50th anniversary overlap of Quentin Tarantino's latest movie - a black comedy-cum-thriller set in 1969 LA - and an orthodoxy-busting new book by Tom O'Neill, the helter-skelter spiral concerning the life, death and afterlife of celebrity mass murderer, Charles Manson, continues to unravel.

If Tarantino’s title attests to a sense of his picture's elliptical storyboarding, O'Neill’s obsessive study, two decades in the making, underwrites its anarchic archetypal matrix. Either way, should one or both works help to provoke laughter at the facile official version of the Family's choreographed career, a valuable public service will have been performed. In any event, the supposed madman who derailed free love's peace train and called himself no one is a media star all over again.

Some might need to think of him as beyond the pale, but, arguably, Manson was very much a product of American post-War popular culture and a toxic body politic. Thus, at a time when the psychedelic Summer of Love was turning - or being turned - hateful and psychotic, the Family's graphically mediated slaughter of the heavily pregnant actress Sharon Tate, plus three unfortunate friends and a visitor, would be obscenely exploited in order to euthanise the counter-culture by injecting a final shot of fatal terror into the haunted paradise of the beautiful people.

Although the Leno and Rosemary LaBianca slayings two nights later in a separate Los Angeles neighbourhood were suspected by investigators to be copycat homicides, the synergetic contiguity of the two events sealed the Manson clan's fate, implicated as its purported ringleader already was in the murder of Gary Hinman by Bobby Beausoleil.

What fascinates about Manson's legacy as Hollywood's Bluebeard-esque signature villain, is his shapeshifting multiplication through a panoply of visages that evoke resemblances with Jim Morrison, a desert Christ, Büchner's schizophrenic assassin Lenz, and a swastika-stamped beatnik Nazi.

Shot through with a consummate performer's narcissistic and solipsistic grandiosity (in my mind's eye my thoughts light fires in your cities) and memorably inflected anti-humanism (I have X-ed myself from your world), Manson may or may not have been a malignant killer, but, like some fire and brimstone reincarnation of Oscar Wilde without the dress sense, he was always fiendishly quotable.

One can readily see how Tarantino was drawn to his cinematically suggestive story, even as one suspects a superior auteur like David Lynch - whose noirish attunement to Hollywood’s underside is indissociable from the Manson-magnetised termination of flower power  - might have concocted a far more unsettling film.

As we might expect of a mortal so manufactured, if not consumed, by his own demoniacal myth, it is difficult to exaggerate Manson's enduring cultural impact. Yet the more prosaic and humiliated humanity onto which his personae were pinned curdles the legend: a rootless and institutionalised roamer from a broken family; a beatnik thief; a sociopathic fantasist of race war who hung out with Hell's Angels; a failed musician with a monstrous superiority complex.

His archetypal reversion to zero, to a politics of utopian and/or dystopian annihilation, is presumably the clearest clue to the Family's engineered reality. To take Charlie at his word means to view him as essentially a cipher, a figment, of Hollywood’s phantasmic horror, a parodic Freddie Kruger precursor to the Terrible Beauty generation.

His final reported phone call from jail, a recursive quasi-Beckettian microscript, says it all in its unsaying:

'Nothing with everyone and everything over and gone to start backwards again and again to nowhere and nothing again.'

Notes

Quentin Tarantino's new film, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2019. It is released in the UK on 14 August 2019. Click here to watch the official trailer.

See: Tom O'Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, (William Heinemann, 2019).

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, and critic. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

This is a revised and updated version of an earlier (unpublished) post of the same title. 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here.