Monday, March 21, 2011

It's All About the Fetishism, Bay-Bee (Analysis #3)



This scene from the movie From Dusk Til Dawn portrays a man with a foot fetish getting a little bit of what he craves. Namely, pretty Selma Hayek's feet in his face. As Quentin Tarantino is portraying the character, and he is rumored to have a bit of a foot fetish himself, it is really no surprise that he would take advantage of the chance to have something like this in his movie.

Looking at this through a Freudian lens, one would note that the foot in this case is the replacement for the penis that this man really wants, but cannot have. In order to feed this need, he fixates on something else. Something that makes it easier to see the woman, without a penis of her own, in a sexual light. Probably he developed this fetish early, as a replacement for what he believes is his mother's lost penis, and a protection against losing his own. As Freud writes in "Fetishism", the fetish is a "token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it" (843). The fetish becomes, in a way, a talisman, a sort of good-luck charm against the possibility of castration. Add in the characters weird, co-dependent relationship with his brother, who acts more like a father and might have raised him, and his propensity for violence against women, and the result is a man that I'm sure Freud would have loved to analyze in depth.

One could be forgiven for not quite understanding the whole concept of fetishism. Those who don't have a fetish - or don't have one that is obvious - might not understand the reason behind such a thing. Although Freud might have gotten the reason why one develops a fetish wrong, he was correct in his belief that if said fetish does no harm to anyone, then it is not the right no any one person to judge another for having one, whatever it might be.

Works Cited


Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. 841-45. Print.

"YouTube - Film: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) - Fetish Scene." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. Web. 21 Mar. 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n_pQkK_MP8>

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