Here is J. G. Ballard on the subject:
With the resources of video, you can build up quite a large library of images … I can imagine that, quite accidentally, you might get some obsessive, say, who finds himself collecting footage of women’s shoes whenever they’re shown (it doesn’t matter if it’s Esther Williams walking around a swimming pool with forties sound, or Princess Di) — he presses his button and records all this footage of women’s shoes … After accumulating two hundred hours of shoes, you might have a bizarre obsessive movie that’s absolutely riveting.
You might. You might indeed. And I have tried, God knows I’ve tried, but it’s surprisingly hard. All too often the image has been and gone before you’ve reached for the remote control and pressed the record button. I am no techno freak, nevertheless my archive contained a certain amount of video material, and I sometimes edited together relevant images and, if I say so myself, some of the results weren’t bad.
It was always a work in progress, but here’s one way it might have run. Fade in on Mickey Rourke sprawled on a bed stroking Kim Basinger’s feet in 91/2 Weeks, then cut to Dirk Bogarde doing the same with Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter, but here they’re on the floor and he’s actually kissing them, then to Bull Durham where Kevin Costner is painting Susan Sarandon’s toenails, cut to Goldie Hawn in Overboard where her manservant is doing the same for her. Then the shot from Who’s That Girl, where Madonna’s just been transformed from the street urchin to the glamour puss and we see her for the first time in a spangly ball gown, and the camera starts at her feet then moves all the way up her body to her face, but in my version we do a freeze frame on the start of the shot, the first moment when Madonna’s feet fill the whole screen. Madonna, incidentally, has feet to die for. Cut to Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa, cut to the scene in The War of the Roses where Danny De Vito’s girlfriend starts to give him a foot job under the dinner table. Possibly then a collage of images from Single White Female where first we see the girls trying on and buying metal-heeled, black suede court shoes, several shots of these shoes pacing corridors, then finally (and not too credibly in my opinion) the scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh kills Bridget Fonda’s boyfriend by driving one of the heels into his eye. Changing the pace, we have a brief shot of Katherine Helmond in Brazil wearing a leopardskin shoe on her head, an idea borrowed from Elsa Schiaparelli, then Alan Howard stroking Helen Mirren’s feet in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
I could go on and on, but for now I’d end with the shot from Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or, when Lya Lys, in a state of sexual arousal and frustration, sucks the toe of a statue of Christ. Her lips are a perfect shiny black against the white stone of the statue, and her eyes look glazed and orgasmic. It is one of the most truly pornographic images I know. The only problem with this, of course, is that it’s a man’s toe she’s sucking and that is well outside my range of interests.
Quite early on with Catherine, after I’d been sucking her feet for a while, she decided to return the favour and took my big toe in her mouth and moved her lips back and forth over it in a perfect impersonation of fellatio. It was a thoughtful gesture, I suppose, but I was appalled. I had to tell her to stop. My feet and toes are probably better looking than a good many men’s but I couldn’t possibly let a woman suck them. It was a disgusting idea. As I said to Catherine, ‘I may be a fetishist but I’m not a sicko.’ At the time she believed me, but later she seemed to change her mind.
Sixteen
A moment came when I knew something was wrong. Catherine phoned me — a rare event in itself — and she wanted to meet. This wasn’t exactly breaking the rules, but it wasn’t the way we normally did things. I was the one who usually made the running. And then she said she wanted to meet on neutral territory. She suggested London Zoo.
‘As neutral as that,’ I said, and I feared the worst.
It was a cool grey day and the zoo wasn’t crowded. We met by the aquatic birds of Europe and I saw at once it was worse than I could have expected. Catherine was wearing a pair of trainers. They were possibly very expensive and fashionable and loaded with statements about status and fitness and youth, but I was hearing a very different statement. She wanted to walk and talk.
‘I think it’s over,’ she said. ‘I think something’s happened.’
I suppose it didn’t come as a complete surprise but that didn’t make it hurt any the less.
‘What sort of thing?’ I asked as coolly as I could.
‘I don’t know exactly, but I know I can’t carry on like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘You know what I’m talking about.’
Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. Either way I wanted to hear her name it, to spell it out, but at first she wouldn’t or couldn’t.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘I just ask myself, and I think you should ask yourself too, is this a sensible way for two adults to conduct their lives?’
‘For me it’s the only way,’ I said.
‘I’m not even sure if I believe that. But for me it’s not the only way.’
‘Lucky old you,’ I said. ‘Was it bringing Rosemary to your flat that did it?’
‘It didn’t help.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘It was just a one off. It was a variation. We tried it and you didn’t like it, so, fine, we won’t do it again.’
‘It wasn’t only that.’
‘Was it showing you the archive?’
‘The archive is pretty strange, you have to admit.’
‘OK, I’ll admit it if that helps. Was it Harold and his shoes?’
‘Harold’s pretty strange too.’
‘Creepy you said.’
‘Yes, he’s creepy, but he does make nice shoes.’
‘He does.’
We had arrived at the primates. The monkeys were throwing themselves at the wire fronts of their cages, playing to the gallery, showing off, mouths flapping with what you know is not laughter. Caged animals, the stuff of metaphor, the stuff of overworked imagery. Nature bound and perverted. I thought of the monkeyskin shoes Harold had made for Catherine. It was as if the whole zoo was a source of raw materials for shoemaking.
‘So it’s all got too strange and creepy for you, has it?’ I said.
‘Something like that.’
‘I’ve scared you?’
‘Something has.’
‘You know,’ I said sadly and calmly, ‘I’ll never find anyone who has feet as perfect as yours.’
‘That may or may not be true,’ she said. ‘But either way, so what? I mean, be real, what does it matter whether or not a woman has beautiful feet? What does it mean?’
That could have got me very angry, but everything seemed to depend on staying cool, on remaining in control, of myself if not of the situation.
‘It doesn’t mean anything at all,’ I said reasonably. ‘That’s the whole point. Beauty never does mean anything. Beauty is just a fact. It has no moral dimension. It has no consequence in itself. But in this case it has some consequences for me. I see a beautiful pair of feet and I want to act in a certain way. And that’s all that matters. The fact that it matters to me.’