Why Quentin Tarantino was disappointed about erotic cinema never going “mainstream”
Quentin Tarantino has tried his hand at a variety of genres, but never erotica. If he were to make an X-rated, sex-filled film, we can imagine it would just be crammed to the brim with feet, so perhaps that’s for the best.
That’s not to say that there’s not still a sensual air to some of Tarantino’s films, but sex scenes are rare. In fact, only one of his movies has ever featured a sex scene: Jackie Brown.
Discussing his aversion to these kinds of scenes, Tarantino once told the Spanish publication Diari ARA, “It’s true, sex is not part of my vision of cinema. And the truth is that, in real life, it’s a pain to shoot sex scenes, everyone is very tense. And if it was already a bit problematic to do it before, now it is even more so. If there had ever been a sex scene that was essential to the story, I would have, but so far it hasn’t been necessary.”
It seems like Tarantino gets his kicks more subtly with his close-up female foot shots wedged into almost all of his films. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Still, he has a real appreciation for good erotic cinema – he is a dedicated cinephile, after all. The director has cited various erotic movies, like Richard Gere’s Breathless and even the British porn flick The Sexplorer, as movies that he holds close to his heart, but he can’t help but feel disappointed that erotic cinema never made it properly mainstream.
You could argue that it sort of did in the 1980s and the 1990s with the rise of popular erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, but Tarantino argues that there was a promised era of eroticism in the 1970s that was never truly delivered in the way he’d hoped. These days, erotic cinema is far from being truly erotic, it almost feels the opposite with its cold and sanitised approach (see Fifty Shades of Grey or 365 Days).
We could’ve had a period of genuinely great and actually sexy films following the easing of the Hays Code, Tarantino believes, but instead it died a quick death following the release of campy classics like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Introducing the Russ Meyer film in France, Tarantino said, “There were a lot of promises made. Some of them were kept and fulfilled, and some of them weren’t. One of the promises that unfortunately existed that year [1970] and a couple years after that was never fulfilled was the promise of a new, erotic cinema.”
In Tarantino’s ideal world, these kinds of films would “get out of the raincoat crowd, the grind-houses, the porno theatres and the 8mm reels” and “become respectable and mainstream so regular people could go to the cinema and experience erotic cinema without any embarrassment or shame.”
Meyer’s film had the potential to kickstart this movement – it was a success at the box office due to its combination of music, humour, sensuality and murder – but instead the promise of a new erotic landscape disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. It “lasted, at the best, three years,” and “then returned to either porno or sexploitation movies,” Tarantino argues.
Erotic cinema was never going to become truly mainstream, because it’s one of those genres which revels in subversion and taboo. If it’s not child-friendly, religion-friendly, or conservative-friendly, it’s going to ruffle a lot of feathers, and that’s just the ethos of erotic cinema. It thrives in the B-movie or arthouse realms, and that’s perhaps where it should belong.
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