This phenomenon is appearing in all kinds of non-porn and porn-adjacent content. Quentin Tarantino, for example, was an early adopter, starting with his magnum opus Pulp Fiction in 1994, and has stuck with the preoccupation throughout his career. He featured Qualley’s own bare feet prominently in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. On Instagram, risqué but not technically pornographic OnlyFans models striking poses involving their feet will periodically appear on my feed — often multiple times throughout the day. Zoomers tend to be shy of sex conversations, but with clues here and there — feet jokes, the feet-featuring reels I’m sent, side comments that fixate on women’s footwear — it’s clear to me that it’s an interest among my cohort. 

The best statistics, however, come from foot-porn numbers, available from Pornhub, and concern material showing actual naked people in a video. According to the porn aggregator’s 2025 report, the “feet” category gained a 69% (don’t laugh) increase in views over the course of the year. More to the point, Gen Z viewers’ searches for “feet” were 347% more frequent than searches by other generations. The only category that Gen Z seemed to like more, compared with older generations, was “party,” at +385%. As Pornhub sadly put it, this was a manifestation of “the need for connection” sought by Zoomers. 

The 24-year-old Julia Filippo, among the most viral in the ever-expanding cadre of Miami OnlyFans girls, plays to the interest. Scroll her Instagram, and you’ll see her sucking on a long, phallic lollipop with her leg bent over behind her head, and four individual, smaller lollipops placed between her white-pedicured toes. In another post, captioned “glizzy time,” she’s in a bathtub filled with hot dogs: in one photo, her leg is bent up as she stares at the hot dog she’s placed between her toes; in three others, in slightly different poses, she’s pointing her toes, which are holding a mayonnaise-globbed hot dog, at the camera. Hungry yet? In still another, Filippo performs a sexualized version of the king pigeon yoga pose, staring at her foot with her tongue out, as if she’s ready to lick it. 

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Filippo has 1.2 million followers on her main Instagram account and 292,000 on her secondary one. Meanwhile, there’s also wikiFeet, where you can browse and rate celebrity feet. While men are included, it’s the women the website boosts and who get by far the most attention. FeetFinder, a platform that allows one to anonymously sell feet pics online, estimates that its “established creators” make between $2,000 and over $5,000 a month — just for pictures of their feet. 

In the outright porn category, adult superstars like Riley Reid have embraced foot fetishism, too, and wholly departed from hardcore content creation. Reid posted on X on Jan. 14, “did someone say feet content?” holding her open-toe heels up to a mirror, and on Mar. 18, “these feet got dance moves” to a video of her moving her feet around and wiggling her toes.

Graphic foot-porn tends to be some combination of the female performer enthusing about how “sexy” or “cute” or “little” or “smelly” her feet are (depending on the foot-proclivity in question), followed by her (or her co-star) maybe enthusiastically removing her heels or sneakers or sandals or pantyhose, maybe some toe-sucking (by her male counterpart, and sometimes, herself sucking her own toes), then maybe a footjob (like a handjob, but with feet), and … you can imagine the rest. There’s also fully solo feet-play, and lesbian feet play, involving genital stimulation, mutual foot-licking, foot-deepthroating, and other such goodies. Sometimes the actress’s feet will be well-kept and, dare I say, pretty; other times, they’ll be dirty, which is probably the point for some viewers. Still rarer, but definitely out there, is the inverse dynamic: a female porn actress sucking on a man’s toes. 

This odd new interest demands the question, why now? The foot fetish is one of the oldest recognized fetishes, and has long been an emblem of deviant sexuality, but during the great kink mainstreaming that took place in the era of Tumblr and the sex apps, it wasn’t particularly prevalent. An informal poll of Boomer and Gen X kinksters, including Melanie (her name has been changed), a 58-year-old woman who frequently uses the Kinkster platform to solicit BDSM encounters, turned up no one who’d ever encountered the interest in the wild. Melanie said she has been involved in the kink scene throughout her adult life and has met dozens of men through it, including of younger generations such as Millennials, and that she’s never come across foot fetishism.

Zoomers, however, were raised on porn, and no one can avoid it online anymore. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan, who is a practicing Muslim, has a hijabi wife, and is 41 years old, has openly said: “every third video that scrolls on its own, is gonna be some OnlyFans model.” And the algorithm likely plays its part in encouraging the fetish. Filippo, for instance, is clothed on Instagram, even if scantily so, which meets Meta’s anti-porn threshold. Instagram seems to optimize such pornographic-but-not-officially-porn content. OnlyFans promotions on X, which have the option of showing graphic content, also seem to skew towards feet pics — leading one to suspect that such material gets the most clicks. The promotion by the platforms must, to some extent, create even more demand.

But in a more human sense, perhaps because Zoomers are overexposed to graphic porn content, eroticism has moved elsewhere, to content that is more interesting because it’s traditionally less explicit. The foot fetish is also alluring because it still has an aura of weirdness and taboo, so it can still shock in a porn-universe where little is shocking. What is more, in an increasingly sex-averse world, it substitutes as an object of desire. 

There’s traditional sex appeal to some of it — Filippo is conventionally attractive, showing a lot of skin, whatever — but it isn’t the point. Nor is the appeal sexual humiliation, in the old-fashioned sense. The Zoomer interest is of a different variety than, say, the 59-year-old, Leftist independent journalist Glenn Greenwald’s leaked tape from spring of last year, in which he paid to suck on a Brazilian male prostitute’s toes. Greenwald wore a schoolgirl skirt throughout the affair and showed the man that he’d sent him $2,000 by PayPal after he was done, to top off the humiliation ritual. 

To the straight Zoomer man, a woman’s foot is a location upon which to channel desire; he doesn’t want to experience pain or degradation or anything like that per se. The foot-as-object is the point, not submission. The foot provides very little sexually, in comparison to other body parts, and thus feels safer, and is even more appealing to a sex-avoidant generation. Will Gluck, the director of the new romantic-comedy One Night Only, said that he avoided significant nudity and sex-heavy scenes specifically because younger movie-goers are made uncomfortable by them. I, for one, am 19 years old, and I remember that in middle school, one of my more annoying friends stole my phone from me and proceeded to follow multiple foot fetish accounts on Instagram — I probably spent hours thereafter unfollowing all these accounts. That, at least, was my introduction to all this.  

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And there may be something to the foot itself. Women take better care of their feet than men and wear nicer shoes, but then why wouldn’t a man have the urge to masturbate to a woman’s manicured hand, too, or fixate on it during sex? Freud recognized the foot as an object of particular sexual fixation, speculating that it was a “phallic substitute,” for when a child recognized that his mother did not have a penis. 

There’s also a sense of return to a pre-Sexual Revolution sexuality. Overstimulated by porn and scared by actual sex — and by many accounts having worse and more awkward sex at that — Zoomers long for re-mystification. 

The last really major era for the foot fetish, by contemporary standards, might have been the 1950s, with a defining artifact of the moment Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, featuring the late Brigitte Bardot. For Vadim, the actress’s feet were a topic of fixation in a way that immediately recalls 2026. Bardot plays a young orphan girl who’s been placed with a family — in Saint-Tropez, no less — where she navigates relationships with men from opposing ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. In the opening scene, the camera zooms in on Bardot’s feet as she’s sunbathing. In another, she’s scolded for walking around barefoot in the shop she works at, as if this alone made her a slut. She also bikes barefoot and walks throughout the town barefoot. All throughout the film, there are numerous close-ups of her feet. The film would come to define the wild and playful “Bardot aesthetic” and also was seen as shattering the sexual mores of the ’50s. That feet had the ability to do this is a tribute to their sexual power. 

Of course, what followed during and after the Sexual Revolution was actual sex — more of it in film; more of it in the real world; more of it pre-marital. Zoomers aren’t doing as much of that, but their foot fetishism demonstrates that sexuality, in some form, will always be present. When Zoomers do have sex, it’s also often different — many need to have sex as if they’re imagining themselves in a porno, wherein fixations on objects of desire such as feet would come in. Unlike Tarantino, who operates in a sex-and-kink-celebrating world, Vadim was not necessarily thought of as a foot fetishist. Feet were understood as an expression of sexuality, even if somewhat scandalous. What else is Gen Z’s foot fetish, if not just that? Chanel is just being honest about it — and making a great profit on a mere fraction of a shoe, as well. 

And, then, the same month Pulp Fiction celebrates its 30th birthday, the 61-year-old director abruptly announced that The Movie Critic was no more. Apparently crushed beneath the weight of expectation foisted on the project by its creator, Tarantino announced its cancellation. There was talk of endless rewrites for a script described as a nostalgic character study set in the seedy LA milieu, in which Tarantino first discovered the movies, featuring a character based on The New Yorker’s legendary film critic Pauline Kael, whose hold on the director — seems to have played a big role in Tarantino’s self-psych-out. 

Kael pops up in Tarantino’s recent book of film criticism, Cinema Speculation, more frequently than Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Sergio Leone and Steven Spielberg, and is the source of Tarantino’s much-vaunted go-out-with-a-bang-Butch-and-Sundance retirement plan. “I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker,” he has said, repeatedly, over the years “I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older.” 

The opinion was fully explored by Kael in a 1998 interview. “I do think directing is a young man’s game,” she told Modern Maturity, which Tarantino would have read about the same time he was recovering from the disappointing box office of Jackie Brown. “Directing is something people do best when they’re young, with the possible exceptions of Vittorio de Sica and Luis Buñuel. When you’re young, you use all your senses and have the devilry to do something new that will affect an audience deeply. Spielberg doesn’t do now what he did as a young man. He did crazy, goofy things. Jaws was a great comedy; in E.T., he let his childhood feelings inform the material in a direct way. But Hook was deadly, no child’s imagination left in it. Schindler’s List is a work of feeling, but planned feeling. Everything becomes safer and more extravagant as you get older.” 

Is this true? And even if it is true, should filmmakers be heeding it as closely as Tarantino evidently has? The collapse of The Movie Critic couldn’t have been more appositely timed, as news arrived of a herd of swansongs converging on Cannes this year, where Francis Ford Coppola (85), George Lucas (80) and Paul Shrader (77) — three luminaries of the New Hollywood, now in their late seventies and eighties — will be premiering films and collecting awards, Coppola with Megalopolis, Shrader with Oh, Canada, and Lucas collecting an honorary awards just for being George Lucas. This as Scorsese (81) announced his next two films, one about Jesus and the other about Frank Sinatra, and Clint Eastwood readied his 40th and final film, Juror no 2, for release at the age of 93. 

It is unlikely any of these films will catch the vigour of their respective director’s earlier work. There is a special bloom to a filmmaker’s first films, when even the most uncompromising of geniuses must be at their most charming to persuade financiers to part with their millions, and audiences to with their hard-earned cash. 

The 25-year-old Orson Welles could talk a dog off a meat wagon when he made Citizen Kane. Terrence Mallick’s Badlands is as near perfect a film as he would ever make. David Lynch would never again manage the narrative economy of Blue Velvet. Audience preference for Woody Allen’s “early funny” movies became so pronounced that he even turned it into a gag in Stardust Memories. Not many would agree wholly with Kael’s dismissal of Schindler’s List, but a Spielberg top ten would largely comprise the astonishing quartet of films — Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET — made in his twenties and early thirties. 

The same goes for Scorsese, who has, in his recent films, come closest to essaying a “late” style — blunt, attenuated, much haunted by moral reckonings and regrets, shorn of the sometimes overwrought camera pyrotechnics of his youth. 

Success can be a bitch. After years of toiling like Sisyphus to get their foot in the door, the director starts to hear the word “yes” too much, where previously they heard “no”. The friction that fostered creative decisions disappears along with the discipline required to push open the gate posts, the charm required to win over an audience and the willingness to tell a story. They become an adjective — “Spielbergian”, “Lynchian” — and become much more conscious of effects that once came naturally. 

Here’s a good hypothetical to test the truth of Kael’s proposition: imagine a filmmaker’s fifth or sixth film as their first, and then try to imagine whether it launches the same legend. If Spielberg’s first films were not Jaws and Close Encounters but Hook and The Color Purple, what rock would we currently find him under? What happens to a David Lynch who starts with Lost Highway or Inland Empire? Or imagine that, instead of the double-barrelled blast of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino had kicked off with Kill Bill or any of the three-hour adrenaline-rush geek fantasies that followed, where blood the colour of raspberries spurts from severed arms and legs and the characters all sound like they have swallowed dictionaries  “To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?” Well, pardonnez moi.

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Nobody in Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs or even Jackie Brown talks like this: they’re too hard-wired into contemporary street vernacular, the source of all that is most miraculous in Tarantino’s writing. No neophyte filmmaker would dream of inflicting a six-hour movie on an audience. With Kill Bill as his first film, what happens to him? He would still get the geeks, the fanboys, and maybe some of the box office, but not the critics, not the Palme D’or, nor the comparisons to Welles, and the outsized influence. 

The Hateful Eight is not a movie that upends the Zeitgeist, as Pulp Fiction did. At a recent 30th anniversary for the latter, Uma Thurman called it “probably the last film Quentin made that was on schedule, where he actually tried to make his days and make his weeks,” to laughter from the audience. 

It might behove him to pay more attention to critiques like Thurman’s than Kael’s. Tarantino has proven himself a perceptive critic — Cinema Speculation bested most of the writers who have written about his films — but you have to ask whether filmmakers should really be attempting to micro-manage their own legacy to the extent that Tarantino has. 

“I’m not sure that I would trust my own sense of the absolute value of a piece of work to know whether or not it should have been brought into existence,” Christopher Nolan told the ReelBlend podcast when Tarantino’s retirement plans came up. “I’m a big fan, as is Quentin, of films that maybe don’t fully achieve what they try to, but there’s something in there that’s a performance, or a little structural thing, or a scene, you know, that’s wonderful. And so, yes, I understand. I think I wanted to keep a sort of perfect reputation of something, but also kind of don’t want to take anything off the table.”

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The irony is that the filmmaker Nolan describes — past their prime, but still showing flashes of the old genius — almost exactly describes his friend Quentin Tarantino, whose recent filmography requires exactly such panhandling for the good bits: the fight amid the breakfast cereal in Kill Bill, the Ku Klux Klan scene in Django Unchained. It’s hard not to hear a pang of mortality in the director’s attempt to stop the clock. Nobody gets to sit out the march of time unless they are John Travolta’s Vincent Vega, resurrected from a hail of bullets by dint of a miraculous flashback at the end of Pulp Fiction. 

Young punks tend to take advancing years badly — have you seen Sean Penn’s updo recently? — but beneath Tarantino’s braggadocio would seem to be the knowledge, half-suppressed, that the cinematic flesh has long since started to sag. Film directing after a certain age becomes about leg strength. 

Oddly, Tarantino did once make a movie which acknowledged the weight of years with unexpected grace: Jackie Brown, the movie whose “failure” at the box-office Tarantino was reeling from when Pauline Kael called directing a young man’s game. In it, a 56-year-old bail bondsman, played by Robert Forster, helps and slowly falls for a 44-year-old air stewardess with a suitcase full of cash. 

Sitting down together in a sports bar, they discuss  how to quit smoking without gaining weight, their vinyl collections and getting old. “My ass ain’t the same,” she confides. “I’m a little sensitive about my hair,” he tells her with a crinkly smile. With its mellow, soulful groove, restrained pace and ruefulness about the passage of time written in the faces of its lead actors, the film offers a tantalising glimpse of the filmmaker Tarantino chose not to become. Maybe there’s a reason his swansong fell through — he has already made it. 

Jacob Furedi: Bret, you’ve spoken before about the struggle you had writing this book. You first tried in 1981, and then again a number of times in the decades since. What changed that meant you could write it now?

Bret Easton Ellis: I’m old. That’s really why I ended up writing this book. I was 16 or 17 when I started writing Less Than Zero. I was in high school at Buckley, Los Angeles, and something happened in my senior year. The writer in me suddenly got a little out of control. I started to embellish a lot. I started to make up things. I was a fabulist. I believed things were happening that really weren’t happening.

I had a girlfriend, one of the most popular girls in our senior class at Buckley, but I was gay, and only pretending to be a boyfriend. I was having a secret affair with a closeted football player, and that was a whole other drama. (Unfortunately, I told a good friend of mine about it, and he confronted the football player.) I made up stories about an English teacher. I was making up stories about my family. And everything kind of collapsed. Becoming a writer had spilled over into my real life. And it was like an origin story: how do you control this superpower? How do you make it work, and not wreck your life and wreck the lives of others?

This was in my senior year, in 1981 and 1982, and I realised I had to pull back. And that was the moment when I moved from being a teenager to being a man, when the corruption of adulthood happened and moved me into the world of adults.

I interrupted Less than Zero and I tried to write The Shards, but it was just too big, too complicated. There were too many characters, too many things that happened to me that I wanted to dramatise. So I forgot about The Shards, and went back to writing Less Than Zero, which was a vibe novel: parties, the beach, nightclubs. It wasn’t heavily plotted, there was very little characterisation. It seemed like the easier book to write. Decade after decade, I would go back to The Shards and try to figure out how to write it, but I never could.

Then the pandemic hit. And the Hollywood dream I had chased for 14 years — of directing the scripts that I had written — died with lockdown. We were all stuck in our apartments. And I found myself doing something that I never did, which was going on Facebook, thinking about classmates from that senior year — a lot of classmates that I had perhaps betrayed.

Jacob: What do you mean by “betrayed”?

Bret: Well, certainly, my girlfriend. And certainly the boy who was closeted. I had certainly made up stories about things I felt bad about. I started looking at these people who I hadn’t spoken to in decades. Some I couldn’t find. They didn’t have any social media presence. And that began to haunt me.

As with every book I’ve written, it starts with a feeling. I was confused about not finding those people. I was feeling nostalgic. I began to look for all the places that we hung out, the coffee shops, the malls, the movie theatres, the restaurants, the nightclubs — they were gone. All of them are gone. I started listening to the music from 1981 and 1982 — Icehouse, Kim Wilde, Blondie — and things began to swirl around me.

The novel just poured out of me, in a way that none of the fiction that I’ve ever written has, and it upsets me now to realise, at the age of 58, that I wasted those key, great years, your forties and your fifties, when a lot of American writers produce their masterpiece. They’re really at the height of their powers. And I had been in Hollywood chasing a mini-series, and trying to get movies made that had just died. This book should have been written 10 or 15 years earlier, and then I could have gone on a book tour and at least been appealing to groupies!

Jacob: So you think you’ve missed your opportunity to write a “masterpiece”?

Bret: I’m not immune to the idea of how people perceive me. I do read my reviews: I know there are a lot of five-star and one-star reviews on Amazon. Some even say DNF — Did not finish!

But at the same time, I’m not a career writer. Books are a hobby. I’m not that writer who works with an editor at a publishing house and says, “OK, I’m gonna have this book in 18 months, and you’re going to publish it.” I don’t really write for an audience. I dedicated my new novel, The Shards, to no one. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for myself. And it was a very emotional thing to write. That’s how every single novel I’ve written works.

Someone once asked me why I haven’t written a memoir, a proper memoir. But I have written my memoir, over nine volumes of them — my novels. All have a narrator of the same sort of age as I was, and they are all a reflection of whatever pain, confusion, distress I was going through at the time. And writing each novel helped me move through those problems.

Jacob: What was that catharsis in American Psycho? What did Bret Easton Ellis reveal about himself in that novel?

Bret: The catharsis was that I had moved into a world that I didn’t want to be a part of. I didn’t want to be a man, and I was becoming a man. I was out of college. I was living on my own in Manhattan. I was making money from my books and I wanted to fit into the world of adults. But I just hated the world that was being presented to me.

It was the end of the Reagan era: yuppies, Manhattan, Wall Street. What it meant to be a man, how masculinity was defined, was very different from what I aspired to be. And yet… I wanted to fit in.

I felt, in a lot of ways, like Patrick Bateman, because I don’t think Patrick Bateman is necessarily as insane as people perceive him… He wasn’t wrong about a lot of things that he noticed! There’s a truth to his criticism of the society that he was a part of, which comes out every now and then in the novel.

I was also interested in creating fiction, which is what Patrick Bateman does. Is Patrick Bateman fantasising about all of this? Is it real? Is it not? Is he creating these narratives because he’s so angry, so crazy, so upset about stuff? The only way he can feel anything is to have these insane violent fantasies.

I was also deeply impacted by growing up in California, in the late Seventies and into the Eighties, when it was home base for serial killers. They were everywhere: two or three operating at once. Cults, too — it was just part of the wallpaper. I was five or six when the Manson murders happened. I was talking to Quentin Tarantino about this as well. Because he grew up in California at the same time. And he said: “Man! The Manson murders just really freaked everyone out.” And it traumatised me too.

Jacob: Now you’re 58, do you feel more comfortable than you were when you wrote American Psycho?

Bret: I do feel somewhat embarrassed exhibiting myself now, in a way that I didn’t at 28 or 38. When I started doing book tours, I was the youngest person in the room. Now I’m the oldest. I do feel at 58 that it is kind of unbecoming: you’ve aged out of that notion of having fun on book tours, staying up all night, then doing interviews on Oprah the next day.

I did not do a book tour for The Shards in the United States. I refused to do one, although it was very problematic for my publisher there. But the media in the United States is insane. There’s no reason to try to deal with a fake media that’s really out to get you — and is far snarkier than in England.

But in England, I am also publishing my new novel in a very different way. I have left Picador, which had been my publisher since I was 21. They didn’t want The Shards, so I am publishing it with Swift instead.

I didn’t know anybody at Picador’s new regime. I don’t know why they didn’t want the novel. Maybe it’s because I am a white privileged male, writing a novel with no diversity or inclusivity. I think they wanted me to write more about the Nicaraguan maid that Bret [the character in The Shards] was with. I’m not really joking! I do think that there is something about the tenor of the times, and this book itself, that they didn’t want.

Jacob: While we’re on the subject of publishing, you must have heard about sensitivity readers. Can you imagine The Shards in the hands of a sensitivity reader? Or American Psycho?

Bret: Well, The Shards did get through my publishing house in America, which does employ sensitivity readers. And look, I know they exist. I heard a horrible story about sensitivity readers, and a novel written by a middle-aged woman about middle-aged women. The women want to meet and talk about their problems with their husbands. They are going to go to a Chinese restaurant. One of them says: we probably shouldn’t go there, because of the MSG. And someone flagged that as racist — you can’t have that. So they made the writer move the scene to a coffee shop. I really don’t want to be a part of that.

Maybe part of the reason The Shards got through is just because I’m old — I was grandfathered in. But still I heard the view that there was way too much sex in the novel, and that it was not a “positive” portrayal of homosexuality. I mean, what is a positive portrayal of homosexuality?

Jacob: Ok, but at the same time, if you look at Amazon UK, The Shards is currently sitting at number one… in the section for Gay Biography.

Bret: Did you have to tell me that? It’s not Gay Biography at all.

Jacob: There is a biographical element to it, though. And that seems to be quite common these days. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans — a lot of fantastic creators are going back to their pasts. By writing The Shards, were you trying to escape the present?

Bret: I think you hit an age where you want to go back into the past, and you want either to romanticise it, or to understand the shadow history of which you weren’t aware at the time. A lot of great film directors have done that. At a certain age, Federico Fellini made Amarcord about his childhood; Alfonso Cuarón made Roma; Woody Allen made Radio Days; Ingmar Bergman made Fanny and Alexander. I’m writing fiction that took place in 1981. I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it.

Jacob: But you still keep an eye on the present. Your last book, White (2019), was rooted in contemporary politics — on the state of liberalism and Trump.

Bret: It wasn’t about any of those things. It was about Generation X — a cultural examination of Gen X and their attitudes. It wasn’t a defence of Trump (which is what the crazy moment of 2019 thought the book was); it was about the reactions to Trump.

And as a member of Gen X, I was interested in why we had gotten into such a hysterical divide. I think part of the reason why Gen X is the most conservative of the generations — much more than boomers, much more than millennials — is that we had the most freedom. We looked to be shocked. We wanted to be offended. We loved dirty jokes. We loved music.

But today, the world has to be childproof. And you have to think like the better people. I didn’t experience that. So I think part of the reason why Gen X is 10 to 12 points more conservative in the polls in the US is precisely because of this reaction against this kind of authoritarian language. That’s what White was about. It was not a defence of Trump or an attack on liberalism. I was a liberal — what are you talking about? It just so happened that the culture had moved so far over to this other side that I guess I wasn’t anymore. So that’s what that was about and why it was written in a very heated moment in 2019.

I would never write that book now. I was asked recently whether I would write that last chapter again, where I was talking about working with Kanye West for five years on projects that never happened. Kanye is a bit crazy. But the Kanye now is really no different from the Kanye I met in 2013. He is the same person. He is outrageous. He is a provocateur. He is going way too far on the platform he is on now…

Jacob: Is he an antisemite?

Bret: I don’t believe he’s an antisemite. No, I do not believe that at all. I believe that he’s a destroying artist. And I believe that he’s at a point in his career, because I’ve been I’ve been there too…

Jacob: But you’ve never said anything that could be as construed as antisemitic as he as.

Bret: … I’ve had a lot of a Jewish boyfriends. But look, my Jewish boyfriend and I make antisemitic jokes all the time. What’s wrong with an antisemitic joke? But the problem is that with Kanye, he wants to live in a world that is completely free and… To not be able to say that you liked voting for someone or that you like this… And that there’s this entire industry that is trying to shut down free speech and label a lot of stuff hate speech… I think that’s what Kanye is reacting to. I don’t really know why he wants to die on this particular hill, but I kind of get it, knowing Kanye the way that I did. He just wants to say “fuck you” to everybody. “I can say whatever the fuck I want. If I want to say that I like fucking Adolf Hitler, what are you going to do about it?”

My boyfriend’s Jewish. And my stepfather is a Jew who lost his family in the Holocaust… I know, I know. Saying that is so stupid… And he fought in the Israeli war and everything. And he just shrugged and said “Kanye is a moron”. He didn’t turn it into some gigantic tornado of hysteria that the American press liked to do — and that corporate culture likes to now punish. But I would not rewrite that chapter about Kanye or add that into it because that took place in 2018. That chapter was a reflection of that moment, and where we were, and I thought it was a pretty accurate portrayal of who Kanye was overall.

Jacob: I want to pick up on something you said earlier. You talked about that freedom that you and Gen X had, but also how conservative that generation has become. How did that happen? And does that mean you’ve become a conservative?

Bret: I don’t know how to answer that. That is such a millennial question! I don’t even know how to start answering that question.

Jacob: Try and answer it?

Bret: What was the first part of it again?

Jacob: I’ll rephrase it. Are you a conservative or a liberal?

Bret: I’m nothing. I’m not a conservative or a liberal. At least in the US, I can’t agree with either of them. I think they’re both completely bonkers. I don’t watch the news anymore. We have the Food Network on all of our TV screens, or video games. I’m done.

It’s very hard to follow it when it all seems like a simulacrum, a preordained narrative that is being fed to you. The mainstream press in the United States right now just seems so fucking fake.

Jacob: That seems the perfect place to go to the audience for questions.

*

Is anyone going to write the great millennial novel?

Bret: No. Last time I was here, everyone was telling me that Sally Rooney has written the great millennial novel. And I think: she’s fine. Whatever. But I just don’t know whether the novel is vital to millennials as a way of expression. There’s nothing bad or wrong about that — they just won’t write it.

I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel.

I’m not saying that’s indicative of everyone, but it was telling in terms of what the novel meant to them. Thirty years ago, everyone had read the Pulitzer Prize winner of that year, even if you were not a writer. People then had a different relationship to novels from what they do now.

So how can there then be the great millennial novel? I hope I’m wrong. I’ve read novels by millennials, and some are good. But I just don’t think novels mean as much to their generation as they did to Gen X or Boomers.

*

America’s culture of violence has clearly influenced your novels. What do you see its role being?

Bret: Violence is tense, it’s gripping, it’s dramatic, it’s emotional. Tarantino once said that he uses violence in the way that people use the musical numbers in movies. They’re just there. They’re fun, they’re exciting. They lift the movie up into another tier and they’re integral to his vision of the world.

I feel the same way about my books. I don’t think that the violence is gratuitous, as people would argue about American Psycho. It’s not only part of my sensibility, but also part of the subjects that I write about. It would be inauthentic to write about a serial killer without certain details about the murders.

I never forgot when Jean-Luc Godard was taken to task for having bloody scenes in his movies. And he said: “That’s not violence, that’s red.” Violence is just part of my aesthetic, but then again, I can’t over-intellectualise it. It just seems like an authentic part of some of the books that I’ve written.

*

Sorry to bring this back to politics, but how are we going to get ourselves out of this mess?

Bret: I don’t know how we’re going to do it. In the last two American elections, there were tens of millions of people who thought they were fraudulent. They don’t believe in the process. There is a huge divide in that country. You would be shocked at the percentage of people who said 2020 was an illegitimate election. And then the other side said that Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016, or that the Russians aided him or whatever.

I don’t want to blame the media because, when you look at TV ratings and newspaper circulation, you wonder: where are people getting their information? If CNN has, like, 300,000 people watching it, is CNN really the devil as the Right likes to say? The distrust of elections is out of control. I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024. But I’m not the right person to ask this because I’ve veered away from politics. You can’t really have that kind of debate, or help people see things in a different light. Talking about America is now like talking into a mirror.

Will I vote? I guess it depends on who’s running. But I am in the majority of Americans who don’t vote. The majority of Americans don’t trust the political system, and they don’t like the people running. And so why would you vote, if you feel that way?

*

When I was in my mid-teens, I wanted to be a writer, and showed my dad something I’d written. He didn’t like it very much, and I’ve struggled to write since. You started at a very young age — did you ever have a moment like that? 

Bret: I’ve noticed that millennials have a huge sense of shame, which my generation simply didn’t have. I did not care what my parents thought about my books. I do know that my parents were not happy with some of my books. I found out after my father died that he described Less Than Zero to my mother as “that dirty little book that our son wrote”. My mother is proud of me, but I don’t think I write the kind of books that my mother particularly likes. That’s fine. They weren’t written for her.

Wanting to be liked was not part of Gen X. But I do think it’s a major — and crushing — part of my boyfriend [musician Todd Michael Schultz]’s millennial generation. He wants to be liked. He wants to be followed. He wants likes on Instagram, a lot of views on his YouTube video. He is exhibiting himself. He’s not a typical millennial — he is very critical of his generation, which might be one of the reasons why we’ve gotten along, and been together for as long as we have. But he wants to be accepted in ways that I just never did, and my generation never did.

A teacher reading something I wrote and slamming it made no difference to me. At college, my professor read one of the first stories I had turned in, and said, why all the brand names? Why are you mentioning the songs people are listening to, or what’s playing on TV? And my reaction was, well, this is part of the wallpaper, the background noise of their lives. That’s life. And he took me to task and said: “You’re going to end up on the ash heap of literature. If you keep writing books like this, you’re going to date yourself.” And I really didn’t care.

*

What are you reading at the moment?

Bret: A collection of essays by David Mamet, the playwright. He’s a big free speech advocate and these essays are a very interesting take: short, to the point. I’m also reading a collection of non-fiction pieces by Michel Houellebecq, which are just absolutely terrific. Mamet and Houellebecq understand our moment better than anybody; they see through the hypocrisy, what they call the “authoritarian liberalism” that has been infecting Europe as well as the United States. They locate it, they decimate it, and it’s pretty great. I’m also reading Great Expectations.

The last great book I read was The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, which I’d never read before, and it is absolutely amazing — with a spectacular ending, so terrifying. It’s just wonderful. I was also blown away by Lost Illusions by Balzac. I’m disappointed with a lot of contemporary fiction.

*

What would you have been if you had failed as a writer?

Jacob: That’s a great question. Because, Bret, when you were asked this before, you once answered that you would have been a porn star. Were you serious?

Bret: Well, I hope I would have been a successful porn star! But seriously… I don’t know. There are days when I think I am a failure.

As a writer, I’ve had a really strange career in terms of being equally liked and equally hated, never nominated for a prize. The American mainstream literary press thinks I’m a bit of a joke — they don’t really take me seriously. So I don’t wake up in my bed, clutching my Pulitzer Prize, my National Book Award, my framed great reviews in The New Yorker, whatever. I never had that kind of adulation. And I didn’t really care about any of that.

What I do care about are the tactile, tangible, pragmatic things that you have to deal with in your everyday life. You know, I have ageing parents. I have a boyfriend who went through major addiction issues two years ago. I’m really worried that this is the first time I’ve left him alone for two weeks… I’ve had major plumbing issues in my apartment for fucking ages. It’s been a Kafkaesque nightmare of trying to get the plumbing sorted and it’s so expensive. And I’ve been thinking about these things much more than I have about The Shards. That stuff really is the main part of my life and so… Failure? Success? I don’t know. I’m just a human being, with other concerns.

The Shards is published by Swift Press.

A few years ago, in a conversation which presages this new book, Bret Easton Ellis invited him on to The Bret Easton Ellis Show to discuss political correctness, creative mid-life crises, and how they both fell in love with film…

Bret Easton Ellis: Quentin, it seems every week, there’s some kind of negative shit being written about you. What are your feelings about these controversies? How do you process them? And how seriously do you take them?

Quentin Tarantino: Well, it’s hard to take any of them seriously. But it’s actually ended up being kind of sobering. In a weird way, whenever I felt myself getting riled up, I came to realise that I was taking part in the riling up myself.

I never really thought of interviews as being these artistically significant things, but there used to be an artistic significance to the beginning and the end of the interview, and the beginning and the end of the published article. Well, now when they come out, they’re simply like a whale for other journalistic sharks to grab their little chunk of meat and make their big headline.

Now you’ve got 480 articles about me throwing shade on the director of Selma, from everywhere from The Guardian, to The New York Times to Variety and Hollywood Reporter, all the way to the Times of India. And so you look at all that, and just think: “Oh my God, well, I’m never going to do interviews again. This is such a drag.”

Bret: As someone who has been giving interviews for 30 years, I feel there’s something different in the air between the interviews I gave in 1995, compared to the interviews that I give today, where they are automatically dissected in social media, and things are pulled from them, that are taken out of context, like in my New York Times interview with you.

It’s part of an ideology now, and having an ideology is more important than aesthetics. Everyone really wants you to be PC, and if you don’t really toe the groupthink party line, then you are open to attack. It makes you think: why do I do this?

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By Bret Easton Ellis

One of the things that was really interesting that didn’t make it into our interview was my reaction to your love of Don Siegel’s 1973 crime drama Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau. I rewatched it after our conversation, and I was amazed by it: it seemed to inform everything that you’ve done, and it seemed like a huge influence on the Tarantino aesthetic. And yet in the published piece, it seems that I take you to task for thinking this, and they removed my parenthetical about “or perhaps he’s right, it is magnificent”.

So let’s start with Charley Varrick, and why this movie matters to you as much as it does: what does that movie do for you that speaks to you and continues to speak to you?

Quentin: Yeah, well, it’s interesting, because I didn’t see Charley Varrick at the theatres when it came out. I think I saw it in 1973 in Tennessee. And I think one of the reasons I saw it was because Joe Don Baker was in it, because he was the star of Walking Tall, which was a huge movie in Tennessee at that time. I think it was more or less that type of aesthetic. And I think that’s what I probably responded to, even though I don’t know if I was sophisticated enough to call it by name.

Bret: Sometimes I think that passion comes from being exposed to amazing movies when we’re young. And maybe the reason film culture will wane for a generation is because of what they’re being raised on now, compared to what we were being raised on.

Quentin: Hopefully they’re being raised on me and less crap.

Bret: This is true, I would say you are one of the few. But 1975 and 1976 are very different years cinematically for a 12-year-old than today.

Quentin: Imagine learning about cinema from 1969 through 1974. At the age of eight in 1970, I went to the Tiffany Theatre on the Sunset Strip, where old Hollywood gave way and rock ‘n’ roll and the hippies took over. And at eight I saw a double feature of Joe and Where’s Poppa?.

Bret: I remember going to a double feature of Where’s Poppa? at the Sherman Theatre in Sherman Oaks, LA, which turned into a pretty good revival theatre. And I had the same exact thing. I remember being ten, leaving my house, walking by myself to Ventura Boulevard to go into the La Reina Theatre, when school was out in December 1974, buying a ticket to The Phantom of the Paradise and going into the theatre by myself. And I sat there and it spoke to me and I loved it. And I became obsessed with the movie and I became obsessed with De Palma and I wanted to watch everything that followed. It’s very hard for me now to understand a ten-year-old doing that. The options aren’t the same. The ten-year-old now is seeing Frozen.

Quentin: Or Age of Ultron or something like that.

Bret: Or Age of Ultron, and I sometimes think that there actually is a Gen X sensibility different from Millennial sensibility, that there is this thing that we shared.

Quentin: Very much so. Even the whole aspect about the fact that when I was in my 20s, before the Gen X talk started, when we were just busy living it and not writing articles about it, we were always stuck with people who were older than us who lived through the Sixties. And they were always telling us how junky our culture was in the Seventies compared to the Sixties — and usually what they were using as bully-whack to whip us with was how rock music had changed from their time. The Beatles doing their thing or Dylan…

Bret: … And becoming disco or The Eagles or whatever.

Quentin: Yeah, the pop sounds of The Partridge Family, which I still appreciate to this day. I actually think David Cassidy is one of the most underrated vocalists in rock history. But the point being, though, was that our music was junky and theirs was right-on. However, what they didn’t realise was that, okay, well, maybe you’re right when it comes to the music, but you’re not right when it comes to movies at all — you’re dead wrong.

And for that matter, you’re dead wrong when it comes to television, too. There was an aspect that we as children, literally children of the Seventies, invested in TV in a way that the generation before us didn’t. And we held on to TV in a big way.

But the thing is, though, we were invested in TV, and we were also invested in our movies. Even in elementary school we talked about the movies we saw. We talked ad nauseam about things like, not only The Bad News Bears, but even the crappy exploitation rip-off Here Come the Tigers. I remember when some kids saw that and came back the next day talking about it. And going to a pretty much all-black school, the weekend after Mandingo opened, like five students were talking about it or Black Belt Jones or whatever.

Bret: Well, also there was a kind of permissiveness in the Seventies that led us down these paths to movies. My parents weren’t going to take me to Chinatown at ten, but my dad took me to Theater of Blood and a couple of R-rated horror movies with my friends. We were nine; we loved it. They didn’t trigger anything, we weren’t cowering behind the sofa — we snuck The Exorcist on the Z channel that was here in LA. And I just keep thinking of the groovy Seventies, the permissiveness of it, seeing The Omen ten times in the summer of ‘76 because friends’ brothers and sisters took us in. And maybe this permissiveness of the Seventies, when I look at your group of filmmakers, perhaps aided in creating this movie consciousness that is definitely shared with Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson.

And I was thinking, in 2012, someone published your list of your Top 12 movies — which of course I know change at times…

Quentin: Almost always invariably, I pick ten new ones, every six years.

Bret: I just chose a random ten for my Criterion Top Ten. And I know that next week, it would have been a different ten. But it’s Apocalypse Now for you, The Bad News Bears, Carrie, Dazed and Confused, The Great Escape, His Girl Friday, Jaws, Pretty Maids all in a Row — a very strange and interesting choice…

Quentin: I kind of love that movie!

Bret: I do too!

Quentin: I show it quite a bit.

Bret: And then Rolling Thunder, Sorcerer, Taxi Driver, The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly — eight of these movies from the Seventies.

The other big two revelations for me were that you really were not a big Hitchcock fan, and that a lot of Hitchcock left you cold, especially the Fifties movies. And you also look at the Fifties as a very dubious decade for American film, almost up there with the Eighties. And that Vertigo doesn’t really turn you on.

Quentin: Vertigo, not at all. I really don’t get Vertigo. And I don’t really believe anybody who says they love it to that degree.

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Bret: Looking over your career, just to be clear, was there a period where you were unhappy? A period, a year or so, where you are like: this is it, I was probably most unhappy during this period.

Quentin: Yeah, when I was 18-22.

Bret: Really, those four years?

Quentin: Yeah. I’m sure I was hideous to women, I felt it. And I was really by myself in the world. I’d quit school a little too early, so I didn’t have any friends. I was really at odds in the world. I had kind of stopped going to my acting classes that brought me some joy at that time. My best friend at that time was a guy in even more, worse doldrums than me. And we literally were very pathetic, and we just kind of kept each other company in our own pathetic-ness.

Oddly enough though, that was actually a really good time for movies. So I just spent all the time going to movies by myself or dragging the sad-sack with me to go see films.

Things changed when I started working at Video Archives. That was basically like I joined college, not because we learned so much about stuff. It was more just that, if you don’t have your college experience, you usually find yourself working at a place where you get your college experience. And maybe you don’t learn as much as you would learn in college, but you have the whole social aspect of it. All of a sudden I had some friends, and I was working in a video store. It’s not really what I wanted to do, but it was connected enough to what I wanted to do that it actually gave me joy.

And my personality really flourished at this video store. I became like the little Andrew Sarris of the video archives and it was my Village Voice. And people came in and I started becoming a bit of a professor. They couldn’t even choose a movie unless I put it in their hands and gave them some little spiel about it.

People would come up with something like Pauline at the Beach, which has a very sexy box. And they would ask: “So how is this? What is this?” And I would explain to them what an Éric Rohmer movie was. So I’m kind of describing it, and I’m saying: “Well, they’re very interesting little stories. Not much happens; they’re usually just a tale of a group of people, some men and some women, and how they negotiate their little peccadilloes together.”

And somebody would say, “Is it a comedy?” “Well, no, it’s not a comedy. But if you watch it enough, give yourself over to it enough, it becomes slightly amusing. If you give yourself over to it enough, when it’s over, you’ll either know, okay, I like this, this was actually kind of an interesting experience. And if you don’t like it, well, then by the time you get to the end, now you know you don’t.”

Well, with a little setup like that, that was all they needed to actually watch the movie with the proper glasses, the proper response to things. And again, you have to remember again, how differently from now, as opposed to a Netflix cue, if I talked them into taking a movie out, they weren’t going to just watch it for ten minutes and turn it off. They actually wanted to watch it. They were invested in this.

Bret: It’s investment.

Quentin: They were invested in actually watching it for a while. If they really didn’t like it after 45 minutes or a half hour, they’d turn it on and off, and they come back pissed. But in the case of Éric Rohmer, with that kind of preamble, all the Éric Rohmer movies ended up renting like 90 times because if you saw Pauline at the Beach, and you liked it, you came back and you saw Claire’s Knee. And if you really liked Claire’s Knee, then you saw Full Moon in Paris.

And I was able to do that. Not only that, but that time at Video Archives, in a weird way, almost became a primer to some degree of what it would later be like to become famous. Because in Manhattan Beach, where the store was, we were famous. The guys at Video Archives were famous. We were the Video Guys. I’d walk down the street and people would drive by: “Hey, Quentin, hey, hey, hey, hey.” Everyone knew me: I was the Video Guy. The Man’s Theatre, that was right by us. We’d walk into the theatre, and then here we hear: “Those are the guys from Video Archives. Those guys from Video Archives.”

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Bret: It’s a different time… So have you had a midlife crisis? You’re about my age. I know I definitely had one about five years ago. You’ve escaped that, you did not fall into the mid-40s depression, or “where am I going”?

Quentin: My 40s were pretty good!

Bret: I guess my 40s weren’t so good — that’s why I had it! But you’ve also said that you are going to retire at 60 or after you complete your tenth film. You want to get to your tenth film. You think there are a few impediments. You think that there’s the idea that film is not going to be available to you, and you really don’t want to shoot on anything else. So if that happens, then maybe you’re going to be writing that novel, or whatever you’re going to be doing before that. So is that really the one impediment, the idea that there is no film?

Quentin: I think, especially if I’m talking about only doing two more, I think I’ll get past that. I think we’re okay. We’ll see what happens…

Bret: You’re right, because there is enough film: there’s a three or four or five-year stack.

Quentin: Look, things can change four years from now. But more or less, I don’t think that would be the thing that would stop me. It’s interesting because there is an aspect about the idea of saying you only have two movies left that I actually think is almost doubling and tripling down on my artistic vitality. I think that’s an interesting way to look at it, because I think most directors when they talk, especially if they get around my age, they all think they have more time than they really, truly do. I’m going strong after 20 years but going strong after 30 years… that’s a different story. And I’ve been very lucky.

But part of it all is just that nothing is more important than this. This is what this is; this is the time. And it’s not about wives, and it’s not about kids, and it’s not about anything. It’s about this.

Now, I don’t know if I can keep that up for a 40-year stretch, and I don’t even know if I would want to. But the thing about it, though, is I do think most directors think they have more time. And they talk about this book that they would like to do, and then this movie, and this genre movie, and this one and that one, and either they don’t live long enough, or their circumstances commercially change.

But if you’re actually thinking “you only have two movies left”, and asking what are those movies going to be and what is it that you want to say — well, then you’re not just going to be derailed by a bestseller that comes out, or a project with a big actor you want to work with, or any of the things that can possibly come up. Right now, in my brain, from stories that I have come up with in my head, I could do four or even four and a half movies. Now if I only do two, which of those four and a half will I end up doing, committing the next six years of my life to do?

That’s interesting, to see which of those two end up being the ones that I put my mark on. Which will be the ones that I end on, meaning they define me? Maybe I change and do 1. Who knows? Maybe I don’t. If the tenth one is bad, maybe I will. The idea is to kind of go out, you know, with a good one.

This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation from The Bret Easton Ellis Show.

He told the podcast The Moment how, when he was a child, his mother said: “This little ‘writing career’ that you’re doing? That shit is over!” It has plagued him all these years, although it helped his work. Connie sounds like a Tarantino character when he remembers to let women speak.

He remembers it. “And when she said that to me in that sarcastic way, I was in my head, and I go: ‘OK, lady. When I become a successful writer, you will never see one penny from my success. There will be no house for you. There’s no vacation for you, no Elvis Cadillac for mommy. You get nothing. Because you said that.’”

Fans should be grateful for this fury. There is no director so engulfed by it and no director who was so obviously raised not by parents but by cinema itself. He is the god of men who live in the dark. He will not analyse it — he can’t — but his nine films are, at heart, an account of an unhappy childhood in which the child delivers the antidote to himself, as if by needle into his veins: pulp fiction.

People who believe his work has no emotional core are wrong. His emotional absence — his denial, his fury — are the core. He is his tragic hero hiding from his own pain. He said so himself. Films, he says, exist to make you “high”. If he is an addict, he knows it. He says he will stop after ten films.

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Tarantino wants to be versatile and is now trying fiction too. His novel of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is just out. I read it, but fiction is not his form. Why waste a life spent in the movie house? The book is a series of digressions into film criticism, with broken tough guys and idealised women performing cameos, like mutilated dolls chatting on a copy of Total Film magazine.

Tarantino writes about women as if he has never met one. But who could teach him about reality? His father Tony Tarantino — a spiv, a failed actor who appeared in Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre — left Connie before Quentin was born. She named him after Quint, the Burt Reynolds character in Gunsmoke, and Quentin in The Sound and the Fury. She worked 16-hour shifts to support her son, once leaving him with his deranged alcoholic grandmother in a trailer park in Tennessee. He used it though, as he used everything: terrible things happen to Tarantino characters in trailer parks. Their eyes are plucked out. They are eaten by snakes.

He was always a writer. For Mother’s Day he would write Connie stories in which she died at the end like Queen Lear. “You don’t really mean it, do you, Quentin?” she asked him. “Of course not, Mom,” he replied. “I feel real bad about it, but that’s just the way the story turned out. You’re still the greatest mom, even if you had to die.”

She didn’t but others did, at least in his mind. He tore his GI Joe figures limb from limb and, according to his biographer Wensley Clarkson, smashed his puppy’s head against a wall. (Yet Connie said he loved this dog and I believe it.) When he was seven, Connie took him to see Deliverance, with its scene of male rape. Whatever it did to him at the time — Connie told Clarkson, “I honestly do not think it harmed him in any way” — he later rewrote it for Pulp Fiction.

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Connie was right in one sense. He won an Academy Award for writing Pulp Fiction, with Roger Avary. Connie treated him as an adult, and he turned trauma into art. When he was arrested for parking ticket violations and sent to LA’s county jail, she refused to bail him out. He is not without resources. Instead, he began to write Natural Born Killers.

As for Tony Tarantino, he was not in Quentin’s real life, but he is everywhere in his cinema, behind every bar room door, in every grave, or loitering out of shot. Quentin’s era is Tony’s too; his characters have all the swagger and deceit of the Tarantino hero. Here, on film, they meet at last because — as with the mutilation of the women — it is safer that way.

He took his father’s name too. He says it was because it sounded “cool” (and he now regrets it) but “cool” is barely a word, let alone an explanation. Is it, rather, a seeking? He has only met his father once and the encounter sounds like a fragment of a Tarantino film. What else could it be?

He told the WTF podcast: “So one day I was in a cafe, I’m ordering something and all of a sudden, he is just there. And he’s like, ‘Hi. It’s me.’ And I look up, and I knew exactly who it was. And I go ‘Ugh. I knew this day was going to come.’ And he goes, ‘Yup. That day is today.’ And he goes, ‘May I sit?’ And I just looked at the table, and I waved him away with my hand. I looked at him when I said, ‘Ugh.’ And then I just looked at my plate and waved him away. Just go, just go. And he went.” If it were a movie, there might have been a beheading, or a confidence, but Quentin learned it young: real life isn’t that accommodating.

Instead, he can only be explicit — and truthful — about Hollywood’s dedication to itself. It has nothing to teach us about reality, and neither does he. Instead, he takes the cinema that nourished him to its logical extremes. By making films not about life, but about cinema, Tarantino exposes it for what it is: a collection of sad archetypes and dreams we know will not come true. If we are disappointed, it is because we are disillusioned. Watch Tarantino and an art form that once comforted you lies, like his own innocence, in fragments.

Here we are 175 years later, and those questions are more contested in the courts than ever. This month alone the US Supreme Court finally dismissed a long-running claim that Led Zeppelin plagiarised the introduction of “Stairway to Heaven” (1971) from Spirit’s instrumental “Taurus” (1968) but high-stakes copyright lawsuits against Katy Perry, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift continue to move through the legal system. Even in the midst of a pandemic, the vital business of deciding whether some songs sound too much like other songs goes on.

There is something inherently ludicrous at the best of times about judges and juries assessing copyright infringement claims based on the testimony of rival musicologists (“proverbially discordant among themselves,” as Carusi’s attorney put it) and their own inexpert understanding of the creative process, and these are not the best of times. The business of sueing over plagiarism — and it is a business — has been in overdrive since 2015, when a jury found that Robin Thicke’s and Pharrell Williams’ hit “Blurred Lines” (2013) had stolen from Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up”.

Even though the two basslines used different notes, rhythms, phrasing and scales, the jury decided, to the tune of $7.4m, that having a similar vibe was enough. It was a shocking, chilling verdict, and when Thicke and Williams lost an appeal in 2018, the author of the dissenting opinion stated that the verdict “allows the Gayes to accomplish what no one has before: copyright a musical style”. The judge added that the decision “establishes a dangerous precedent that strikes a devastating blow to future musicians and composers everywhere”.

Musicians and legal experts agree that this lousy decision has created a climate of fear, with artists awarding credits left, right and centre in order to fend off the faintest possibility of a lawsuit. Almost as soon as some listeners noticed that the chorus of Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” (2017) was amusingly similar to that of Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” (1991), Swift credited the British band, even though nobody seriously thought that she plundered 90s novelty hits for melodies. If you’ve ever wondered why modern hits seem to have so many songwriters, then this neurotic credit inflation is one reason. Credits are becoming more a legal fiction than an accurate account of a song’s creation because it is easier to settle even a frivolous claim than to risk years of costly litigation.

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Yesterday, the Beatles and why talent isn't enough

By Dorian Lynskey

The “Blurred Lines” verdict was unusually hostile but it exposed the underlying weaknesses of copyright law as it relates to music. Other artforms have a much more mature relationship with the nature of influence. While a screenwriter or director can’t just plagiarise someone else’s work wholesale, the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Ryan Murphy are free to stuff their work with homages and allusions. Nobody would claim that a Mexican stand-off, or a socially awkward detective, or a pram rolling down steps, or a serial killer who makes costumes from human skin are legally-protected concepts. And every Shakespeare-lover knows that he took raw material from extant sources without being a mere copyist. Art should be a lively conversation between past and present, with the minimum of obstacles.

Not so for music, where litigation has little to do with the reality of creativity. For a start, most instances of “plagiarism” are unintentional. Songwriters are human jukeboxes whose instinct for realising when a new melody resembles an old one can never be infallible. After Sam Smith gave a cut of “Stay with Me” (2014) to Tom Petty for its inadvertent resemblance to “I Won’t Back Down” (1989), Petty was sympathetic: “All my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by… A musical accident, no more no less.”

Unfortunately, the judge who ruled in 1976 that George Harrison had plagiarised the Chiffons on “My Sweet Lord” (1971) set a precedent that did not allow for accidents: “Did Harrison deliberately use the music of ‘He’s So Fine’? I do not believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless… this is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished.”

Some elements of copyright law are hopelessly outdated. The old defence that the defendant did not have “access” to the plaintiff’s song is meaningless in an era of streaming. The song is on Spotify or YouTube? Then you have access, whether or not you know it exists. Nor has the law kept pace with songwriting norms. Most hits are now constructed by several specialists: the beatmaker, the topline melody writer, and so on. Yet when a jury ruled (dubiously) that Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” (2014) had copied the beat from Flame’s “Joyful Noise” (2008), even the lyricists were ordered to pay damages. The ongoing suit against Taylor Swift is of a different order of stupidity: her song “Shake It Off” (2014) bears no resemblance to 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play” (2000) except the common phrases “Players gonna play” and “haters gonna hate.” The writers of Playas Gon’ Play are claiming ownership of figures of speech.

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The historical amnesia of culture warriors

By Dorian Lynskey

The history of popular music skews towards the free flow of ideas, from the melodic recycling of the folk tradition to the cheerful repurposing of old songs in sample collages and mash-ups. Yet the law keeps getting in the way. The notorious 1991 case Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. destroyed the tradition that gave us freewheeling, sample-happy records like the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. Even now, uncleared samples bar De La Soul’s classic work from streaming services. Samples are at least demonstrably someone else’s work but how can you own a generic beat or common chord progression? As Katy Perry’s lawyer Christine Lepera complained in court, the writers of Joyful Noise were “trying to own basic building blocks of music — the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone”.

Who benefits from strangling creativity in this way? Certainly not music fans. The most compelling case for copyright law is protection for the little guy. It feels ethically right that struggling blues musicians won songwriting credits from Led Zeppelin in the 1970s and tragic that the drummer Gregory Coleman died homeless in 2006 even as his performance on the Winstons’ “Amen, Brother” (1969) became the most sampled breakbeat of all time. The idea that songwriters shouldn’t starve while others grow fat off their work has an instinctive moral appeal.

Most plagiarism suits, however, have less uplifting consequences. Bridgeport Music, the second plaintiff in the Blurred Lines case, has made millions of dollars from hundreds of suits over unlicensed samples without any benefit to the original songwriters. The 2005 case Bridgeport Music, Inc. v Dimension Films (2005) overturned the de minimis defence of sampling, making even an unrecognisably altered two-second sample a matter for litigation, yet the composer of the sampled song, George Clinton, didn’t get a cent because, he claimed, Bridgeport “stole” his publishing rights (although the courts ruled it legal).

Copyright acquisition can lead to Kafkaesque scenarios. John Fogerty was sued by his former record label over a resemblance between his song “The Old Man Down the Road” (1985) and one of his hits for Creedence Clearwater Revival 15 years earlier. Because the label owned Creedence’s publishing rights, Fogerty became the only person ever to be sued for plagiarising himself. “It was very cruel,” he reflected.

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The death of the music industry

By Ian Birelll

This year’s economic turbulence has seen a boom in investors scooping up song catalogues. While this is primarily to profit from streaming revenues (“Music and booze are only two industries that flourish when people are both happy and sad,” one wealth manager told Billboard), the potential for a bonanza lawsuit will not be lost on them. One of the plaintiffs sueing Ed Sheeran is a company called Structured Asset Sale. So much for the little guy.

There needs to be some legal deterrence against bad actors flooding Spotify with note-for-note replicas of classic songs, or big stars stealing demos submitted by hopeful young songwriters, but the bar should be extremely high. Currently, the typical case is a cynical waste of time and money which gives the public the false impression that artists are amoral thieves without two original ideas to rub together. A successful song is both an artwork and a commercial asset but the plagiarism-suit racket perverts the art. Old songs become roadblocks to new ones. The natural process of being influenced, consciously or subconsciously, is recast as larceny.

This was never the intention. “The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an ‘author’’s creative labour,” said Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1975. “But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.” The post-“Blurred Lines” epidemic of litigation and nervous celf-censorship makes a travesty of that aim by suppressing creativity. Enough. Throw all of these cases out, reform copyright legislation, and let art do what it does. And you know what? Carusi’s version of “The Old Arm Chair” was better.