In Garry Marshall’s Princess Diaries (2001), Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway), an ordinary, but very clumsy teenager, learns that she is the Princess of Genovia -- she undergoes a transformation from ‘ugly duckling’ to elegant and beautiful but still clumsy princess, all the while searching for ‘true love’. In Marshall’s follow-up, Princess Diaries 2 (2004), the time for Mia to take the throne has come, when one of those problems so characteristic of Hollywood appears: she has 30 days to marry or she will forfeit her position as heir to the throne. Clumsily as ever, she goes about looking for a perfect suitor, all the while hoping that she’ll find ‘true love’. It would be easy to examine Princess Diaries 2 as a ‘chick flick’, that is, as a film whose narrative revolves around a female protagonist who offers the main emotional point of entry, and therefore, targets a predominantly female audience. And it would be easy to focus solely on the romantic notion of ‘true love’ that lies at the heart of both films. Instead, I would like to take a small detour.

In a 1937 review of Wee Willie Winkie Graham Greene, who worked as a film critic from 1935 to 1940, claimed that nine year old Shirley Temple was used by Twentieth-Century Fox due to the fact that she possessed a certain "adroit coquetry" which middle-aged men found attractive. Unsurprisingly, a libel suit was brought against him. In fact, Greene seems to have been adept at penning controversial thoughts in his reviews, and once even received a letter which contained a piece of feces. Greene’s comment that sex and sexuality surface in Hollywood films in unexpected places is not as far-fetched as you might initially assume. By repressing explicit representations of sex, Hollywood created a perfect breeding ground for representations that rely on suggestion and euphemism. And it was not only overt censorship that encouraged this smuggled sexuality, but also the force of mainstream conventions that functioned to control and contain a film’s meanings. This repressive function of mainstream conventions can still be observed, especially in the case of chick flicks where ‘true love’ is not only constructed as a highest value which gives life its meaning, but is also carefully crafted as a spiritualized emotional relationship. In this representation of love, sex is noticeably absent, banished as it where to some outer void. Nevertheless, sex, like many a banished exile, manages to sneak back incognito. And it seems to be characteristic of repression that banished content often returns in a slightly more aberrant form. In the films directed by Garry Marshall, it is possible to detect this ‘sneaking back incognito’ in a not too deeply disguised expression of a foot and shoe fetish.

Foot fetishism is one of the oldest and most common displacements of sexual interest from a natural focus on the genitalia to a focus on some other object. Freud traces it back to 10th century China with his assertion that foot binding, (a practice which persisted until it was banned by the Republic of China in 1911), was a form of foot fetishism. There are scenes in Marshall’s films where a discussion of ‘feet’ or ‘shoes’ functions to heighten sexual tension. Thus, in Pretty Woman (1990) when the prostitute played by Julia Roberts first meets the wealthy businessman played by Richard Gere she talks about the size of her feet and gives general trivia regarding feet while she discusses how much she is paid for sex and feels between his legs to see whether he’s having an erection. In Marshall’s Frankie and Johnny (1991) there is a moment where Al Pacino’s Johnny, (no pun intended), has sex with a waitress who is naked except for the high heels that she wears. Marshall’s camera makes sure we don’t miss the high heels. And in the opening credit sequence of Raising Helen (2004) we are shown a day in the life of Kate Hudson’s Helen. The shots often focus in on her walking feet, so that we know all about her shoe collection before we have even seen her face. While filming a character’s walking feet might be a standard cinematic technique, I couldn’t help noticing that Hudson was wearing knee-high stiletto-heeled boots. And boots of this sort are overwhelmingly linked with shoe fetishism of a decidedly kinky strain. In fact, one article I perused on sexual fetishism specifically mentioned the thigh-high stiletto-heeled boots that Julia Roberts wears in Pretty Woman as a clear example of ‘kinky boots’. In mild cases of shoe and foot fetishism these objects can cause sexual arousal; in more extreme cases sexual arousal and climax cannot be achieved without these objects; in the most extreme cases they replace the sexual partner and become the only object required for sexual gratification. Marshall’s films seem to occupy a happy middle-ground. Whilst his characters do engage in normal sexual relations, shoes or feet almost always factor into the equation.

In Princess Diaries and Princes Diaries 2, Marshall’s fetishistic rendering of Anne Hathaway’s feet is somewhat subdued, but the sexuality of foot and shoe fetishism still exerts its presence as a subversive counterweight to the de-sexualized romantic love that forms these films’ thematic centre of gravity. In Princess Diaries Mia was somewhat obsessed with the idea that a kiss was not a ‘perfect’ kiss unless she could lift her foot upwards and backwards as she kissed. Ostensibly, this was to reproduce the way they ‘did it in the movies’, but for the purpose of exposing the very physical, slightly aberrant sexuality that insinuates itself into Marshall’s films it is enough to note that Mia’s enjoyment of this most innocent of sexual pleasures required the cooperation of her lower leg and foot. Put simply, the kiss and the motion of Mia’s foot are inextricably joined so that the thrill of the kiss cannot exist without the movement of the foot. I could also note that this lifting movement of the lower leg and foot seems to function for Mia in a strikingly similar way to male sexual arousal, and creates a mirror image of that arousal. In Princess Diaries 2 Mia’s feet continue to give an unusual sexual flavour to her search for ‘true love’. When Mia first meets Nicholas (Chris Pine) she clumsily steps on his foot. A normal enough accidental pressing on a normal enough part of the body, you might think, and I’d agree, except for the peculiar fact that when Mia apologizes Nicholas responds with the vaguely camouflaged sexual remark, “You can step on my foot anytime”. Why would someone say that? It’s more than a little similar to countless comments made by characters in old Hollywood films such as, “You can come up to my room anytime”, which function as a euphemism for, “You can screw me anytime”. And in a later scene, having discovered that Nicholas is her rival for the throne Mia approaches him with a good deal of flirtatious sexual allurement and then abruptly stamps on his foot, (which, in all fairness, he had invited her to play with anytime). This stamping will seem innocent only to the uninitiated. In the psychological literature foot-stamping is recorded as a well-known instance of sexual fetishism: some people finding a release of sexual tension by stamping a strangers foot; others by a more dramatic grabbing and fondling of the foot. In Mia’s case the stamping is quite openly linked on both the narrative and cinematographic levels of the film to her attraction for Nicholas, and it seems to function as something like a substitute for kneeing him in the groin. Seen in this light, Mia’s act of stamping Nicholas’ foot aptly expresses her sexual frustration and petulance: it is a not too serious attempt to damage what she wants but cannot have.

I am well aware that this is a somewhat unusual tour of Princess Diaries 2. It doesn’t try or pretend to be comprehensive. Just the opposite. Its aim is to show that our understanding of film -- even of convention-saturated Hollywood productions -- is never comprehensive, but more importantly, that what escapes our understanding is not simply trivial details or innovative ways of interpreting a film’s main themes, concepts, issues, etc. What escapes us is the far more radical insight that we can never know a film fully if we only focus our attention on its so-called main themes, concepts and issues. To experience a film only from such a vantage-point is the equivalent of trying to experience a city by taking an approved tour along its main boulevards and stopping only at sites that all the tour agencies, in their collective expertise, agree are that city’s most important attractions. But can you really know a city in this way? Even to know Hollywood I think we’ll have to dump the tour guides and wander down the backstreets and lanes. Well, that’s what I’ve tried to do with Princess Diaries 2, take a small detour through its backstreets and lanes in order to get to know it better.

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