If you are like me, you spend your life avoiding thinking about feet. Nothing against foot fetishists; I just don’t get it. The only time I think about my own feet is when they hurt.
This is why Becky Hunter’s documentary short, Unbound, intrigued me. Like most curious people, I am often fascinated by other people’s fascinations. Hunter’s obsession is counterintuitive to mine, which makes it interesting. The result is that I’ve spent the last few days spiraling about feet, how we treat them, and, in general, looking at shoe designs and wondering how the hell we got here.
The answer is as it always is: capitalism. However, Unbound is less about why capitalism is hurting us than making the simple argument: we’re wearing shoes wrong.
Hunter and her camerapersons, Mikey Corker and Marianne Williams, lay out thorough interviews and stats, the history of shoes and their design, and how our culture is too hard on our boesies, our feet in particular. It’s partially a gender issue, with women needing nine times more feet surgeries than men. Women’s heels have long been exposed as torture devices, put up with for the sake of beauty.
This is an idea that actress and barefoot enthusiast Tati Gabrielle doesn’t understand. Gabrielle is one of a dozen women Hunter talks to about their feet in an attempt to get us to think about how we treat them and, by extension, ourselves. This is a message that even those among us who believe in it need to be reminded of every once in a while.
But then Hunter mentions that tennis shoes have heels, something I knew of course, but it never occurred to me that these would also be harmful. It’s one of those things where you know the facts but have never connected them. The moment is one of several that hints at Hunter’s desire to make Unbound a feature documentary rather than a short.
Still, given the short runtime, Hunter expertly presents a lot of information quickly, from the history of heels in early military dress to learning that cushioned shoes cause 123% more accidents than non-cushioned shoes.
Next to Gabrielle, the most prominent voice is Nina Harris, a podiatrist begging women and men to treat their feet better. Feet health extends to the rest of the body, reminding us that it’s usually trying to tell you something if your feet hurt. Something that makes you realize how capitalism and modern work culture often force us to harm our bodies for the sake of someone else’s gain.
Harris expounds on “pronation”, the natural movement of the foot. When you walk or run, the foot is meant to roll inward when the sole impacts. That way, the force of the effect is spread throughout. Think about how modern shoes crunch up your toes or how heels force your arch unnaturally upwards, forcing your toes to bear the brunt of the impact, and you start to get some idea of what Hunter and Harris are driving at.
The style of Unbound is how the documentary gets under your skin. Hunter talks to women of various races and classes. From famous chef Radi Delvukia-Shetty to models to ordinary women, Hunter strives to keep the conversation as rich and layered as possible. Yet, far from feeling like a series of talking heads, Unbound feels like a collective interrogation on shoewear. Unbound doesn’t feel like a documentary so much as a community coming forward and sharing lived experiences. The result is that the documentary feels like an active conversation with Hunter editing back and forth between different women, embolding the other’s opinion with anecdotal and statistically based facts.
Unbound takes its name from the act of Chinese women binding their feet to be dainty and petite. A brief moment that the documentary touches on is how women are culturally pressured to be small and unthreatening. Compared to other moments in the doc, these get a short shrift. Again, it feels like Hunter has more she wants to say but cuts it short in favor of other items. It’s understandable how this feels like old hat in comparison, so Hunter instead uses it as a wide-angle lens.
Hunter’s documentary is woman-centric for a good reason: She’s trying to show how beauty standards often harm women rather than empower them. A good stance to take when you live in a world with multimillion-dollar beauty brands striving to push you into being beautiful rather than comfortable 24/7.
But beyond that is the notion that footwear affects men and women. The state about cushioned shoes had me rethinking my shoe choices upon realizing I had chosen them precisely because of the cushioned soles. Unbound is the kind of documentary that can get inside your head if you’re not careful. You’re watching a movie one minute, and your eyes drift down to the characters’ feet and I wonder how much their feet must be killing them. This, of course, leads me to realize that I’ve never pictured the characters’ feet in Deep Space Nine or Star Trek. Why does Captain Marvel have heels on her space costume in the MCU movie?
I’m sure these aren’t the questions Hunter had in mind when she made Unbound. But maybe they were. Either way, Unbound does an excellent job of thinking about its subject more than you probably already have. Even if it leaves you wishing it had more time to go into detail.
Images courtesy of Stanton & Company.
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