Eros, Pulp Fiction and Mia Wallace.
the first weekly Erosfuturism Digest.
In the name of keeping glamour and the erotic alive, welcome to your weekly Erosfuturism Digest. A love letter to the sensual, the mythic, and the mysterious. Each week, I’ll trace the pulse of erotic history through art, film, fashion, and forgotten rituals. And, I’ll be threading it all back to myth, mysticism, feminine lore and Jungian psychology. Some of you have been asking to work with me 1:1 in erotic creative sessions, here is the link.
✶ INITIATION: THE MUSE AS PORTAL
As I write this, I’m struck by how deeply I’ve always been drawn to the subtler, more niche displays of eroticism on screen. Not the overly explicit, porno-fied kind. Pulp Fiction was my first introduction to an art house flick. I was about 14, sitting in my living room with my best friend, both of us transfixed with our notebooks analysing scene after scene. Tarantino has a way of filming the ordinary and dialling up the senses. Every gesture, every silence seamlessly becomes erotically charged. You don’t have to be a 'Tino devotee to clock his obsession with feet, but beyond the surface-level voyeurism, there’s always something more subtle at play.
….which is why the first muse I want to get in nerd mode about is my cultural icon Mia Wallace.
Mia never read as a housewife to me. She felt like a caged, semi-androgynous woman - both artsy and elegant. I kept asking myself: What was her art medium? How did she straddle the lines of being both muse and wife to Marsellus Wallace, the underworld kingpin? What was her favourite cocktail? What dreams did she have?
*Cut to scene where Vincent meets Mia*
The setup: Marsellus instructs Vincent Vega (John Travolta) his trusted hitman, to take Mia (Uma Thurman) out while he’s out of town. Vincent hesitates outside her door, checks his reflection, psychs himself up. But when he finally presses the intercom, she doesn’t greet him at the door. She watches him via surveillance instead, and at that moment, the power shifts. She’s observing and orchestrating. He sweats and sweats. through this act alone she manipulates her environment, and he is caught in her web. Also, her interior decor is so sexxxy. ugh yes.
✶ POWER DYNAMICS & MYTHIC ARCHETYPES
Being with a man like M. Wallace (her very own Hades) might offer protection, but Mia’s mystery lies in the fact that she’s never truly claimed. The very fact that she gets as close to Vincent as she does clearly signals that she’s beyond the virginal ‘wife’ arc. Dare I say, Mia isn’t a classic glammed up femme fatale. She carries the essence of the Dark Muse. Her erotic power is in her presence. A conjurer of erotic auric potency. So, what makes Mia step outside of herself? What’s her origin myth?
Their shared mythos isn’t just leading Vincent through a twilight of descent. It’s her own reckoning with identity. Mia exists in chronic tension. Wife of a dangerous man, muse of a violent world, and still a woman trying to negotiate her own desires. Beneath her curated image is a raw, self-possessed woman, fighting toward the light of uninhibited expression.
✶ THE DANCE AS RITUAL
One image haunts me: her black flats casually kicked off, as if discarding the weight of performance. That simple gesture felt like freedom. Earth Goddess, chic, and rebellious. She steps out of the ordinary and into a sensual dimension. Barefoot and no longer the perfect wife, but a ruler breaker of domination.
To Vincent, she becomes more than a date. She's a mirror and myth. In Jungian terms, she is his anima. What the poet Robert Bly called the woman within. She lures him into ecstasy: cocaine, dancing, dissolving into rhythm. As they slip onto the floor to win the quirky twist contest at Jack Rabbit Slim's, it transforms into a ritual. Prophecy. A sacred play where time dilates and identity blurs. again, her androgynous white shirt and black trousers carry meaning. Vincent’s feminine twin.
✶ THE DESCENT (EROS & DEATH)
This is where Mia’s witchcraft dances with fate, in the heart of that charged space between eros and danger. Her overdose marks the threshold moment, a descent into the underworld for them both. In the tradition of erotic mysticism, eros walks hand in hand with Thanatos (the God of death). It’s the Dionysian red pill, where risk is the price of meeting a higher spiritual authority. She becomes a ‘à la mode’ Persephone, flirting with oblivion. totally and utterly unaware of her own limits. Returning to the ordinary world not unscathed, but more alive, more deliciously sensuous. Yikes, is there always a price to pay? maybe, maybe so.
✶ THE RETURN
I used to fear that edge though, the way desire brushes up against death, how it devours all of my reflex control mechanisms. But in my own erotic memory, I know this much: eros is a trickster. It demands a hefty sacrifice of ego when you step onto this odyssey. Every charged encounter leaves you changed because it absolutely MUST. And as Mia teaches us, when you’re toeing the line between seduction and self-annihilation, that’s when you wake the f**k up.
Mia’s last words to Vincent, as he drops her back home: “Vincent... I want to thank you for dinner. It was a real fun night.”
This is Erosfuturism.
A question for you:
What needs to happen for you to return from your underworld transformed—and not just haunted? To go further: What do you need to bring back from the descent that makes it worth it?
Faith over superficial sh*t,
Sade.