plumbing the
depths

1 i have this dream
2 a flush of guilt
3 baptisms in blood
4 'psycho'
and deadly sin
5  freudian jokes
for the john
6 exploring interiors
7 the naked truth
8 dirty bits
and naughty bits

"It's the only room in the house that has a lock. And a lot of tremendous things happen in there -- bathing, the sort of baptism, all those things..."

Wes Craven

exploring interiors

"i think that the house, after your own body, is the first structure that you project your personality into,'' says literature professor-turned-Scream filmmaker Wes Craven (who, by the way, was raised by Christian fundamentalists, not wolves). "There are areas of the house that are your consciousness, there are areas of the house that are your subconscious, there are areas of the house that are your imagination -- especially in the old-style houses. Each room in a house is imbued with a certain personality and context that is very, very powerful.'' In movies such as The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976) and Craven's own The People Under the Stairs (1991), shuddering, almost organic plumbing gives creepy life to an inanimate building. (After a while in Polanski's film, you begin to wonder if the tenant is inhabiting the building, or vice-versa. From his apartment, Polanski can see the shared toilet across the way, in which some kind of hieroglyphics have been carved that make the chamber seem all the more mysterious.)

like the polanski of Repulsion and The Tenant (in which the plumbing of a building expresses the disintegrating sanity of the person living in it), Craven has featured bathtub scenes in several of his movies -- notably the religious fundamentalist/Ernie Borgnine thriller Deadly Blessing (1981), in which a Freudian snake slips out of the plumbing and into a girl's bathwater, and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which boiler-room kid-killer Freddy Kreuger, monster plumber from the id, nearly drowns a teenage girl in the tub. "When you write a scene where people sink under the surface of the bathwater, you tap into something that goes back to your first years, when you're afraid you're going to be drowned or something," Craven says. "Water is very evocative. The drains go we know not where, and we have those fears of being dragged down inside.''

a warm bath can be a comforting womb or a watery grave -- and, in movies like Wes Craven's, often changes from one to the other in an instant. If Psycho made explicit associations between death and the shower, other movies before and since have found death in the bathtub. (Well, what is a rebirth, but a death followed by something else?) In The Nanny (Seth Holt, 1965), a precursor to The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Bette Davis is accused of drowning her young charge in the bath. And in movies as dissimilar as Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955), Repulsion, Fatal Attraction, and Drowning By Numbers (Peter Greenaway, 1989), former (or would-be) lovers/husbands are pushed down into the tub -- almost as if, because they were no longer desired, they could be simply be flushed down the drain along with the old, dirty bathwater.

or flushed down the toilet like... well, expended food. The bathroom is a terminal destination for the expended fuel that keeps us alive, and occasionally for living beings themselves. Death in the sterility (or filth) of the bathroom seems particularly harsh, but also particularly apt. It's the end of the line, a place where life itself may be flushed away. And it's not just for rock stars: Elvis Presley on the Graceland linoleum in the semi-documentary This is Elvis (Malcolm Leo, Andrew Solt, 1981), or Sex Pistol Sid Vicious' main squeeze Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb) in Sid & Nancy (Alex Cox, 1985). Most of Candyman's victims die in the bathroom -- the killer himself comes through the medicine chest mirror. The severed penis of one casualty is found in the toilet bowl -- a man's pride disposed of like a turd. It's in a public restroom that Robert Carradine shoots David Carradine in Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1974), and that Lukas Haas witnesses Danny Glover committing murder in Witness (Peter Weir, 1985). M. Emmett Walsh dies on the bathroom floor, staring up at the exceptionally elaborate plumbing underneath the sink as the life drains out of him in Blood Simple (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1984). (The Coens have confessed to tarting up the plumbing a bit under there; the real stuff was just too simple to be worth looking at.)

and when michael corleone (Al Pacino) plans to avenge his pop in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), his gun is hidden in the lavatory. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) in Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), certain that the Communist menace is infiltrating our "precious bodily fluids'' through the fluoridation of drinking water in our pipes, chooses his office bathroom for his suicide. Vincent D'Onofrio meets his end (and takes drill sargeant R. Lee Ermey with him) in the latrine -- framed in by rows of sparkling white porcelain bowls -- in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). And in The Godfather, Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), gangster-turned-informant Frankie Pentangeli (Michael Gazzo) commits suicide in the bathtub like a disgraced Roman warrior, slitting his wrists and letting his life's blood drain into a pool on the white tile floor (the second time Coppola would use such imagery that year). Bathtubs and bathrooms are often the sites of suicides, onscreen and off, of people choosing to shuffle off their designer clothes along with their mortal coils, and  leave the world naked, the same way they came into it. 

naked and vulnerable in the bathroom, we confront the intertwined implications of sex and death. When Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and his family spend the winter as caretakers of the Outlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) the camera prowls the empty, outsized hallways, ballrooms, lobbies, kitchen, pantries, and boiler room.  But one place it -- and young psychic Danny (Danny Lloyd) -- is not supposed to go is room 237.  Both Danny and his daddy are irrevocably changed by what they come face-to-face with in that room.  We go in with Jack, who discovers a voluptuous naked woman in the shower.  But when he embraces her, she turns into a rotting hag -- something, by the way, that every voluptuous naked woman (and man) eventually turns into, more or less.  Jack -- who, unbeknownst to himself, has "always been the caretaker" at the Outlook (this Truth being cryptically delivered in hushed tones in a blood-red restroom) -- isn't really being tempted by "another woman"; he's being seduced by the hotel itself, his real mistress, and the knowledge of his own (im-)mortality.  What Faustian bargain did he strike (and with whom?) to get this permanent gig?

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plumbing 6 

The bloodbathroom, where life goes down the drain:  The Coens got into plumbing early (in their first feature, Blood Simple). 

Delbert Grady sez: "You've always been the caretaker..."