 plumbing the 1 i have
this dream
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the naked truth "In american films people only take their clothes off in the bedroom and the bathroom,'' says noted British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, in whose films people are apt to be naked just about anywhere. In both rooms, we are stripped down to our animal natures. While having sex or bathing or eliminating bodily waste, we discard the accouterments of civilization and we're forced to confront the fundamental physiological reality of who we are, what we're really made of. No wonder so many crucial movie scenes take place just above the sink, in front of the bathroom mirror, where characters really come face to face with themselves, wiping away the condensation and taking a long, hard look at the person reflected in the glass. My therapist says he tells people that when they're looking in the bathroom mirror, they're seeing themselves at their worst: abnormally close-up and usually under exceptionally harsh, revealing, and unforgiving lighting. An extreme case: In How to Get Ahead in Advertising (Bruce Robinson, 1989) Richard E. Grant is so mortified by what he sees when he looks in the bathroom mirror -- and discovers a hideous talking boil growing on his shoulder and staring back at him -- that (like Harry Caul, in a shock of self-knowledge) he passes out.
nudity that might be arousing in the bedroom may be viewed as disgusting in the bathroom. A college friend of mine (who used to ask me to remove the long black hairs from her bathtub drain because it made her gag) once told me: "You never REALLY know how much you love somebody until you see them naked on the toilet.'' In that primal, no-holds- barred state, the loved one has nothing left to hide -- physically, at least -- and for my friend, this was the gut-level test of the limits of her acceptance and devotion. In Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1974) an exceptionally erotic pair of scenes between husband and wife Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie leads from bath to bed, the segue emphasizing the intimate nature of both settings. Former editor Roeg intercuts the couple's calm, post-coital dressing for dinner with the naked passion of their lovemaking in a painfully beautiful and heartfelt portrait of a marriage wrenched by the loss of a child. greenaway's movies -- notably A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1990), Prospero's Books (1991), and The Pillow Book (1996) -- with their copious exposure of all shapes and ages of bodies, usually in non-erotic contexts, are particularly adept at holding the bathroom mirror up to nature. Rather than seeking to arouse, Greenaway says, "These images are saying: This is what we are. This is the flesh and blood we're made of, the anatomical bottom line, as it were.'' Perhaps that's the origin of those unsettling "peccadillos from toilet procedures'' Psycho screenwriter Stefano has mentioned.
in poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), a man steps into the Freeling family bathroom to wash his face and rips away his flesh to reveal what he's really made of, the grisly skull beneath the skin. Martin Scorsese's short film The Big Shave (1967) contains similar imagery: While shaving in front of the mirror, a young man carves his own face with the razor in what Scorsese intended as a graphic metaphor for America's involvement in Vietnam. (As with so many plumbing scenes, the contrast between the gooey textures of organic tissue and the hard sterile bathroom tiles, between the screaming red of the blood and cold spotless white porcelain surfaces, is part of what makes these images so unsettling.) the first shot of The Stepfather (Joseph Ruben, 1987) shows the murderous title character (Terry O'Quinn) undergoing a transformation of identity in the bathroom. He places a briefcase containing his new "costume'' on the toilet, washes the blood from his hands in the sink, strips and steps into the shower, wipes the mirror, shaves off his beard, cuts his hair and inserts colored contact lenses. The bathroom is the cocoon for the transformation of his identity; he leaves his discarded (and murdered) family a new man. In Cronenberg's The Fly, researcher Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) undergoes a different sort of metamorphosis. As the molecular-genetic fusion of human and housefly he calls "Brundlefly,'' he continually monitors his transformation in the bathroom mirror, placing his teeth, ears and other now- useless body parts -- relics of the evolution of his new flesh -- behind it, along with the Kaopectate, in the medicine cabinet -- which he's christened "The Brundle Museum of Natural History.'' The movie has been read as a parable about the physical transformations the body goes through in response to disease, particularly cancer or AIDS, but Cronenberg says he was just thinking of the ultimate terminal disease: aging. All these sorts of degenerative processes can be particularly painful or humiliating when they involve, as they often do, loss of control over "bathroom functions.'' When we can't control our own interior plumbing (Brundlefly is momentarily ashamed that he now has to spit up on his food before ingesting it), it's as if we've come full circle and regressed to infancy -- yet another way in which we exit the world as we entered it.
stripped to our flesh in the bathroom, we may confront our biological/evolutionary roots as well. In Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980), Dr. Edward Jessup (William Hurt) feels himself regressing into a more primitive humanoid form. And for a moment, as he stands in the shower looking at his suddenly hairy and misshapen feet, he gets a glimpse of his primordial ancestry. While standing in front of the bathroom mirror in Cronenberg's They Came From Within (aka Shivers or The Parasite Murders), a bare-chested man with a Water Pik swallows the parasite that will reduce him to his most primal, libidinous urges. Even an adolescent horror-comedy like Teen Wolf (Rod Daniel, 1985) touches on the issue: Michael J. Fox hides out in the bathroom while finding himself transformed into a teenage werewolf. His dad thinks he's just masturbating in there, but Fox's transformation extends beyond the mythical hairy palms. Similarly, when Bob Hoskins' apelike gangster is shown in a sin-cleansing post-murder shower in The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980), it's as though we're staring at the missing link himself. A public restroom is also where John Merrick (John Hurt) cries out "I am not an animal! I am a human being!'' in The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980). But in the lavatory, there really isn't much difference. |
plumbing 7
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