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

"Plumbing.
  Can't beat it. Helps any movie"

Ethan Coen
co-auteur of
Blood Simple,
Barton Fink
and The Big Lebowski,
among others

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warning: this article is not for the squeamish. although it is serious film criticism, it contains images and descriptions of dirty bits and naughty bits

by jim emerson

"[Production Code official Joseph Breen] goes to the bathroom every morning. He does not deny that he does so or that there is such a place as the bathroom, but he feels that neither his actions nor the bathroom are fit subjects for screen entertainment.''

-- memo to David O. Selznick from Val Lewton; April 4, 1939

i have this dream: I flush the toilet and, during a protracted moment of rising horror and anxiety in which time and breathing are suspended, I watch helplessly as the stinking muck that was supposed to be whooshed cleanly out of sight backs up and spills out over the bowl, oozing onto my nice clean bathroom floor in an ever-spreading pool of reeking filth. My mind races as I witness the creeping terror in panic.  I wonder how I'm ever going to clean it up and I want to scream: "Will all of Neptune's oceans wipe this... shit from my floor!"  Worst of all, I know this stuff came out of me -- in some ways it is me.  I feel guilty that this putrescence is the product of my own corrupt body.  And I'm horrified to realize that it's now punishing me (for something -- being human?) by taking over my house and my life like "The Blob."

i can't tell you how much I loved telling that recurring nightmare to my shrink. It seemed such a PURE dream, unambiguous enough to earn a big, approving smile from Dr. Freud -- like the one a single woman friend of mine had about straddling a telephone pole.  I mean, in these days of indoor plumbing, the toilet is a naturally potent metaphor for everyday repression, for all the bile and rage and memories and sins and other impure thoughts and unclean urges that can't always kept down or flushed away. Every once in a while when the psychological plumbing gets clogged, the load of excrement becomes more than one's psychological pipes can handle, and the shit all comes bubbling back up from below and spews out onto the surface.

the dream isn't mine alone. It's one of those, like flying, that seems to spring (leak?) from our collective unconscious. And in the movies, those other shared dreams, monsters from the id have risen from the sewers, dominion of the repressed, for decades -- from Lon Chaney's disfigured composer in The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925) to Danny DeVito's Penguin in Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992). In horror films, particularly, the "monster''/invader, whatever it represents, is quite often a creature who emerges from or is vanquished into the bathroom plumbing.

like the crude Aussie blue collar worker who disrupts the constipated lives of the academic couple in Peter Weir's brilliant The Plumber (1980).  And, on the other end of the scale of cinematic achievement, Anne Archer and Michael Douglas practically push the incarnation of his raging guilt and libido (personified by jilted ex-lover Glenn Close) back down the bathtub drain to keep their clean and happy home together in Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction, (1987) -- and, in the American release version, they succeed, though that wasn't the original ending.

the pipes and sewers are plumbed for screams in low-budget, tongue-in-cheek exploitation pictures like Lewis Teague's Alligator (1980) (exploiting the urban myth about what happened to all those pet baby alligators that got flushed down the toilet when the kids lost intereset in them -- another Revenge of Nature theme) and Douglas Cheek's C.H.U.D. (1984) (radioactive subterranean mole people live under the city, the product of poor homeless folks exposed to poorly disposed toxic waste -- a perfect environmental cautionary fable for the middle of the Reagan era). 

and the bathroom is often the (primal) scene of death and mayhem in all-out horror films like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, David Cronenberg's Shivers/They Came From Within (1975), Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Bernard Rose's Candyman (1992), just to name a few. In fact, one of Cronenberg's earliest "biological horror" pictures was called, simply, From the Drain. In the bathroom, people are reduced to their biological essentials (blood, water) as their lives are quite literally drained away into the dark void. (Remember the blood and shower water swirling down the drain, then dissolving into Janet Leigh's lifeless eyeball in Psycho? Not much more to say about the physical finality of death than that.)

but plumbing nightmares aren't restricted to horror pictures. Sure, there are the usual homeowner/renter plumbing nightmares, like those in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), or Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), or The Money Pit (1986). But a more evocative/provocative use of plumbing can be found in, say, Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), in which Orson Welles' charmingly sinister and amoral monster-from-the-id, Harry Lime, takes refuge in the sewers of Vienna. Chased beneath the city like a rat, he breathes his last gasp trying to surface -- almost as if to squeeze himself (or at least his fingers) through an iron grating. Even the elegant comic director Ernst Lubitsch touched lightly on the subject in 1946's Cluny Brown, wherein Charles Boyer takes a look at a stinky clogged drain and pithily describes the implications of backed-up plumbing, pronouncing it "an analogue of human frustration."

in the movies, plumbing is all of these things and more – a powerful metaphor with implications that range across the psychological (guilt, repression, renewal), the religious (baptism, sin, redemption), and the biological (digestive, circulatory, sexual/reproductive fuctions -- and the ceasing of all functioning, death itself). The bathroom is the primal room, where we are stripped of all the illusions and accoutrements of civilization, and left to confront ourselves, face-to-face, in that steamed up mirror on the medicine cabinet. (And behind that mirror – more indications of our biological nature and limitations – shaving paraphernalia, deodorants, antacids, laxatives, anti-fungal cremes…).

as director Peter Greenaway has said about nudity (a form of exposing the organic pipes), plumbing is a way of expressing or confronting humanity's "anatomical bottom-line." Or, as Wes Craven says, "I found by staging scenes in (A Nightmare on Elm Street) in the bathroom, that it took on a whole other meaning, because that's so much, for a child, the private room -- the room where you explore your body and all the mysteries of the body. It's also 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..."

so, it would seem that, regardless of censor Joseph Breen's personal tastes or hygiene habits, the movies have long exploited all these bathroom resonances for "screen entertainment."

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plumbing 1

Young Cronenberg
in plumbing heaven:
shooting From the Drain