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

although the tradition of scatological imagery in literature and the visual arts is a long one -- from Chaucer to Burroughs, Bosch to Bacon -- before Psycho, the water closet was generally located offscreen, a place that Hollywood movie stars rarely seemed to feel the need to visit. As screen gods and goddesses, perhaps they were beyond the call of nature. Movies were escapism, and there is hardly anything less escapist than the toilet. Voyeuristic Cecil B. DeMille tub scenes aside, the camera hardly ever ventured into the bathroom. Oh, Sybil Seely might take a little bath in Buster Keaton's short, "One Week'' (1920), but a discreet hand reaches out to cover the lens for decency's sake. But she'd never have been shown sitting on the toilet. That coy censoring hand was to playfully tease us with the taboo of nudity, not the greater taboo of digestive elimination.   So, perhaps it's appropriate that it took a Catholic filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock, to bring the bathroom into the cinematic mainstream for the first time -- in Psycho (1960), the granddaddy of all great plumbing movies.

in the furtive privacy of the bathroom, that which is dirty or shameful is revealed -- if only to oneself. I mean, you can't hide from what goes on in there, which is why you close and lock the door when you go in. It's as much to protect other people from the various sensations (sights, sounds, and smells) you're about to uncork as it is to protect your modesty.  And in Psycho, Hitchcock at last unveiled the loo on Hollywood's silver screen, and America's cinematic toilet taboo was finally broken. As Stephen Rebello recounts in his book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of 'Psycho' (Dembner Books, 1990), "The script is shot through with obvious delight in skewering America's sacred cows -- virginity, cleanliness, privacy, masculinity, sex, mother love, marriage, the reliance on pills, the sanctity of the family... and the bathroom.'' Rubello quotes screenwriter Joseph Stephano on the subject of primal-screen plumbing: "I told Hitch 'I would like Marion to tear up a piece of paper and flush it down the toilet and SEE that toilet. Can we do that?' A toilet had never been seen on-screen before, let alone flushing it. Hitch said, 'I'm going to have to fight them on it.' I thought if I could begin to unhinge audiences by showing a toilet flushing -- we all suffer from peccadillos from toilet procedures -- they'd be so out of it by the time of the shower murder, it would be an absolute killer. I thought [about the audience], 'This is where you're going to begin to know what the human race is all about. We're going to start by showing you the toilet and it's only going to get worse.' We were getting into Freudian stuff and Hitchcock dug that kind of thing, so I knew we would get to see that toilet on-screen.'' Just the sight of the flushing toilet was considered shocking enough to mildly unsettle and disorient audiences of the day.

so, Hitchcock's guilty fugitive protagonist, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), having totaled the sum of her indebtedness, monetary and karmic, on a slip of paper, rips up the evidence of her culpability, flushes it down the water chute (although a telltale piece of it misses the bowl, as Detective Arbogast [Martin Balsalm] will later discover) and steps into the shower. Just as she's figuratively washing her the sins of her recent past down the drain, Mrs. Bates pays her a visit with a butcher knife. Marion pays for her sins in blood. And the image of her blood swirling into the blackness of the drain dissolves into an image of her now-lifeless eye. Her head lies on the bathroom floor next to the toilet. For what is a human body itself -- its arteries and intestines and organs and other viscera -- but an elaborate piece of organic plumbing? Carrie's leaky plumbing is only natural; Marion springs a fatal leak.

even the sloppiest of us have the innate craving for cleanliness and order that a sanitized bathroom may represent, and in the next few scenes Hitchcock taps into that primal urge as well: The carve-up is followed almost immediately by the clean-up. Francois Truffaut noted (in his landmark interview book with Hitchcock) that when Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) stumbles into the bathroom murder scene and begins to tidy up the evidence of his mother's sins, our loyalties are transferred from the late Marion to Norman: "... [A]s soon as Perkins wipes away the traces of the killing, we begin to side with him, to hope that he won't be found out.'' And in response, Hitchcock himself adds: "When Perkins is looking at the car sinking in the pond, even though he's burying a body, when the car stops sinking for a moment, the public is thinking, 'I hope it goes all the way down!' It's a natural instinct!''

so, the bathroom is the place where all our unsanitary stuff, whether generated from within or without our bodies, can be dealt with hygenically, in nice, clean porcelain fixtures. Few things are upsetting as a dirty, smelly bathroom. It's no accident that that pond near the Bates Motel resembles an open sewer: Metaphorically, at least, that's where the plumbing from the Bates Motel empties out. And in the final shot of Psycho, superimposed over Norman's mad face (and, briefly, a death's head), Marion's car, the evidence of his crime, is dredged out of the murk and (almost subconsciously) out of his skull simultaneously. In the process, our psyches (as Norman's co-conspirators) are linked to the psycho's. Like him, we just want everything to come out, and go down, cleanly. Is the biological fact that we have to do something as nasty as shit, and are ashamed of it, somehow related to the concept of original sin?

the young Jesuits-to-be in The Devil's Playground (Fred Schepisi,19'76) are trained that it's a sin to expose their bodies even while in the shower, although as one boy complains, you can't "wash properly'' or thoroughly in swimming trunks. Ironically, the "cleaner" the boys try to be (by keeping their privates covered), the less clean they actually become. The boys' exterior biological plumbing (their penises) are considered a constant source of temptation, the enemies of purity and chastity. They're taught that no amount of bathing and showering will wash their souls clean; on the contrary, the bathroom, like the body and the soul, is a temple of sin, which is one way of interpreting the satanic frolicking area of the title.

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plumbing 4 

Buster Keaton's hand.

Super Bowl debut:
Flushing her sins away...

The End: Norman, the skull,
and dredging up the muck