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

March 9, 2010 1:19 PM

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.

A survey of plumbing in the movies. Wee bit NSFW in both word and image.
posted by kipmanley (33 comments total)

I guess he hasn't gotten to Brazil yet.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 1:26 PM on March 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

My toilet suffered a metaphor only this morning, it was a real fucking mess.
posted by Artw at 1:27 PM on March 9, 2010

All in the Family featured TV's first prime-time toilet flushing sound, aptly enough.
posted by not_on_display at 1:28 PM on March 9, 2010

I believe there's a bathroom scene in every Kubrick film.
posted by grumblebee at 1:30 PM on March 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Scorsese's "After Hours" features a clogged, overflowing toilet.
posted by grumblebee at 1:32 PM on March 9, 2010

Wee bit NSFW in both word and image.

I see what you did there.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:35 PM on March 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Wow, this reads a hell of a lot like Zizek's Pervert's Guide to Cinema - even referencing many of the same films.

When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre, looking at the screen... You remember, at the very beginning, before the picture is on, it's a black, dark screen, and then light thrown on. Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet? And is the entire magic of a spectacle shown on the screen not a kind of deceptive lure, trying to conceal the fact that we are basically watching shit, as it were?
posted by vacapinta at 1:38 PM on March 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Should I feel shitty or pissy about all of this?
posted by yeloson at 1:38 PM on March 9, 2010

grumblebee: "I believe there's a bathroom scene in every Kubrick film. "

Just follow these ten easy steps.
posted by octothorpe at 1:38 PM on March 9, 2010

The internet-- and the world-- is the richer for some people's weird monomaniacal obsessions. I could make this comment every day on Metafilter, and it would be true.
posted by norm at 1:39 PM on March 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

I believe Trainspotting trumps everything else in this regard. And yes, including Brazil.
posted by localroger at 1:42 PM on March 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Zizek gets all kinds of mileage out of toilets and plumbing, not just in the Pervert's Guide. Which is probably to be expected from a Lacanian, really.

Netflix members: The Pervert's Guide to Cinema is available for streaming, and is worth every minute.
posted by rusty at 1:48 PM on March 9, 2010

I believe there's a bathroom scene in every Kubrick film.

Well, not Barry Lyndon, although that sort of proves the point of the article.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:48 PM on March 9, 2010

There IS a bathroom scene in Barry Lydon! It's literally a room with a bathtub in it. Which WAS what a bathroom was for wealthy people when that movie was set.

That move and "Lolita," both feature people soaking in a tub.
posted by grumblebee at 1:57 PM on March 9, 2010

Dagnabit, now I have to go back and watch Barry Lyndon again which actually is good and not frustrating yay!
posted by shakespeherian at 2:05 PM on March 9, 2010

I believe Trainspotting trumps everything else in this regard. And yes, including Brazil.

You are not wrong, but my first thought was definitely Sin City.
posted by quin at 2:11 PM on March 9, 2010

I think it's "Duck Soup" in which the three Marx Brothers emerge from some guy's bathtub while he's trying to take a bath. He eases himself into the tub, hears a honk, and the rest is history.
posted by grumblebee at 2:25 PM on March 9, 2010

Ooh, grumblebee, that reminds me of one of the best parts of Lolita, when Humbert's wife comes home to take her stuff away, and her lover uses the bathroom.

I sat with arms folded, one hip on the window sill, dying of hate and boredom. At last both were out of the quivering apartment--the vibration of the door I had slammed after them still rang in my every nerve, a poor substitute for the backhand slap with which I ought to have hit her across the cheekbone according to the rules of the movies. Clumsily playing my part, I stomped to the bathroom to check if they had taken my English toilet water; they had not; but I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon. Actually I daresay it was nothing but middle-class Russian courtesy (with an oriental tang, perhaps) that had prompted the good colonel (Maximovich! his name suddenly taxies back to me), a very formal person as they all are, to muffle his private need in decorous silence so as not to underscore the small size of his host's domicile with the rush of a gross cascade on top of his own hushed trickle. But this did not enter my mind at the moment, as groaning with rage I ransacked the kitchen for something better than a broom.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 2:27 PM on March 9, 2010

There's a wet guy in there with an erection.
posted by turgid dahlia at 2:29 PM on March 9, 2010

Nobokav's prose makes me simultaneously shiver and giggle. Awesome.
posted by grumblebee at 2:31 PM on March 9, 2010

How can this list possibly omit Gina Gershon and her sexy, sexy wrench in Bound?
posted by rokusan at 2:38 PM on March 9, 2010

Extremely tangentially related, but pretty amusing: Water consumption in Edmonton during the gold medal hockey game.
posted by painquale at 2:43 PM on March 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Oh, good! Toilet talk at dinner time again.
posted by Drasher at 3:04 PM on March 9, 2010

The article fittingly ends with a quote from Ethan Coen.
posted by Mental Wimp at 3:15 PM on March 9, 2010

Quin [re Trainspotting]: You are not wrong, but my first thought was definitely Sin City.

If the article was about castrations instead of toilets, it would be the other way around.
posted by localroger at 3:27 PM on March 9, 2010

Twenty-five comments and no link yet to the Pinion video from Nine Inch Nails?!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:19 PM on March 9, 2010

[Sorry, should have said might be NSFW]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:27 PM on March 9, 2010

Quentin Tarantino loves scenes in bathrooms. Pulp Fiction alone has the guy hiding in the bathroom when Jules and Vincent kill the kids, Vincent talking himself out of making a move on Mrs. Wallace, and two key scenes that are affected by Vincent being in the bathroom reading Modesty Blaise. Reservoir Dogs has the story about the drug dog. True Romance (which Tarantino wrote) has the vision of Elvis making appearances in the bathroom.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:46 PM on March 9, 2010

I think it's "Duck Soup" in which the three Marx Brothers emerge from some guy's bathtub while he's trying to take a bath. He eases himself into the tub, hears a honk, and the rest is history.

grumblebee, you're close, but it's only Harpo (not the others too) that emerges from out of the tub towards the end of "Duck Soup" (1933). The guy taking a bath was the veteran "slow burn" actor, Edgar Kennedy. He also appears earlier in the film at the lemonade stand, during Chico and Harpo's fight with the hats.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 7:48 PM on March 9, 2010

It's astounding, it's amazing! Get on the bandwagon! Pipe the shit right out of your house!
posted by griphus at 8:08 PM on March 9, 2010

Peter Weir's The Plumber is a study of social behavior and terror. I recommend it.
posted by SPrintF at 9:17 PM on March 9, 2010

Not for nothing but that web design is right out of 1995.
posted by Bonzai at 9:25 PM on March 9, 2010

Unforgivable. How could any self-respecting film critic write eight pages on plumbing as a film motif and not mention the Super Mario Bros. movie?
posted by Strange Interlude at 9:41 PM on March 9, 2010