Because the cinetrix can't make this stuff up, she directs the curious to Plumbing the Depths--How the movies use plumbing as a pipeline to the subconscious. Yes, kids, it's "an in-depth, critical survey of plumbing in the movies."
If you're into that sort of thing. No judgments here.
The section on Psycho, the first mainstream movie to picture a toilet, is actually pretty interesting.
[S]creenwriter 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.''
Rub-a-dub-dub.
