Famous Bathrooms in Movies

Being the site of some of the most functional and basic of all human activities, you might be forgiven for thinking that moviemakers – from European auteurs to Hollywood hacks – would avoid bathrooms.

The thing is, it is a fine place to metaphorically and literally strip your characters naked, to have them vulnerable.

For the likes of the teen gross-out crowd, it is also a straightforward and simple way to bring about, aptly enough, toilet humour. So, with this in mind, I went searching through the annals of film history to pluck out a clutch of famous bathrooms in movies.

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Reservoir Dogs

Tarantino’s starburst on to the scene was this masterpiece, a heist film with the postmodern twist of never actually showing the heist.

I’ll activate the spoiler klaxon quickly here – forewarned? Ok. Well, Mr Orange, the snitch in the group, has an evocative, forceful scene where he tells his ersatz criminal anecdote about being faced with a police dog and a clutch of policemen in a bathroom.

He sells and hams it up as we slip in and out of the cut-away. It’s an important scene – not since Lady Macbeth has hand washing been so tense.

Trainspotting

High up on the nausea scale – quite a compliment in a film as grubby and begrimed as this one – is the landmark scene of the protagonist Renton taking a hallucinatory route to recovering an opium suppository.

Trainspotting is rightly regarded as a transgressive masterpiece, but the junkie’s swim around paradisiacal waters could only be in his imagination, especially after you consider the slurry-ridden toilet that serves as the portal.

The film is a document for the 1990s, but this scene is one you’d really only watch once.

Psycho

I would have been marched to the tower if I hadn’t managed to fit this into the list somewhere.

Arguably the most iconic bathroom scene in cinema history, Hitchcock’s adroit use of sharp cuts (no pun intended), Janet Leigh’s atavistic scream and the dark lake of chocolate ‘blood’ gurgling down the drain in stark black and white serving to make this particular murder indelible in the mind.

Scarface

There is not one but two heavily representative and memorable bathroom scenes in this – in my opinion – stunningly overrated film.

The first is a grisly business, as a group of Colombian cartel gangsters break any number of rules of health and safety and propriety by taking a chainsaw to a man inside what I can see is a shower bath.

Poor form, if only because bone shards will damage the finish. Better, later on our antihero Tony Montana reclines in a sunken, circular bathtub which radiates luxury.

He has made it. I do hope he has taken care to go for brass and chrome taps, anyway, otherwise he might have soon said goodbye to his brittle friend…

(sorry)

The Big Lebowski

Nothing ruins the warm, womblike immersion of a long soak in the bath than the introduction of a toothsome rodent.

That this rodent should be sent in to thrash its claws and gnashers around mere millimetres from a man’s tenderest area – by a group of nihilistic Germans, no less – only makes matters worse.

The menace comes across clearly to ‘The Dude’, whose sangfroid is shaken thoroughly by further threats to emancipate his manhood from his person. Darkly hilarious, this scene shares those qualities with much of the rest of the film.