(More) Famous Bathrooms in Movies – Part Deux

After the rip-roaring (i.e. probably modest) success of our previous foray into the junction between film and bathrooms, we have returned with a second helping for you.

Whether you like it or not, below are five more celluloid representations of the business we’re in. Enjoy.

The Shining

People have completely the wrong idea about horror films these days – it’s all sudden jolts and flashing knives.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, adapted with invidious licence from Stephen King’s novels, goes in more for subtle psychological horror. The film tells the tale of Jack Torrance, recovering alcoholic and word-constipated writer.

He takes his family up to look after the snowbound Overlook Hotel, hoping the isolation will spur his imagination.

Instead, cabin fever sets in and Torrance unravels like a cheap jumper whose sleeve has been caught in the propeller of an aircraft carrier as the malevolent building twists him into madness.

At one point, Torrance heads into the bathroom of an upstairs room and has a smooch with what ends up being a mouldering, festering animated corpse, which cackles horrendously.

The scariest film out – I hate it and love it.

There’s Something About Mary

There’s at least a brace of toilet scenes we could discuss here, though for the sake of propriety we’ll stick to the first one.

It is the lesser of two evils, as Ben Stiller’s Ted heads to his prom date’s house to pick her up. Pit-stopping briefly to relieve himself in the bathroom, in his haste to zip himself up he, well, zips himself up.

Cue helpful denizens of the neighbourhood appearing in the bathroom and even at the bathroom window, one of whom advises him to release himself quickly.

An off-screen bloodbath ensues and an ambulance is called.

An insalubrious reminder to all menfolk to take their time in bathrooms.

Pulp Fiction

Again, there are a few keynote bathroom scenes featured in what is one of my most favourite films.

Vincent talking himself out of cracking on to his boss’s girlfriend, Mia misbehaving in there after topping up her lipstick and, the finest of the lot, poor Vincent Vega getting machine-gunned to oblivion by Butch as he returns to pick up his treasured watch.

It’s an absurd scene that is handled wonderfully by Tarantino, who stretches the tension between the two men as they glare at each other across the hall before the Pop Tarts irrupting from the toaster signals the gunfire.

Poor Travolta – went in for a calming bit of bathroom me time, with the novel Modesty Blaise, only to be shot down before he’s even left the room.

Full Metal Jacket

A second entry for the masterful Kubrick here, Full Metal Jacket charts a group of men who are entering service in the Vietnam War.

It’s 1967, so the full-on fatalism surrounding the venture has yet to reach its screeching peak. They then meet their senior drill instructor Hartman, a man so scorchingly abrasive I’m convinced he could bellow the armour plating off a tank.

The film splits neatly in two, really, with the first portion concerned with the bullying, rough and tumble of basic training, and the second act being when the grunts arrive in South-East Asia.

The troubling bathroom scene forms a coda of sorts for the opening act, as Private ‘Pyle’ – so called for his doofus antics and general well-meaning ineptitude – completely slides off into cool insanity and commits suicide via an M14 in his mouth.

This has come after collective punishment led the rest of the squad to hate him, the general overbearing violence and hatred towards his weakness ending in a starkly echoing shot that bounces off the tiles and ceramics. A shocking scene, soberly shot.