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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
From "Bathroom Frivolities" to "Gladiator," a semi-comprehensive guide to film's greatest pee scenes.
Aug 30, 2000 | Earlier this season on "Sex in the City," the usually open-minded heroine, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), was dumped by a politico who otherwise seemed perfect. There was only one problem: He asked her to incorporate golden showers into their relationship. She refused. Instead, Ms. B. suggested alternatives. She would pour warm tap water on him, she offered, or maybe, just maybe, she could leave the door open while she sat on the toilet.
The boyfriend called it quits. But Carrie got the last word, titling one of her columns "To Pee or Not to Pee?"
Obviously, this Carrie character spent the off-season buying shoes and dishing the dirt with her trampy friends. If she'd been at the movies, she'd be desensitized to the whole idea of pee as play -- and plot point.
In the past year or so there's been a bumper crop of flicks showing micturition, both male and female, both involuntary and willful. And it's not just X-rated movies. There's been pee trickling, leaking and all-out gushing in everything from "Magnolia" to "Gladiator" to "Holy Smoke."
Not that the current cinematic urination obsession is anything new. Bathroom scenes and humor have been around since pictures started moving. The Internet Movie Database lists two early, silent black-and-white zingers: "Bathroom Frivolities" (1898) and "A Bathroom Problem" (1913). (And then there are non-filmic pee scenes, such as Alice Neel's exquisite untitled 1935 watercolor of a bathroom scene on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It depicts Neel on the toilet, peeing and playing with her hair, while her lover, John Rothschild, stands in front of the sink doing the same.)
The first filmed pee scene I saw was on the little screen, back in the 1970s. In Michael Landon's made-for-TV movie "The Loneliest Runner" (1976), Lance Kerwin -- a blond, straight-haired boy who we all thought was the next best thing to Leif Garrett -- played a kid with a bed-wetting problem. In an effort to shame her weak-bladdered son into a cure, Lance's hardhearted mother would hang his soggy yellow bedsheets out his window for all the world to see. Each day after school, Kerwin hightailed it home to remove the damp evidence of his incontinence before his friends could see. He was so successful that by the end of the movie the fair James had become an Olympic running champion with brown, curly hair, played by Landon.
Unfortunately, the movie never really showed Kerwin in the act of urinating. And it appeared on TV, not the silver screen. "Wet Wayne's" Pee Movie List -- "the world's most comprehensive and thorough guide to urination in the cinema" -- pointedly notes that "The Loneliest Runner" features only wet pants and wet sheets. But really, if you think about it, the whole hour and 15 minutes of the thing was basically about urine as a transforming force, which means that it qualifies as one long pee scene.
A more up-to-date example is the recent hit "Gladiator," which boasts an exquisitely brief shot of a frightened slave wetting himself before entering the ring. The "Gladiator" episode is a refreshing departure from similar scenes in other movies in its brevity. In other words, the camera doesn't linger or cut to a wet spot on the ground. If you missed it, you missed it -- kind of like a TV show without a laugh track.
But most pee scenes are long, drawn-out affairs that fall into a handful of categories. "Gladiator's" is in the whoops-I-lost-control- out-of-the-bathroom (OOB) variety, a subset of the wet clothing genre (see "The Loneliest Runner") in which the character lets go out of desperation, fear or from laughing too hard.
The most glaring of these too-long OOB pee scenes is in Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 opus "Magnolia." It's everything the "Gladiator" scene is not: long, heavy-handed and patronizing. The excruciating (for both the character and, in my case, the audience) scene takes place for what seems like hours, as poor little child-genius Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) suffers in silence on the set of a game show when no one will let him use the bathroom. Finally, after much crosscutting, agony and what seems like hours of film, we get a shot of his anguished little face. We get the wet sound effect. And then, in case we haven't gotten it yet, we get a shot of the expanding wet spot on the carpet. (Note to director Anderson and others like him: We all went to elementary school, and we know when someone's about to wet their pants. Stop rubbing our noses in it.)
Scottish actor Peter Mullan's directorial debut, "Orphans" (1997; new on video), a sort of Glaswegian take on "After Hours," includes another OOB. The twist is that the urinator is a wheelchair-bound girl who loses it while crawling to the toilet after spending the night at a stranger's house. It's a pivotal moment. What will the family think? Instead of being angry, the matriarch cleans up after the girl. And instead of being annoying, the scene somehow works.
The most irritating, overdone type of pee scene is old-school, obstinate and willful frat-boy urination (FU), in which men stand and pee here, there and everywhere -- and which one sees too much of in real life to bother with here. However, Huey Lewis' piss in "Short Cuts" (1993) marks a notable exception for the full-frontal explicitness. (According to Wet Wayne, though, Lewis went prosthetic for the scene: "I have read that he uses a fake penis connected to a hose because it was too difficult to urinate on cue.") For the real thing, check out Mike Figgis' little-seen "Loss of Sexual Innocence," when Femi Ogumbanjo and Hanne Klintoe, as Adam and Eve, stand and watch each other urinate in a lake.
An important subset of the FU scene is the pee dis (PD), in which someone urinates as a form of scorn or insult. The plot of the Cohen brothers' "The Big Lebowski" (1998) takes off when two gangsters pee on the title character's rug. And in "X-Files: Fight the Future" (1998), David Duchovny pisses on a poster for the previous year's blockbuster, "Independence Day." In "Fight Club," Brad Pitt pees in the food at the restaurant where he works.
Then there's the elite FU subgenre -- pee as science (PAS). The opening sequence in the aptly titled "Waterworld" (1995) offers a primo example. In it, Kevin Costner urinates, recycles the stuff and then drinks it. No wonder the movie flopped.
