So, movies (at least, mainstream Hollywood movies) never showed a toilet. Hitchcock decided to break this "taboo." But really, what great social change is going to take place by insisting on showing a toilet in a movie?
shareNONE MAYBE...NOT REALLY THE POINT...HITCH WANTED THE FILM TO FEEL MORE REAL THAN OTHER "HORROR" FILMS...TOUCHES LIKE THE TOILET WORK TOWARDS THAT GOAL.
shareWhat was so special or different about the toilet in the motel room?
shareUp until that time in American studio films, toilets were on a list of things "not to be shown."
The movies were a "fantasy land" (even in stories about real people living in real houses or working in real offices) and it was simply considered to be in bad taste -- crude -- to suggest bodily functions though something as direct as a toilet.
Indeed, Psycho rather shows how bathrooms and toilets were NOT shown , in the early scene at California Charlie's car lot where Marion asks to go the Ladies Room. She goes in there. We see a sink and a mirror -- but we don't see any toilets or stalls. (That said, the very fact that this beautiful female movie star DOES ask about the Ladies Room sets the "toilet" theme in Psycho earlier than you would think. California Charlie probably really thinks that Marion needs to go to the bathroom.)
As screenwriter Joseph Stefano reached writing the shower scene -- realizing the scene was to be set in a bathroom -- he suggested that showing the toilet would be both natural and "Freudian" -- Freud connected sex and bathroom needs as "intimate" and disturbing. Show the audience a toilet flushing said Stefano to Hitchocck and "you'd knock the confidence out of the audience, setting them up for the shower murder.
The censors had to be dealt with. Hitchcock asked Stefano to write a REASON for the toilet moment. And so: flushing the scrap of paper down the toilet (it has Marion's math on the money) became the reason. We could watch the toilet flush with no human waste(which hasn't been shown much if at all in the 60 some years since Psycho, by the way. I count Sin City as one place this was shown.)
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Interesting: Psycho returns to the "toilet" theme in a symbolic way when Norman sinks Marion and her car in the swamp. It is like "flushing" the body and car -- one critic wrote "Norman pulls the chain."
Interesting: When next we see the toilet in the bathroom -- when Sam and Lila are in there inspecting the bathroom("No shower curtain," notes Sam) and Lila finds the scrap of paper -- Sam and Lila BLOCK the view of the toilet. The censors only allowed us to see it ONCE.
Interesting: In the 1960 trailer for Psycho in which Hitchcock gives us a tour of the Bates Motel and house, when he enters the bathroom and talks about the shower, he first pulls up the lid of the toilet (ONLY the lid is allowed to be shown) and says: "A very important clue was discovered...down there." Even in his TRAILER , Hitchcock teased the toilet and made us think about it.
Interesting: Robert Bloch, the author of the novel Psycho and creator of its shower murder, said "I'm just glad I didn't stage the murder on the toilet." Well, in Psycho III(1986) mother DOES murder a woman who is on the toilet. Its one reason that Psycho III is NOT a classic.
Interesting: in several of his films AFTER Psycho, Hitchcock put his characters in toilet stalls and sometimes showed the toilet:
Marnie: Preparing to burgle her employer's safe, Marnie hides in a stall in the Ladies Room at work until all the workers have left for the day.
Torn Curtain: Paul Newman gets down on his knees next to a toilet in a Mens Room stall to read an important book page.
Topaz: In the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, two spies retreat to a hotel room bathroom to discuss their next move. One says of his upcoming task "I'm not going to fail in a bathroom."