Toilet
Is it true this is the first time they showed a toilet?
shareThe first time they had a close-up(overhead) of a toliet FLUSHING.
Not human waste, of course -- instead, the torn paper that Marion wrote her car buy figures upon.
But making the scene about PAPER , not human waste, the scene was "filmable" in 1960.
Hitchcock and his screenwriter Joseph Stefano felt that showing the "other intimacy" (than showering naked) of the bathroom -- GOING to the bathroom -- in Psycho -- would help unnerve the audience in this landmark assault on Hays Code censorship. A flushing toilet would be a shocker in a film FILLED with shockers.
The idea originated as "can we show a toilet flushing?" but led to "screenplay plotting" -- Marion sitting at her motel desk writing out the figures, tearing them up, flushing them -- and then they pay off WAY LATER, when Lila finds a scrop of paper in the toilet, but its false clue:
Lila: Look, something has been added to or subtracted from forty thousand dollars. That PROVES Marion was here.
Sam: Bates never denied she was here.
How deflating. This dialogue from Hitchcock really means: "Gotcha! The paper I said was an important clue in the trailer was a red herringI just wanted to show a toilet flushing."
Its a funny thing about the censored American movies of the 30s to the 70s: the use of toilets -- and the need for them -- was not meant to be shown, barely discussed.
And yet people knew about going to the toilet...hell there were bathrooms in movie theaters.
Note: Hitchcock in his 1960 trailer referenced all this but all he could show was the TOP of the toilet(bottom of the frame) lifting the lid into the shot:
HItchocck: "An important clue was found....." (lifts lid into frame.) "Down there."
(BOY did audiences want to find out what that clue was.)
CONT
HOWEVER: Way back in 1954 with Rear Window, Hitchcock and his writer gave nurse Thelma Ritter a funny line about...going to the bathroom:
THELMA RITTER: You heard of that market crash in '29? I predicted that.
JAMES STEWART: Oh, just how did you do that, Stella?
RITTER: Oh, simple. I was nursing a director of General Motors. Kidney ailment, they said. Nerves, I said. And I asked myself, "What's General Motors got to be nervous about? Overproduction, I says, collapse. When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country is ready to let go.
So Hitch was already sneaking in bathroom humor well before Psycho.
Note in passing: When Norman sinks Marion's car in the murky(aka "shitty") swamp...it has been written that he is flushing the car down.
And how about that license plate on Marion's FIRST car: ANL.
Note in passing: In 1966, in Torn Curtain, Hitchcock staged a scene in which handsome superstar Paul Newman had to go into a public bathroom stall, and kneel with his head next to the toilet to read some important spy papers. Putting Newman in such a position! Pure Hitchcock.