Stanley Kubrick's Room of Doom
Director Kubrick cast a whole new light on the movie bathroom
© jeff coe
Aug 24, 2009
“The toilet is of the standard zero-gravity type. Depending on requirements, System A and/or System B can be used, details of which are clearly marked in the toilet compartment. When operating System A, depress lever and a plastic dalkron eliminator will be dispensed through the slot immediately underneath. When you have fastened the adhesive lip, attach connection marked by the large “X” outlet hose. Twist the silver colored ring one inch below the connection point, until you feel it lock.”
So begins the deadpan and wildly convoluted instructions for the Zero Gravity Toilet aboard the space shuttle in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It was only fitting that the late director fashion a futuristic look at the room that played such an important part in many of his films. In Kubrick’s world, the bathroom is a place of absurdity and a place of horror, all with really good acoustics. Often, it is a place where death is not very far away and, sometimes, startlingly present.
Lolita through Eyes Wide Shut
Beginning with Lolita (1962), there will be key sequences set in the “facilities” in five of Kubrick’s seven remaining films. The tone of these forays veer from the blackest of comedy to the grotesquely tragic. In fact, the most brutal scene is his Vietnam film, Full Metal Jacket (1987) doesn’t take place on the battlefield, but within the cold blue light of a barrack’s latrine. With the white tile sparkling ominously, a deranged marine blows a hole through the chest of his drill sergeant and then turns the rifle on himself, splattering his brains across the laboriously polished ceramic.
In Kubrick’s last film before his death, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). a prostitute nearly dies from a drug overdose in the opulent lavatory of millionaire Victor Ziegler. She survives only to decorate a morgue slab later in the film.
It would be easy – and perhaps even accurate – to attribute Kubrick’s cynical tendencies for these recurring visions. Casting a keen eye on the futility of the human endeavor, he seems to suggest that this is where man ultimately belongs – both in life and death. However, a more compelling reason may rest in the aesthetic possibilities rather the philosophical.
Above all, an artist dedicating to evoking emotion and psychological schematics through the visual aspect, Kubrick took increasingly more time to craft his films (and shot more and more takes) to achieve vibrancy in even the most mundane of situations. As Hitchcock demonstrated in Psycho, turning a private place into a stage automatically creates a sense of voyeurism upon voyeurism. Kubrick’s fluid camera and lighting further skews the image, managing to depict a space simultaneously familiar and unworldly.
Kubrick's Bleak Comic Vision
Undoubtedly, the incongruity of characters playing out seminal moments of their lives in the crapper must’ve also greatly appealed to Kubrick. His darkly comic sensibilities infiltrate even the most intense sequences and underscores the heinous nature of the act. The drill sergeant’s John Wayne routine doesn’t play nearly as well clad only in his underwear and hat while confronting the
murderous marine while Jack Torrance’s little chat with the phantom waiter in The Shining (1980) retains a finely clipped civility despite its subject; the slaughter of Torrance’s wife and child.
Foe pure terror , however, we must return to the Zero Gravity Toilet exemplifying as is does Kubrick’s theme of technology far outrunning our capacity to control it. As the space shuttle hurtles toward space, it’s truly unsettling to realize that even the eminent scientist Dr Heywood Floyd is having trouble comprehending the instructions to the john.
