What was the first movie to feature a toilet flushing?
Of all the cinematic landmarks out there, a flushing toilet isn’t the most, well, cinematic. It doesn’t have the same prestige as The Jazz Singer’s introduction of synchronised sound, for example, or the innovativeness of The Silencers’ introduction of the post-credits teaser scene. It wasn’t a particularly catchy innovation either. It’s not as if successive filmmakers have been falling over themselves to create the definitive flushing toilet sequence, though there is always time for the trend to take off.
If you were to hazard a guess as to which filmmaker took the plunge on this toilet-flushing landmark, you might think of the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters, whose cinematic innovations include things like having actors eat real dog faeces on camera.
Or maybe your mind might take you in a different direction, to a filmmaker like Michael Bay, perhaps. It’s not really something you can put your finger on, but there is definitely a je ne sais quoi about his filmmaking that might conjure thoughts of a toilet or, to put it more accurately, with a toilet that won’t flush.
Auteur bashing aside, there is, of course, an answer to the query.
So…what is the history of toilet flushing in cinema?
Many film aficionados who are into this sort of thing cite Psycho as the film that introduced toilet flushing to film-goers (though they were, hopefully, aware of the general concept already). Given how innovative Alfred Hitchcock’s slasher movie was in other ways, it’s not surprising that this particular novelty failed to make much of a splash. That’s doubly true given that the movie’s most famous moment takes place in a shower, and honestly, how many times can a single movie reinvent cinematic portrayals of a bathroom?
In the film, Marion (Janet Leigh) writes down sums on a piece of notepaper before tearing it up, tossing it down the toilet, and flushing it away. It’s an innocuous set piece, at least until she gets in the shower and the moment morphs into one of the most iconic movie scenes in history, but the censors still had an issue with it. Toilets, they believed, were too vulgar to be shown to the public, not like the totally acceptable image of a woman being slashed to death. If Psycho had been made a few years earlier when the Hays Code was still strictly enforced, the toilet scene would likely never have made the final cut. But by 1960, the Production Code Administration wielded less power, and the scene stayed.
This is the widely accepted origin story of toilet flushing in movies, but is it true? According to some cinema enthusiasts, it was beaten to the landmark by more than 30 years. In the 1928 silent film The Crowd, the main character gets ready for the day in his bathroom, washing his face and yes, flushing the toilet. There is an actual close-up of the tank of the toilet, and an intertitle in which the man asks his wife why she didn’t tell him it was busted.
With all due respect to Hitchcock, this early toilet scene is clearly more of an envelope-pusher than his split-second paper-disposal shot. It actually focuses on the toilet as an everyday appliance. There is a marital discussion about it. The only thing it lacks is sound, but you can hardly hold that against anyone given the limited technology at the time. Thanks to the relative lack of censorship in the film industry in 1928, this scene floated completely under the radar.
