Shit happens on the big screen: faecal motifs in contemporary film

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to analyse various excremental motifs and their functions in selected contemporary films. Drawing on concepts such as Julia Kristeva’s abject, Mary Douglas’s taboo and Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque body, the authors demonstrate that dirt in the form of excrement holds metaphorical and symbolic potential in cinematic representations. Faecal tropes selected for discussion range from the use of excrement as a means of humiliation (The Help, Green Book, Kornblumenblau) or resistance (Silent Grace, Hunger) to an understanding of defecation as an ideal and peaceful act (Jarhead, Halkaa) or as a trigger for culturally conditioned disgust (Death at a Funeral, Daddy Day Care), to the use of faecal matters as a demarcation line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the world of the future (Uncanny, The Platform) or as a productive substance entangled with multiple life forms (The Martian). Since filmic texts can be regarded as a taxonomic representing of faecal motifs that have received considerably little scholarly attention, the discussed examples do not exhaust the topic, but lay the foundation for more detailed analysis in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Excrement
• defecation
• scatological cinema
• abject
• grotesque body
• carnivalesque

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The relation between sacredness and bodily secretions often appears in popular culture in satirical contexts, for example, in one of the episodes of the comedy series Avenue 5 (HBO, 2020–2022), wherein a cloud of illuminated faeces drifting around a spacecraft miraculously forms the face of Pope John Paul II.

2. Mary Douglas writes about excreta in the context of caste society in India, while noting that the ritual, ‘official’ faecal impurity does not translate directly into the everyday life of Indians, who usually did not treat defecation in public as unclean or secret (2001, 125–126). We will return to the issue of defecation in India as depicted in film later in the article.

3. A person higher in the social hierarchy could expose their private parts in the presence of those lower on the social ladder. The king’s exposure to courtiers, therefore, did not evoke a feeling of inferiority or shame (see, for example, Elias 2000, 417–418). At this point, it is worth recalling the memorable scene from the Outlander series (2014–) in which we see King Louis XV of France taking care of his physiological need in front of his courtiers and royal guests. The king is clearly constipated. One of the main characters of the series, Jamie Fraser, advises the king to eat porridge, which may help him with this issue.

4. An interesting filmic example of a doctor analysing human faeces can be found in The Last Emperor (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987). The court physician examines the infant emperor’s stool by checking its smell and texture in order to make appropriate dietary recommendations (‘No bean curd today and no meat!’). These instructions aim at changing the consistency of the excreta as the hard and black stool of the emperor can indicate constipation (Yang 2015).

5. Faeces used as a means of humiliation feature also in such films as Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Jarhead and Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 2006), to mention only a few.

6. During the dirty protest in the Armagh prison, female prisoners also used their menstrual blood (see, for example, O’Keefe 2006).

7. Samantha appears also in Casanova’s feature film Skins (Pieles, 2017), which explores issues related to various disabilities of the characters.

8. See ‘An open defecation free India: Towards maintaining an open defecation free India’, Unicef.org, http://www.unicef.org/india/what-we-do/ending-open-defecation (accessed: 23.03.2021).

9. Bakhtin speaks here of the so-called ‘Malbrough theme’ present in world literature and oral tradition. It considers ‘the interweaving of death throes and the act of defecation, or the closeness or defecation to the moment of death’ (Bakhtin 1984, 151). The juxtaposition of these elements would customarily serve to connote the degradation of death and dying.

10. Traditional sex is eradicated from the future as neither hygienic nor aesthetically pleasing. Instead, for example, the heroine of Barbarella (dir. Roger Vadim, 1968) ‘makes love’ by consuming a special ‘exaltation transference pill’, kneeling and pressing her palms to those of her partner. Similarly, in the distant world of the future presented in Sleeper (dir. Woody Allen, 1973), the traditional unsightly, unsanitary forms of sex have been replaced with a brief, contactless encounter between partners in a futuristic, tube-shaped machine (see, for example, Łapińska 2020, 72).

11. The device of storing in a sack the food ‘eaten’ by an artificial human is also found in Isaac Asimov’s novel The Caves of Steel.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marzena Keating

Marzena Keating, PhD, is trained in the field of Humanities in the discipline of Culture and Religion Studies with a MA in English Studies. She is the author of several texts centred on Irish history and culture. She works at the Pedagogical University of Cracow in the Institute of English Studies, where she teaches courses in British culture. Her primary interests lie in the fields of Irish History, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory and Food Studies.

Joanna Łapińska

Joanna Łapińska, PhD, is trained in the field of Humanities in the discipline of Cultural Studies with a MA in Film Studies. The author of many articles in the edited collections and journals, as well as the monograph To kocha! Związki miłosne ludzi i maszyn w filmie science fiction (2020) about the love relationships of humans and machines in science fiction film. Her interests include the phenomena of contemporary cinema, the theories and practices of posthumanism and the new practices of intimacy. She works in the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna.