The Porcelain Goddess:
New Cinematic Icon?
Recently, in an effort to fill in some gaps in my queer filmography, I rented a bunch of movies with gay themes and/or characters. Among them was Gasoline, an Italian film that came out last year that I’d heard had a good lesbian love scene. Within roughly 30 seconds of the start, a woman throws up, very visibly and very unprettily. Barf, for me, is not an aphrodisiac, and I can’t imagine a love scene that could overcome the horror of that opening scene. The fevered groping, later in the movie, in the stall of a public restroom did nothing to reverse my initial revulsion.
Gasoline served as the celluloid straw that broke the cammello’s back for me. The Italian antitourism film, it begs the question: What is up with using puke as a modern cinematic device? I don’t remember ever once seeing Katherine Hepburn, Doris Day, Cary Grant, or even the Three Stooges spew chunks—and Grant’s character in Father Goose was drunk nearly the entire movie and the Three Stooges ingested everything from pillows to paint! The worst that ever came of that was burping up a few feathers. So why is it that filmmakers today feel compelled to show us this particular slice of reality?
If I wanted reality, I’d walk through the alley behind any bar or hang out at frat-house drinking contests. I will grant that engagement with reality is an important part of maintaining a productive life, but who says it has to be part of a movie—especially one that’s not a documentary about, say, bulimia? You might think I’m just choosing the wrong movies. If, for instance, I had opted to see gross-out flicks, like Ace Ventura or Little Nicky, or horror movies—The Exorcist comes to mind—I would pretty much have only myself to blame. Or even hard-core dramas, like Trainspotting. But comedies and romance movies? Not even films for kids are safe from this trend: in Elf, Will Farrell hurls into a garbage can after spinning in a revolving door, and in the second Harry Potter movie, Ron belches out a stream of slugs.
Is there a group of people who actually enjoys seeing people toss their cookies? Forget I asked that—I learned a long time ago that whatever the fetish, there is someone who has it. But how many of them can there be? Vomit, of course, can also be meant to be funny—I remember a realistic hunk of lumpy rubber my brother bought at a novelty shop once that you could put on the floor. But, like being pantsed, upchucking is only funny when it happens to someone else.
Unless you’re me—or one of the thousands of people who have emetophobia (fear of vomiting—the fifth most common phobia, according to the International Emetophobia Society Web site). Then it’s just gross. Or maybe even downright horrifying, if you’re truly phobic. Worse still—and I speak now as a writer—hasn’t the round-trip meal ticket become kind of a cliché? Lately, in the movies, anytime anyone is scared, sick, shocked, agitated, drunk—well, evidently, the only way to show almost any emotion is to have someone throw up. I mean, come on, screenwriters: get a little creative! Or look at some old movies, if you’ve got no originality. Hundreds of characters languished in states of ill health in old movies, and we knew it because they looked limp and wan, not because they had their heads hanging in a toilet bowl. And when Lou Costello saw Frankenstein, did he yorch with fear? No, he sputtered and wheezed and clutched at Abbott. When Otis on The Andy Griffith show or Bogart’s Charlie Allnut in The African Queen show up rumpled, dirty, and unshaven, we know they’re drunk—we don’t need any (not-so-)special effects to get it. Just because we have the technology to make it look real doesn’t mean we have to use it!
As my rational discussion turns into a rant, I realize that apparently I have been holding it all in for longer than I thought. I also realize how rich and colorful our vernacular English is: who would have thought there are so many synonyms for such a lowly bodily function that an entire Web site would be devoted to them (www.VomitNames.com)? It’s great to be an American …
c 2004 by Yvonne Zipter. e-mail yz@press.uchicago.edu. And check out her new Web site www.yvonnezipter.com.