My wife and I tuned into House of Cards the other night. The scheming Underwoods, Francis and Claire, are being systematically thwarted in the third season. Francis, now President, is asked by his party not to run for a second term. His offer to the solicitor general to accept his nomination to the Supreme Court (and please don’t throw your hat in the ring to become a presidential candidate) is rebuffed. Then he is humiliated by visiting Russian President Petrov, who kisses the first lady full on the mouth at a State dinner. And ruthless Claire, the Netflix Lady Macbeth, who would like to be ambassador to the United Nations just in case her husband flops as pres, sasses a senator at her confirmation hearing and loses the vote 52–48.
The Underwoods are not accustomed to losing.
When ever-devious Claire asks her husband for a recess appointment, Francis first says no (he knows her motives), then says yes (his ambition and habit of outfoxing the opposition are too strong), and finally stalks out of the room, leaving Claire happy, surprised, and flummoxed in the White House kitchen.
In the throes of powerful emotion, Claire does what many TV and movie characters do these days. She goes to the sink, lowers her head, and tosses her cookies.
Really, must we vomit? What is this ridiculous trope in modern American film?
We’re not talking good-natured Stand by Me projectile-cherry-pie vomiting for laughs. This is dramatic-value vomit. Joe Queenan, writing for the Guardian in 2002, lists the following films with vomit scenes, some with multiple vomits: Reservoir Dogs, Speed, Hard Target, Vincent and Theo, Blue Velvet, The Godfather, Part III, The Firm, A Perfect World, Memento, The Virgin Suicides, Requiem for a Dream, Almost Famous, The Sixth Sense, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, The Whole Nine Yards, and Three to Tango.
That was 2002. Since then, dramatic-value vomit has snowballed. It’s everywhere now, in movies, in TV dramas. Male, female, it’s an equal opportunity gesture. The idea is you get to know the character’s interior by finding out what she had for lunch. Your husband is leaving you? Pull up the wastebasket and un-eat. Lost the family savings in an investment scam? That calls for a histrionic horf. Can’t pay the mob the money you owe? Time to talk to Ralph on the big white telephone.
Granted, there is medical literature on stress vomiting. Dr. Tracy A. Dennis in the department of psychology at Hunter College cites powerful emotions, such as anger, shame, fear, and delight, as possible triggers of stress vomit.
“When we’re angry,” he notes, “our heart rate increases, adrenaline flows, blood pressure spikes, and we ‘see red.’”
And then comes gastrointestinal distress, and possibly, emesis (vomiting). Vomit literature also treats cyclic vomiting syndrome, a malady affecting 2 percent of school-age children and an increasing number of adults, and emetophobia, or fear of vomiting, which afflicts up to 1.7–3.1 percent of males and 6–7 percent of females. Vomit lit also refers, at least in passing, to an atmospheric death metal band named Emesis, with such hit songs as “Moulded Blood,” “Sacrifice, the Flesh,” “Bring Your Slasherhook,” and “Raped in the Crypt.” Guaranteed to produce a headache and, in some listeners, induce vomiting.
So stress vomit, not to be confused with flu- or migraine- or pregnancy- or motion sickness– or alcohol- or death metal–induced vomit, is a thing. But how did de-fooding for dramatic effect become so pervasive?
You have to wonder if there’s a checklist of devices that writers, directors, and producers consult, to which dramatic-value vomit has been added.
Car chase?
Yup.
Exploding car crash?
Got it.
Character talking to himself in the mirror?
Check.
Run out of bullets and throw your gun at your target?
Missed that one.
Obligatory shower scene?
Is there a movie made these days that doesn’t show a character standing in the shower, water splashing on his or her head? Steam rises around them, signaling deep conflict, confusion; water gutters in the drain, signaling water—and hope or love or faith or resolve—going down the drain. It’s like a time-out. Hang on, viewer. We’ll get back to the movie in just a minute.
My first recollection of a shower scene, after Alfred Hitchcock’s in Psycho, is from The Big Chill. In the opening scenes of that movie we see Glenn Close sitting on the floor of the shower. Steam rises around her, signaling confusion. But wait, that’s not all: the Glenn Close character is weeping. The shower scene means something; it’s there for a purpose. And Hitchcock puts poor Janet Leigh’s character in the shower not for a pause but to set the scene for the next dramatic action.
A few months ago I watched part of Enemy, a murky film with Jake Gyllenhaal as a Toronto professor confronting his doppelgänger. His look-alike does a number on him. Should he follow himself? Should he reach out and make contact? What does all this mean? Gyllenhaal’s character is so conflicted he has to shower twice in the first forty-five minutes of the film. Something told me, as I was changing the channel, that dramatic-value vomit was in his future.
But this dramatic-value vomit is a modern thing, a movie/TV thing. Entertainments past? I’m pretty sure no one vomits in Shakespeare for dramatic effect. In all thirty-seven plays put together, in a total of 807 scenes, the word “vomit” occurs only six times, “puke” only twice. And usually it’s figurative vomit.
You might expect to find some emesis in Shakespeare, as it figured prominently in the practice of medicine in his time. To keep the four humors in balance and to restore the patient to health, doctors prescribed emetics to induce vomiting, or laxatives, or proceeded to a salubrious bloodletting. In “Sonnet 118,” Shakespeare writes, “We sicken to shun sickness when we purge.”
The closest we come to dramatic-value vomit in Shakespeare is when Hamlet, standing in a graveyard in act 5, scene 1, holds up Yorick’s skull and addresses him/it: “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it” (my emphasis). If Hamlet were to hurl, it would be justified. But in the all the Hamlets I’ve ever seen, he doesn’t. It would be superfluous. Hamlet can say what’s on his mind. There’s no need to show us. Possibly in contemporary productions, a director of Hamlet would suggest, “My gorge rises is your motivation to rush downstage and honk into the pit.”
Please don’t make it so.
No, in Shakespeare, there are no vomits, dramatic-value or otherwise.
And fortunately, Shakespeare also predates the shower as dramatic time-out. If there were ever a shower scene candidate, it’s Macbeth. When he asks, contemplating his murder of Duncan, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash the blood clean from my hand?” you might picture him thinking that while slumped against the tile walls in the castle shower, steam rising around him, signaling confusion, incarnadine waters guttering in the drain.
So too Lady Macbeth, with steam rising around her in the shower, might deliver the lines: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” and “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” She scrubs her hands, asks: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.”
Who wants to pause for a shower?
You might think the dread Lady, as she becomes more unhinged, would vomit at least once, before her exit.
She doesn’t need a shower or dramatic-value vomit. She just uses her words, and the show goes on.