plumbing the
depths

1 i have this dream
2 a flush of guilt
3 baptisms in blood
4 'psycho'
and deadly sin
5  freudian jokes
for the john
6 exploring interiors
7 the naked truth
8 dirty bits
and naughty bits

baths and showers are our ritual rebirths, the everyday baptisms that, along with a bar of Safeguard, not only cleanse but revitalize and rejuvenate us. In Brian DePalma's Carrie (1976), After butchering the Class of '76 at her Grand Guignol high school prom (complete with phallic firehoses raging telekinetically out of control), Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) goes Max Schreck on us and somnambulistically walks home to the little white American Gothic house she shares with her wacko fundamentalist Christian mom (Piper Laurie). Carrie is covered in pig's blood -- and, figuratively at least, the blood of her menses (you know, "The Curse," as mom calls it) -- as well as that of her slaughtered teachers and classmates. We know, even if she does not, that some of the people barbequed and filleted by her long-repressed anger were actually trying to be nice to her, but an unleashed rage is often indiscriminate in lashing out at its targets, and Carrie has no doubt sensed this, which is why she has been afraid to let it loose for so long. (You might say that, in the heat of anger, we're all likely to throw the baby out with the bathwater.)

naturally, what Carrie needs after a night like this is a nice, hot bath. She slowly, ritualistically climbs into the bath and scrubs herself madly like an adolescent Lady Macbeth until she's removed the stain of blood and sin from her skin. (The freckles remain.) The bathwater turns red, like Neptune's oceans incarnadine; she soaks in her own guilt, and no white flannel nightie is going to turn her back into Mommie's Little Girl again. And yet, Carrie is as much a victim (of simply wanting to be a "normal" teenager) as she is a telekinetic monster. It was, after all, never poor, nerdy Carrie White's ambition to be Queen -- not even of the prom, much less of Scotland. Just by accepting an invitation from a high school dream boy (blond-haloed William Katt), did she really succumb, as her mother suggests, to the sin of pride?

carrie has been raised a Christian fundamentalist; Harry Caul is Catholic; both share a sense of guilt and responsibility shaped by religion. As for me, I grew up without the benefit of Catholicism's ingenious mechanism for washing away sin -- the rite of confession -- but I envied those who were able to take advantage of it. Say a few Our Fathers, Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition and your moral transgressions were absolved -- what a miraculous system! My non-denominational secular guilt and anxiety, however, could not be so easily expunged. Still, I came to think of confessional booths as figurative shower stalls for the cleansing of guilt. (Do they hook the plumbing up to holy water, as they claim to do at St. Vincent's in West Hollywood? There, the holy water font is on one side of a wall, while the lobby drinking fountain is on the other. Makes you wonder...)

both harry and carrie find their sins expressed (consciously or not) through bathroom fixtures -- the toilet and bathtub, respectively. And then, there's that shower: "Carrie" begins with its eponymous heroine in what appears to be a "private moment" in the shower. A phallic nozzle spritzing away, Carrie slathers herself sensuously in white goo (soap suds), until her own personal plumbing springs a leak and the crimson tide starts to flow from between her legs. She screams (mom has neglected to mention this biological reality, in hopes that "the curse of blood" -- to her a sign of mature sexuality, and sin -- would not be "visited upon" her daughter) and it turns out she's not alone: she's in her high school gym. The other girls, both disgusted and embarrassed by Carrie's grotesque over-reaction to the situation, start pelting her with tampons, chanting "Plug it up! Plug it up!" What begins as a trickle of blood in the shower, ends with a bloodbath.

and then, there's that other shower scene...

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What this girl needs
is a bath...

The afterbath:  Poor Carrie, having soaked away her sins following a hard night of  slaughtering classmates, finds more trouble waiting just behind the bathroom door.

Jim being cleansed of his sins in a  confessional at St. Peter's in the Vatican, using the showerhead from "Psycho."