Precisely because we feel safe in it, the bathroom is a preferred place for murder. In 18thcentury France, journalist Jean-Paul Marat, one of the most extreme voices of the French Revolution, was murdered in his bathtub by Girondist Charlotte Corday (event represented in the famous painting by Jacque-Luis David); in Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho Norman Bates brutally kills Marion Crane in the shower; in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction gangster Vincent Vega gets shot to death while comfortably seating on the throne reading a comic book. The common denominator of these scenes is that, despite known threats to their safety, once in the bathroom the victims have no notion of their impending misfortune precisely because they are shrouded in the assumed protection of privacy. On the other hand, the killers exploit their victims’ misplaced trust in the bathroom– the idea that life is ‘on hold’ while you are in there – to surprise them and surely get them.
Stay tuned for our “Enter The Bathroom” finale next week, straight outta Miami!!
