A closer look
Alfred Hitchcock's legendary 1960 thriller Psycho holds the incredibly prestigious honor of being the very first American feature film to show a toilet flushing on screen. While modern audiences are completely numb to CGI cities being leveled by aliens and deeply graphic violence, mid-century censors were absolutely terrified by the scandalous implication that human beings possess functioning digestive tracts. The director specifically fought to keep the shot of torn paper swirling down the bowl to prove that a piece of evidence had been destroyed, fundamentally altering cinematic history in the process. It is a brilliant testament to the fragile sensibilities of the era that seeing a porcelain fixture successfully dispose of water was considered nearly as shocking and transgressive as the infamous scene where a woman gets brutally stabbed to death in the shower
