While you were watching Super Bowl ads on network TV last night, six grown-ups publicly vomited in front of each other in the course of 2 half hour shows on HBO (The Righteous Gemstones and Somebody Somewhere). From a viewing perspective, I think 6 vomits in an hour was a personal best for me, but that's just a gut feeling. I can't say with certainty because I have noticed that sometime over the course of I would say the past 10 years, vomit has become a universal device for expressing the inner emotions of a character in movies and on television.
The Gemstones do nothing by halves and the communal distraught emesis of four of them in front of the hospital where the patriarch lay in a coma from injuries sustained in a crash after an ambush by machine gun toting cycle riding gunmen at the climax of last week's show, involved spectacular fountains of effluvia. But the Gemstones is the kind of show that would have its characters vomit satirically. The shared vomiting of sister characters in the more gentle and realistic Somebody Somewhere that followed is more typical of what I'm talking about. One sister, on learning from the other that her husband was cheating on her with her best friend emoted emetically onto the floor of the barn where the two were sheltering from a brewing tornado, upon which the sister who had struggled with having to be the messenger of such bad news followed suit.
Impressive as it was, the second show suffered a bit from having its puke act have to follow the spew-laden spectacle of the former.
I could have done without any vomit, but unless I'm very much mistaken, somehow the stress-puke has become an inescapable trope in dramatic entertainment. It is the go-to deus ex machina for terminating an emotional scene--the signifier of the heightened seriousness of a plot point, in case you hadn't gotten the message from context.
As a very small child, nothing displeased me more than vomiting. By the time I was seven I had developed flawless mastery over the reflex with the result that until I discovered the social lubricant and control inhibiting qualities of alcohol in my late teens, I threw up exactly 0 times. It became my superpower. An inability to control myself with liquor made my late adolescence a minefield of puke, but once I learned by age 24 not to binge drink, even having had stomach flu on more than one occasion since, I have somehow managed to avoid vomiting all but one time in my adult life-- and it was as unpleasant and traumatic as I ever remembered it being. And needless to say, I have never once thrown up merely because something really stressed me out. So perhaps I'm living in a dream world, but I'd like to think people vomit not remotely close to how frequently they now do in movies and on television shows. Then again, most of our lives are generally not an escalation of cliffhangers or an arms race of tortuous plot twists designed to be worthy of water cooler conversation the next morning.
It wasn't always like this on tv. In the 60's, when I was forming my expectations about television, vomit was one of many taboos to the precious sensibilities of the sponsors who brought entertainment into our homes. Toilets didn't exist on TV at all until All in the Family broke the barrier in the Nixon administration. Until the special effects revolution in the 70s, it was extremely rare to even hear so much as a retch on the big screen. The Exorcist was perhaps the Apollo program for cinematic vomit, but aside from an occasional gross-out in a horror movie or outrageous comedy (Terry Jones' gluttonous blow-out in Monty Python's Meaning of Life is perhaps the Everest of gag inducing comedy), vomits on screen remained relatively rare.
How did it become such an appointment TV cliché? I assume there must have been a template-setter for the trope. It must have occurred to some primordial screenwriter that drama could be telegraphed effectively, or a punchline fashioned, with a suspenseful lunge for the commode. Whenever the original archetype debuted, I imagine it made some kind of a stir. While typical audience members no doubt set down their popcorn and covered their eyes, the critics and awards givers must have sat up and taken notice. Perhaps the novelty pushed a performance over an Oscar or Emmy finish line. Whatever engendered it, it seems to have caught on among the scriptwriting caste like a stomach virus, because by now it is ubiquitous. Screenwriters as a class may not be the most innovative bunch on the whole, but when it comes to on-screen vomit, they are lemmings. In COVID lockdown, I have seen characters vomit their emotions in show after show-- to use just some of the HBO shows I've seen over the past year or so as an example, characters vomit expressively in episodes of Succession, Silicon Valley, Search Party, The White Lotus, The Flight Attendant, Hacks, and Euphoria. While some of the aforementioned are among the best TV I've seen recently and most are sparing with the prop vomitus, I gave up on Euphoria when characters had "dram-ited" three times by the 5th episode of Season 1.
While I know news of this phenomenon can't come as a shock to anyone still watching mainstream movies and television, I've been sitting on it for a while. So thank you for listening. For it is only through acknowledging and talking out loud about the problems that we as a society face today that we can begin to address them.
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