Monstrous men and bathroom mirrors: the bathroom as revelatory space in American cinema

Abstract

Suggesting that bathrooms in film are primarily theorized as transgressive spaces of violence, vulnerability, disorder and disturbing acts, Glen Donnar's work adopts a different stance, focusing on encounters with the self and/as other in bathroom mirrors, whereby the bathroom arguably becomes a space of revelation albeit one which discloses inadequacy, difference and transformation. His chapter explores the many contradictory significances of domestic bathrooms and mirrors for younger men across key depictions from and of the 1980s in American film. The simultaneously physical and metaphorical, real and unreal characteristics of the mirror disturb bathroom and male protagonist alike, in large part because of its ambivalent capacity to both reveal and distort. Donnar considers the filmic bathroom finally a revelatory, heterotopic space that can neither conceal nor contain male inadequacy, shame or monstrosity confirmed through the mirrored encounter of the self