Those zombie jokes are just so delightful. Really.
What annoys me all the time is how the characters sound when not shown. They either cough or just give a gag of the throat.
Throwing up in a toilet sounds like a waterslide on a busy day. There’s splashing, dunking, gagging, gasping, etc. I just don’t know why they can’t just pour a can of chunky soup in the toilet while fake-coughing.
Wow, high tech, with handles and everything. I’m not saying the US should adopt this, because it seems to indicate “this is the place for getting so drunk your mouth imitates a Saturn V”, but it’s a pretty dandy solution.
I have seen people lying down on a public bathroom floor, in all cases puking drunk/high out of their minds. Semi-conscious and moaning/rolling around between barfs, or even entirely unconscious. Not too often, because I try to avoid such dives, but stuff happens.
A lot depends on how messed up the person in question is - for the average puke, yeah, people will probably try to avoid touching the toilet or the floor but if you’re extremely ill/incapacitated it’s a different story.
Pregnancy is another common reason for public toilet puking.
It doesn’t take me out of a movie or anything, but I’ve always thought the toilet-hugging thing was weird, and probably exaggerated for effect. It’s never even occurred to me to do that when I’ve been sick–I might brace myself with a hand against the tank or wall as I lean over, but my balance has never been so screwed up that I couldn’t remain standing.
There have been a few times in my life when I’ve been so sick and weak I couldn’t stay on my feet. It wasn’t a matter of balance. Consider yourself lucky it’s never happened to you.
Let’s hope! If I were a movie actor and the script called for me to do that, I would want to ideally see the toilet be a brand new one or a prop, but at the very least very well cleaned before I did this. But it would still be tough to overcome the aversion psychologically. Studies have shown that even if you do something like unwrap a brand new flyswatter in front of someone and then serve them a sandwich with it, they are still grossed out even though they rationally understand that it is new.
As I originally noted in this thread nearly five years ago, I don’t watch a lot of movies with puking scenes, so I have limited data to go on here. But are the floors/toilets in such scenes really so obviously filthy that their putrid festering effluvia distracts the viewer from the plight of the character who’s vomiting?
On the contrary, most public restrooms I see in the movies are pretty much like most public restrooms I see in real life: tiled with enamel fixtures, probably cleaned with disinfectant of some kind sometime within the last 24 hours, usually white with no visible smears or stains.
Not a place I’d particularly enjoy eating a meal in, and not a place I’d be comfortable walking out of without thoroughly washing my hands, but not inspiring any immediate revulsion or fears of invisible unspeakable contamination.
I think many people just have a deep-seated conviction that public restrooms, no matter how clean and undefiled they may look, are seething masses of horrible invisible filth that no sane person would consciously risk touching any more than they absolutely had to. Actual bacteriological study data are not generally effective against such convictions.
Or maybe it’s just that many people are encountering public restrooms that are way dirtier-looking than the ones I tend to see?
But in that case, I would think that the “shocked and revolted” contingent would be asking “Why do movies show public restrooms as reasonably clean-looking instead of covered in mold and rotting excrement?”, rather than “Why do movies show characters who vomit in public restrooms not avoiding reasonably clean-looking surfaces as though they were covered in mold and rotting excrement?”