comparing toilet humor in “And Just Like That” vs. Franzen’s Freedom

How about some poo criticism today?

HBO. Poor Miranda.

Back in March, a daring Hate Read writer railed against the over-use of puking scenes in TV, begging, “For the love of Christ, surely someone with your creative faculties and HBO-charged budget can devise one single slightly less disgusting narrative device” and offering up “sharting” (“If it’s good enough for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, it’s good enough for you) plus a regular ol’ dump-taking as much more creatively interesting alternatives.

It appears that we at Deez Links Media may have to retract that last part. As of this past week, I think we as a culture are now officially good on TV poop scenes, too. For anyone not dwelling in a household where viewing of the “And Just Like That…” finale was required viewing, marking the definitive (they swear this time!) end of the Carrie Bradshaw universe at last, you may have vaguely heard that there’s a most unfortunate scene involving a certain kind of excrement overflowing in Miranda’s toilet. For a prestige revival show designed to serve as a rather fashionable mass tranquilizer, this was possibly outré, but mostly just relied on a kind of disgust so familiar to the common man as to register as vulgar. I buy poop’s inherent inconvenience as a laughing matter, but the joke otherwise did not feel committed in the right ways (though to think someone actually went through the trouble of making sure the uh, color leached into the water (just) like that… ).

And now the entire legacy of Sex and the City will be tied forever with this scene. Does the franchise deserve such a fate? To consider this more deeply, I spent Friday night revisiting the original two-part finale of the original show, “An American Girl in Paris,” parts une and deux, which aired back in February 2004. Those episodes, to me, remain impossible to improve upon and make the storytelling of AJLT feel like a below-average Wattpad project. But while watching “Part Deux,” I realized that the original finale also has a little turdy moment of its own: As Carrie sadly trudges along the streets of Paris, she steps in dog poo and endures the smirks of Parisians as she flails around and tries to wash it off her heels in a public fountain. “Now that’s how you make a poop joke,” I said aloud in my apartment. The reason that scene worked, while Miranda’s Thanksgiving plumbing situation 21 years later did not, was because the collision between the glamour (Carrie’s white Louboutins) and the abject (French dogshit) was more violent, making it almost romantic. I also decided that it was successful because it mercifully left much to the imagination—we were not treated much to close-ups of Carrie smearing her soles around the asphalt, thanks god.

(An aside: it’s interesting that both of Miranda’s finale arcs end in the bathroom for the original show and the reboot: in SATC, she surrenders to the awkwardness of finding and bathing her aging mother-in-law, whereas in AJLT, she’s cleaning up some rando’s mess when her girlfriend decides to show up for her both literally and figuratively. Oh Miranda Hobbes. They pinned you down into the domestic sphere in the end, didn’t they?)

Anyway, poo humor and its various attempts at it became top of mind all weekend because I’ve also been reading Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom and loving every minute of it. (If you’ve read this book, you probably know what scene I’m about to talk about). If you think about it, I suppose we can regard Franzen as perhaps quite the literary pioneer of the poo joke, stemming from his breakout novel The Corrections, wherein the increasingly out-of-touch retiree Alfred Lambert is plagued with visions of sentient turds whilst he vacations on a cruise ship (abject + glamour!).

But in Freedom, as it turns out, our guy Franzen exhibits a renewed vigor for unearthing fertile new fields of poopery. I honestly think the entire book is reading for this one scene alone, which comes about 2/3 of the way through, when the novel’s designed prodigal son Joey has accidentally swallowed his wedding ring, yet still flies to Argentina in attempts to vacation/hook up with bodacious babe Jenna. (What I enjoy about Freedom, as opposed to the other two Franzen novels I’ve read is that every character, rather just than a select few in the story, is such a tragic horndog). Poor sweet Joey is waiting for the inevitable. You and I, the readers, are waiting for the inevitable. We are told, rather gleefully on part of our esteemed author, that Joey has brought along a single fork in his dopp bag for the task ahead in this five-star hotel bathroom:

He knelt on the cool floor and peered into the bowl at the four large turds afloat in it, hoping to see the glint of gold immediately. The oldest turd was dark and firm and noduled, the ones from deeper inside him were paler and already dissolving a little. Although he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was something else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way. He poked one of the softer turds with the fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown, and he saw that this business of a fork had been a fishful fantasy. The water would soon be too turbid to see a ring through, and if the ring broke free of its enveloping matter it would sink to the bottom and possibly go down the drain. He had no choice but to lift out each turd and run it through his fingers, and he had to do this quickly, before things got too water-logged. Holding his breath, his eyes watering furiously, he grasped the most promising turd and let go of his latest fantasy, which was that one hand would suffice. He had to use both hands, one to hold the shot and the other to pick through it. He retched once, drily, and got to work, pushing his fingers into the soft and body-warm and surprisingly lightweight log of excrement.

Part of me is really sorry to have you all read that (and also sorry to the cab driver who had to listen in on me manically describing this scene to an unsuspecting party this weekend), but the other part of me is beaming with pride for the grand tradition of American literature that has enabled this exact combination of words to exist. As for the grand tradition of evocative poo scenes, this one belongs in the true and rightful canon.

And what makes it so good? There’s that violent SATC-like contrast—Joey is, after all, hunting for a sliver of gold amidst a pile of crap—but in rereading this section for the fifth time, I think the hilarity of Franzen’s writing here is the deep, unflinching intimacy with the subject, ahem, matter. He goes for the easy situational humor, but does not rest until he’s unearthed at least a dozen observations that may have only occurred to you in the privacy of your own bathroom. As a result, the scene doesn’t just rest on being vivid or brazen; whereas other writers (and artistic mediums) are quick with a shock-and-run approach, Franzen goes all in.

The result is utterly serious in its luxuriation in detail, and so wholly attentive in addressing the multi-sensory experience at hand that one thinks of the elementary school exercise where you had to use a description corresponding to each of the five senses, and realizes now how such a technique can reveal its true lethal efficacy when deployed by a master. Poop, in Franzen’s hands (sorry), is much more than just a plot-driving inconvenience or visual metaphor; it is itself a complex substrate of life possessed with its own particular qualities, textures, and obediences to the laws of physics—an experience, really, as worthy of examination as the rest of the human condition. It is, also let’s be honest, an aspect of that condition perhaps much better left to the written medium.

*This post has been updated to reflect that The Corrections was Franzen’s breakout novel, not his debut. :)