Despite no end of displeasure and disgust – from a petition put to (and rejected by) UK parliament in 2021 to make warnings obligatory, to a “coalition” of film and television viewers making a stand against the stomach-churning trend – there is no sign the flood of vomit currently sweeping cinema is set to be staunched.
The dam was first burst in 1973, with The Exorcist’s tide of pea soup. Since then, the trope of copious projectile vomiting in cinema has spread contagiously, finding itself in a reliably constant spew of horrors, then comedies, released from the mid-1970s onwards.
In 2017, however, the critic Jen Chaney declared that we had reached “peak puke TV”. From Madeline’s (Reese Witherspoon) unexpected upchuck over dinner in Big Little Lies, to a tonally freewheeling episode of hurling in Downton Abbey, as Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) violently paints the family’s white tablecloth – and concerned wife Cora – with blood before being whisked to hospital, it seemed a queasy watershed moment had been reached.
Chaney pinned the blame on slack standards of new streaming platforms, arguing that only the sloppier channels or services made way for so crude a trend. Its use by writers and directors has been widely denounced as a lazy shorthand for big, unbridled – and unpluggable – emotion. There is, admittedly, little hope in defending the trope for its subtlety.
Yet a spate of recent releases, all of which have shown at major film festivals or won awards, seem to prove Chaney’s prognosis wrong. Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness is the most lurid example, with a 15-minute cascading waltz of chunder (among other body fluids) on a cruise for the revoltingly rich. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon saw Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy drench an imagined version of media mogul William Randolph Hearst in half-digested canapes. Andrew Dominik’s biopic Blonde gives Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas) a fourth wall-breaking barf as sick splatters the camera. Robert Pattinson made The Lighthouse particularly gritty by dousing himself with bodily expulsions, both on camera and off.
Now, a new film from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli casts a sharp eye on the shimmering Oslo cultural scene and its uneasy relationship with illness, as one woman’s quest for attention gets grossly out of hand.
Sick of Myself follows Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a young barista living with her self-obsessed sculptor boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther). Convinced that “narcissists are the ones who make it”, she sets out to yank back the spotlight from Thomas by taking inordinate quantities of an unlicensed drug that triggers a mysterious skin disease. Having honed his visual effects, Borgli recalls the film’s premiere: “We got into Cannes and I thought, ‘Yeah, we’re probably the outlier in body fluids at this festival.’ Then I see Triangle of Sadness premieres the day before ours – and, my God, was I disappointed. It had so much vomit that ours looked like kids’ TV stuff.”
As the boundaries between horror and arthouse have blurred with films such as The Witch (2016) and Censor (2021), many directors outside the genre have begun drawing on horror tropes. “I’ve been hugely fascinated with prosthetics and disfigurements and that element of body horror,” says Borgli. “But it’s always coupled with a kind of absurdist world. It never takes place in our reality. I wanted to make a movie that had body-horror elements inside of a normal universe, a place where you wouldn’t expect it.”
Sick of Myself starts off as a straightforward, almost sugary-sweet, dramedy before descending into gruesomeness, but somehow still maintains the breezy humour of its beginning. Borgli also took inspiration from comedy, namely Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. (He also flags the debt to The Meaning of Life in Triangle of Sadness: “Maybe Monty Python is the source that led us all here.”)
The director of that Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund, confirms the influence, though the reasoning behind his decision to make a no-holds-barred retching marathon his “centrepiece scene” was slightly more complex. The shapeshifting, three-part film begins by centring on the modelling industry – specifically the inversed gender pay gap between men (who earn less) and women – before taking a “sociological approach” to the obscenely rich passengers aboard the Christina O, then finally finishing with a Lord of the Flies-esque desert-island situation where only the working-class cleaner has the skills to survive. The vomit acts as an allegory for a scaled-down apocalypse. Östlund chuckles: “Basically, what I was thinking [was]: we are watching the end of western civilisation.”
The onset of streaming services, the aftermath of the pandemic, and wider economic fragility has entirely transformed the film industry A 2022 BFI report found that budgets for independent films are in decline, with distributors and marketers strapped for cash. There is an increasing pressure to make a bigger splash with smaller means – which is where Östlund’s vom-fest did the trick. “It’s very difficult in a world where streaming exists and [there’s] a lot of chatter online to market something that doesn’t have some kind of calling card like that, that people are talking about and generates social activity,” says Jake Garriock, head of distribution strategy and group publicity at Curzon, which distributed Triangle of Sadness in the UK. “It’s really gut reactions to things.”
Östlund envisions the future of cinema as channelling the entertainment factor of Hollywood to coax more audiences into considering complex ideas. The director is interested in exploring human behaviour in situations where the “social contract is broken”, and a bout of sea sickness amid Michelin fine dining serves as exactly that. “I’m not very interested in vomiting,” Östlund says. “I think it’s kind of childish very often when it’s in the movies – and if I was going to do something with that in Triangle of Sadness then I felt I had to push further than anyone else has done before, because otherwise it doesn’t become anything.
“If you look at the European tradition of film-making, we have for quite a long time now relied on the film institutes and getting money from the state in order to produce movies,” Östlund adds. “It’s a certain kind of European tradition where art should be disconnected from the market to express what you really need. And I think that is great in many ways. But a side-effect, I would say, is that when you’re making movies you are economically safe, so you don’t have to take those extra steps to reach the audience.”
There is something apt about three high-end films (including Babylon) using a traditionally lowbrow trope to lambast the elite and the upper classes. Projectile vomiting also has a history bound up with gender – the most prominent vomiteurs often being women. “Vomiting is really connected with aggression,” says writer and researcher Sarah Kathryn Cleaver, who has written on how the trend interlinks with silence: outspoken women are usually the ones who wind up blowing chunks. “Speech is the thing that can disrupt women’s beauty. These characters are disrupting that femininity – that idea of being a silent, beautiful object.”
An unresolved discomfort around the female body also resides in these films, argues Cleaver, intermingling sexualisation with “the pleasure of watching something expelled – bad feelings or unacceptable thoughts, or whatever it is”.
But, most of all, the extravagant, oddly engrossing and downright disgusting hurling of the last few years has acted as a key talking point in a saturated media landscape – reminding us that cinema is at its core a communal experience. “We have to build a new culture around the cinema: that it’s a social event, that we are going there together, that we are discussing what we’re seeing, that we’re creating a platform for an active audience, rather than the zombies that are looking at these other screens,” insists Östlund. Whether that involves further regurgitations of the trope, we’ll have to see.
