How to Take a Bath

Don't be fooled, this is not "a woman explains how to take a bath", it's rather more interesting than that. There's a story (slight, but present) but more interesting is the degree of background that's just assumed, but which is, 90 years or so on, of the most interest.

So yes, we get to see some minor amount of skin, but if that's what you're after, well, it's a big internet out there with a lot more skin. What I found interesting included

• the bath/shower ritual is just strange. We run the bath, sit in it for some period of time, then wrap a shower curtain around us and start the shower. What is going on here? Obviously by Janet Leigh Psycho time 25 years later people have figured out how to use showers properly, but apparently in the 1930s this was still not widespread knowledge.

• likewise it doesn't seem like they understood plumbing very well. Look at that wall of dials and controls to (somehow) set the temperature and pressure for the bath and shower! And I'll bet that, even with that many controls the temperature and pressure fluctuated wildly.

• likewise the twin beds. Yeah yeah, I know we're supposed to believe that this was just because of Code, but I don't buy it, not in this case. The movie is happy to show nekkid babes, but balks at showing a queen or king-sized bed?

I'm guessing that the beds were separate because that was the way most people slept, but why? A quick internet search tells us that between 1850 and 1950 separate beds were considered the superior option for various reasons. Theories are given as to why they became popular, but I find them unconvincing. So I'll chalk this up to an accurate depiction of social reality (likewise, for all those 50s TV shows, and then inertia, and the tiny size of the show set for TV shows, especially sitcoms, not prudery, keeps it as the TV standard for another thirty or forty years), but remain unsatisfied as to what drove this pendulum, first one way then the other.

• it's not especially surprising, this being the olden days and the Depression, but note the lack of product of any sort. I mean, I'm no prima donna in the bathroom, but I have at least a few bottles, cans, bars and suchlike spread around.

• So that's the bathing itself, but just as interesting is the story. Basically it's all about portraying one type of marriage versus another, a nice happy couple, kind friendly, helping each other versus an unhappy complaining couple. Of course this sort of thing has been done to death and any modern treatment would rapidly descend into various versions of

+ who started it? Why does she get all the blame?

+ why is it the blonde WASP couple that are happy and the ethno-jewish couple that are unhappy?

And so on.

But I'm more interested in the extent to which this was something portrayed and talked-about in 1937. What were the expectations and mores surrounding the creation of a happy marriage? How common were they vs angry fighting marriages? Was this a trivial conceit exploited by the screen-writer purely as a way to get two girls on screen; or was it in fact the primary interest of at least some of the people involved, with the skin as a way to sneak in the social point?