Movies Ad Nauseam

Denzel Washington does it in the back seat of a car in Touchstone’s “He Got Game.” Meg Ryan does it in a hospital bathroom in Warner Bros.’ “City of Angels.” Johnny Depp watches Benicio Del Toro do it all over their hotel suite in Universal Pictures’ coming “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Vomiting. It’s everywhere in cinema these days, from the big studio pictures to the scrappy independents. In goofy comedies and serious dramas, off camera and on, actors are succumbing to nausea at a revolting rate. If it keeps up, queasiness threatens to become as commonplace in the movies as happy endings and heart-to-heart conversations held at urinals.

In recent releases, scenes depicting the result of an upset stomach have illustrated everything from kindness to repulsion, from moral uncertainty to intoxication to a bad case of the jitters. Most often, hurling is played for shock value, as in TriStar’s “The Big Hit,” when Elliott Gould nails Lou Diamond Phillips with a vile mix of prune juice and alcohol.

But more and more, tossing one’s cookies is passing for character development--a shorthand way of establishing sensitivity. In Universal’s “Primary Colors,” a campaign manager reveals his ethical qualms about his job by pulling over to the side of the road and throwing up. In “City of Angels,” a similar moment pegs a female cardiologist (Ryan) as vulnerable.

“It has become a device to show that characters have inner feelings,” said Leo Braudy, an English professor at USC who tracks popular culture on the screen and who laments that nausea may come at the expense of good acting. “There are exercises in Method acting about dredging up parts of your inner life to infuse the character, but this takes that a little too literally.”

In this era of graphic entertainment, when open-heart surgery and flatulence are everyday fare on television, perhaps it was inevitable that ralphing would come in earnest to the big screen. But will people pay to see it up close?

Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python veteran and director of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” hopes so. He admits that some test audiences were turned off by Del Toro’s rampant retching in his adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s tale of drug-crazed paranoia. When asked what they disliked about the film, which opens May 22, vomiting topped the list.

Nevertheless, Gilliam kept it in.

“The business of shocking and offending people is important because it makes them respond,” he said, offering the same justification he recalls using with critics of a lengthy vomit scene in “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” (1983): “We’re trying to make you think. We’re trying to use cinema not as a dulling experience but as a weapon.”

In “Fear and Loathing,” he said, vomit is an essential part of the story.

“These guys are taking a lot of bad drugs and alcohol. To anyone who’s done any of that, the technicolor yawn is not an unfamiliar thing,” he said. “Some movies want to entertain you. Some to put you to sleep. Others are there to goad you. You put these things out there and see what happens.”

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Hollywood has come a long way since Danny Thomas’ first spit-take in the late 1960s, when the TV comedian expressed surprise by expelling a mouthful of water. The 1970s were the key decade for the growth of cinematic regurgitation. First came “The Exorcist” (1973), which showed how scary projectile vomiting could be. Then, in 1978, came two films that proved the gag reflex’s versatility on screen.

“Animal House” established one end of the spectrum: the gonzo spewing scene, intended to amuse by shocking. The scene is unforgettable: John Belushi, stuffing his face with food, then popping his cheeks with his hands, sending the goo flying. “I’m a zit!” he proclaims.

At the other pole was “An Unmarried Woman,” in which Jill Clayburgh played a 30-ish wife whose husband leaves her. Her disorientation and sadness are brought home when, while walking down a Manhattan street, she suddenly leans into a trash bin. Clayburgh elevated throwing up to a new level: a way of showing internal angst.

The ‘80s brought what appears to be the first serial barf scene in Rob Reiner’s 1986 coming-of-age film, “Stand by Me.” Regarded as “the paradigm to which we all aspire,” according to one movie producer who asked to remain anonymous, the scene unfolds as Gordy, the 12-year-old hero of the film, tells a campfire story he made up about a fat kid who enters a pie-eating contest in order to get revenge on those who tease him.

Right before the contest begins, the fat kid downs a bottle of castor oil. Then, in the middle of his fifth pie, he erupts all over another contestant, and the sight is so disgusting that it sets off a chain reaction in the audience.

In 1989 came what may be the first black humor treatment of barfing: in “Heathers,” the off-the-wall inside view of high school hierarchies and teenage suicide. In one scene, Winona Ryder prepares to help a bulimic friend (Shannen Doherty) throw up. (Ryder herself later throws up at a party--an act so uncool that she is expelled from her school’s popular clique.)

In 1990s cinema, regurgitation has simply become unavoidable. What happens in “The Crying Game,” Neil Jordan’s 1992 movie, when Jaye Davidson’s secret is unveiled? A surprised Stephen Rea spends a good long time face down in the toilet.

There is freakish barfing (Georges Muresan, the 7-foot, 7-inch star of this year’s “My Giant,” does it). There’s anti-gravity barfing (Bill Paxton does it in space in 1995’s “Apollo 13”). There is even high-caliber barfing (in last year’s “Men in Black,” Tommy Lee Jones taunts a huge insect into eating him, then blasts his way out of the bug’s tummy with his gun, coating himself and Will Smith with--well, you get the idea).

Some plots actually pivot on a regurgitation scene. In the Norwegian film “Junk Mail,” released here by Lion’s Gate last month, there would be no romance without it: The central character, a mailman, meets his love interest only after she throws up on him. And in New Line’s “The Wedding Singer,” Adam Sandler first flirts with Drew Barrymore after he shepherds an intoxicated youngster outside to heave. “We were not going for shock humor there. We were trying to playfully undercut what is traditionally a romantic moment,” said Robert Simonds, the movie’s producer, who noted that the vomiting, though very loud, occurs off camera.

“That’s what made it funny, as opposed to gross. If we’d actually seen it, it would have upstaged the moment.”

Indeed, filmmakers spend time thinking about this stuff--and, while they’re at it, about what throwing up should look and sound like as well. Gilliam, for example, says that in one “Fear and Loathing” scene, Del Toro’s fake vomit was designed to match the flamingo-colored toilet bowl.

Randy Thom, a sound designer who runs the Sausalito company Ear Circus, worked on the 1995 movie “Nine Months,” in which Julianne Moore is supposed to have morning sickness. His job: to enhance the sound.

“Movies need to be larger than life, and for the same kinds of reasons that typical movie actors and actresses don’t look like normal people, their throw-up doesn’t sound like normal throw-up either,” Thom said, explaining why he recruited several women to gag in a bathroom, so he could record them and mix their groans with Moore’s.

“Obviously the trick is to enhance it without making it sound like Tyrannosaurus rex throwing up. It has to be amplified but believable,” Thom said. One of his barf-sound secrets, he said: using a dollop of oatmeal to simulate what he calls “the splash in the very identifiable acoustic domain of the toilet bowl.”

Some believe that all this retching reflects something deeper about the times. “It’s happening in the movies because it’s happening in the culture. Everything that used to be secret and private is being exposed, thrown up,” said Larry Moss, an acting coach who has worked with Helen Hunt and Jason Alexander.

“People we used to look up to don’t care if their sex lives are all over the newspapers,” he said. “The world is out of control. . . . Throwing up is about loss of control.”

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Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist who also works as a script consultant, agrees but sees another possibility as well. Maybe the people who are writing the movies, she says, are feeling particularly sick at heart.

“I think a lot of screenwriters are nauseous about what they are being forced to write to be commercial and get work,” she said.

“I know a lot of writers who feel that way, that they’re selling themselves out,” she said. “It could reflect an unconscious nausea of the writer saying, ‘I’m puking over my own words.’ ”

Or maybe, said Braudy, the USC professor, it’s a lot simpler than that.

“Maybe it’s a demographic thing,” he joked. “I guess most of the times I threw up in my life were between when I was 15 and 25. So if you have a highbrow movie about angels or presidential campaigns and you want to lure a teenage audience, maybe you say, ‘Throw in a few barf scenes.’ ”