Lessons from 1,000 Bathrooms

Nobody warns you about the bathrooms.

You get into documentary filmmaking and people tell you about the gear, the interviews, the lighting. They talk about the emotional weight of sitting with someone while they tell you the hardest thing that ever happened to them. They mention the travel, the editing, the long days.

Nobody mentions that you will spend a significant portion of your career as a guest in a stranger’s bathroom, hoping for the best.

I’ve been doing this for over a decade. I’ve filmed in living rooms, kitchens, back porches, horse barns, hospital rooms, you name it. I’ve been in hundreds of homes. Possibly over a thousand by now. Which means I’ve been in a lot of bathrooms.

I’ve developed a theory.

The bathroom tells you who someone is. Not the towels, not the tile, not whether the toilet paper rolls over or under (though I have opinions). I’m talking about the odor control situation. What they keep on the back of the toilet. How they’ve decided to handle the basic human problem of what happens in bathrooms.

There are tiers. I’ve mapped them.

Tier One: Poo-Pourri (and its disciples)

These are the fancy folks. The Poo-Pourri household has thought about this. They went online, read reviews, compared formulations, and spent fourteen dollars on a little bottle you spray into the bowl before you go, which traps everything beneath a fragrant barrier before it can become anyone else’s problem.

It works remarkably well, and it says something. This is a household with its affairs in order. Someone here makes decisions proactively. They probably have good throw pillows.

There are knockoffs now…Every Drop, Throne, ManDump, a dozen others. Doesn’t matter. If you see one of these on the back of the toilet, you know what kind of house you’re in.

Tier Two: Glade (and the honorable mentions)

A step down in premeditation, not in effort. The Glade household reacts rather than prevents. There’s a can of something on the back of the toilet — Hawaiian Breeze, Clean Linen, Lavender & Vanilla, whatevs…and the expectation is that you’ll use it on your way out. Social contract. Nobody discusses it. You spray.

Candles belong here too. So do plug-in air fresheners, the little oil cartridges that rotate every thirty days if you remember. Incense, in the right house, lives at the top of this tier. The hippy folks have this. Side note…there’s something almost spiritual about incense in a bathroom, which I respect. Not my scene, but it says this person has a whole philosophy and you’ve only scratched the surface.

Good people. Considerate people. Playing defense instead of offense.

Tier Three: Lysol

We are now in serious territory.

The big can. Costco-sized. The industrial-looking one that has been in American bathrooms since the Eisenhower administration. This can does not pretend to be anything other than what it is. It kills germs. It smells like it kills germs. Germs and odors don’t stand a chance. It’s not a pleasant fragrance replacing a foul one. It’s Lysol. Nobody has ever confused a Lysol bathroom for a day spa.

But it works. There’s a directness to it I’ve come to appreciate. The Lysol household is not trying to impress you. They are handling business. They bought a thing that does a job and the job gets done. There’s no performance here, no layering, no compound smell situation that raises more questions than it answers. There’s the big yellow can and an understanding between adults.

I’ve filmed a lot of Lysol households. Salt of the earth, all of them.

Tier Four: Matches

This is where it gets interesting.

In the oldest homes, the ones that haven’t changed much since electricity, where the wallpaper is original and the bathroom fixtures have names nobody makes anymore, you sometimes find a book of matches on the back of the toilet. Not a candle. A matchbook. Maybe from a restaurant that closed fifteen years ago. Maybe from a motel in Shreveport.

The idea is that you strike a match, let it burn for a second, blow it out. The acrid, sharp, completely unmistakable sulphur smell covers everything, and it sticks on you when you leave the throne room.

This sounds like it shouldn’t work. It does. It has worked since before Poo-Pourri was a category.

(A word on the open window: I don’t count it as a tier so much as a confession. If someone has left the bathroom window cracked in February, they are doing their level best and deserve your compassion and your silence.)

After all these years and all these bathrooms, the matches win.

They win because they’re honest. You’re meeting one strong smell with another strong smell, and the strong one wins. Sulphur for sulphur. No pretense, no compound fragrance raising questions the room can’t answer.

The people who keep matches in their bathroom are the same people I’ve been filming for all these years.

They don’t dress things up. They don’t perform. They sit down at the kitchen table, they pour you a cup of coffee you didn’t ask for, and they start telling you the truth. They don’t wonder if the story is good enough. They tell it. They trust that what actually happened is more interesting than anything they could make up.

And they’re right.

The Poo-Pourri people are wonderful. The Glade people are wonderful. I’d film any of them. But the matches people…the ones in the oldest homes, with the matchbook from the Dew Drop Inn, those are the ones I think about driving home.

The ones who keep it simple, who trust the oldest solution, the most honest one, those are the ones with the best stories.