Reflections on Toilet Paper

In the COVID-19 era, nothing is certain save for the importance of toilet paper. No matter where we reside, we have all heard about the toilet paper shortages in the wake of the global pandemic. Panicked hoarders were quick to strip the shelves of TP. For all that was (and is still) up in the air, one thing became clear: if they were destined to meet god, the consuming masses wanted to do so with clean anuses. Moreover, toilet paper shortages presented some consumers with difficult existential questions.

This was certainly the case in my jurisdiction. Two days ago, I broke my writerly self-isolation (which had already been established in the pre-coronavirus era) and ventured out to the grocery store, where I found the toilet paper shelves bare. I stared into pure, unqualified emptiness between the facial tissue and the paper towel, each of which remained well-stocked.

Gazing into the void, I was reminded of an anecdote a friend of mine had shared on the weekend previous, just as COVID-19 had really dug in its spikes, and society had started to grind to a halt. He lingered for a while in the paper-products aisle of his local grocer, watching as people came face to face with the toilet paper deficit. He observed that the vast majority of these shoppers, tasked with an impromptu choice for anal hygiene alternatives, opted for paper towel. Consequently, the paper towel had depleted relative to the facial tissue, which still brimmed on the shelves.

This evidence is anecdotal, but it allows us to tender a hypothesis a posteriori: the majority prefers paper towel to tissue as an ass-wiping substitute. They would rather have the firmness and absorptive power of paper towel than the gauzy caress of Kleenex and its competitors. Even though the paper towel is potentially abrasive and toilet-clogging, it prevails over the facial tissue, the latter's breezy tactility notwithstanding. Perhaps this is simply because paper towel, like toilet paper, comes on a roll. Or perhaps, in the absence of toilet paper, people's priorities shift. Everyone seeks an immaculate anus, but when the ideal wipe is unavailable, cleanliness of the fingers and hands becomes a crucial tiebreaker. While paper towel may scrape and, moreover, create flushing complications, there is little chance that it will disintegrate mid-wipe. The durability of Kleenex is comparably dubious.

In the COVID-19 era, then, the consuming classes may very well be divided into an ad hoc caste system. At the top will be the champion hoarders with their stockpiles of toilet paper and their impeccable anuses. In the middle will be the not so fleet, whose anuses are wiped raw, but whose hands are clean. At the bottom will be the Kleenex people, for whom there are no guarantees re: the cleanliness of hand or hind—these are the untouchables, though such a designation is moot in a social world mandating that no one can stand within two yards of anyone else.

Faced with the empty toilet paper shelf, and presented with a choice of the alternatives on either side, I decided to defer my choice. Instead, I put my money towards buying more food. I reasoned that, if things got worse (as indeed they have), I'd prefer a surplus of food to that of wiping material. After all, I wanted to guarantee that I would continue to be able to produce poops. For the foreseeable future, I would concentrate on nourishing myself, and worry about wiping on a case-by-case basis.

On a full stomach, I’ve had no shortage of ideas with respect to improvisation. Certainly, being a mostly unsuccessful member of the writing community helps. If this pandemic persists and I can't leave the house, I've got stacks of old rejected manuscripts, not to mention lots of reading material produced by my competitors in the field. COVID-19 just might give me a chance to make it all worth the paper its printed on. From that perspective, my bookshelves are well-stocked with toilet paper alternatives.

The Final Girls (2015)

Imagine if Field of Dreams was about slasher films rather than baseball, and that it explored the relationship between a mother and daughter rather than a father and son, and you'd have The Final Girls. This 2015 horror-comedy tells the story of a college-aged woman, played by Taissa Farmiga, who has tragically lost her mother, played by Malin Akerman. Akerman's character is a struggling actor remembered only for her involvement in a campy 80s slasher, Camp Bloodbath, in which she played the "shy girl" who loses her virginity and then, like clockwork, gets murdered by the masked antagonist. In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character builds a baseball field in a cornfield and, by way of some kind of unspecified magic, he gets to meet long-deceased members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and, eventually, his estranged father, all of whom step out from the stalks of corn. In The Final Girls, Taissa Farmiga's character and her friends, by way of some kind of unspecified magic, get to step into Camp Bloodbath through a rent in a movie screen. They all become participants in Camp Bloodbath and, as such, Farmiga's character must encounter her deceased mother. All at once, the merger of 80s slasher silliness and overdetermined 2010s meta-horror motif-spotting blend to create a poignant exploration of the relationship between children and prematurely deceased parents. When Farmiga's character watches her mother meet her fate in the film-within-the-film, the scene is wrenchingly bittersweet, a strange synthesis of maternal nostalgia and revulsion. Your reviewer (a man who watches movies like Nightmares in a Damaged Brain and Cannibal Holocaust for relaxation purposes) wept unabashedly, something a film hadn't reduced him to since Field of Dreams. For that reason, and for the beautiful, unspecified magic under which it operates, The Final Girls gets the highest of recommendations.

As is obvious from its title, the film goes all in on the "Final Girl" tautology brought forth by a number of feminist critics of slasher films. This analytical framework, asserted most notably by Carol Clover, suggests that most or all slashers are based on a formula dictating that any character who drinks, does drugs, or, most importantly, has sex, will be killed by the antagonist, and, as a corollary, only the girl who has engaged in none of these acts will survive. I hope I am being redundant when I say that this analytical framework is overdetermined. Moreover, it rarely bears out when watching the actual early-80s slasher cycle films. As Michael Koven has averred in his book Film, Folklore and Urban Legends, Friday the 13th's characters are "neither chaste nor rampantly sexual." Indeed, the only people who die after intimate encounters are the nameless counsellors from the pre-credit sequence, and, later on, Kevin Bacon's character and his female companion. Moreover, Friday the 13th's "Final Girl" Alice participates in a game of strip Monopoly and even takes a toke from a joint while doing so, but nonetheless survives. The "Final Girl," then, is an ideal type, and while the fictional Camp Bloodbath may doggedly follow such a model, it appears in few if any actual slashers. I mention this not as a point of critique against The Final Girls, but rather as a call for reflection and re-evaluation among film scholars and critics. The inclusion of this sex = death axiom is not to the detriment of The Final Girls. Instead, The Final Girls can be read as a send-up of not just 80s slashers, but also of frighteningly predictable scholarly and critical categories for analyzing this subgenre.