Izzy

Movie #29 of 2023: Eastern Promises

Anna: “How did you get in here?”

and I just noticed their hands…

god im so glad im the person you say these things to

so my short answer is yeah, i think this whole show is largely about the disposal of waste (bodily, political, etc) and the examples you list here go along with that. it's interesting with the roys who live these lavish gilded lifestyles but still have, like, dead raccoons in their chimney and they still piss and shit and yerf like the rest of humanity.

to get more detailed, i definitely do read into the specific bodily fluids involved (probably more than the writers do consciously lol, but like... these cultural associations do exist). kendall shitting (expelling black bile) at his emotional turning point in season 2; logan having the phlegmatic piss motif but also yerfing at argestes when he tries to use anger (choler) to win against nan and ends up losing control; roman shown cleaning cum, another fluid you'd associate with phlegm in the classical model. in this sense it's interesting shiv spits after the "rape me" incident: she's really deliberately trying to speak her father's and brothers' businessfuck language, one whose vocabulary is made up partially of (certain) bodily fluids.

in terms of the disposal methods, i have always thought it was funny that tom's defence of the snowballing incident is that it was "like a closed-loop system." i think on this show---as in life---a bodily excretion generally signifies some kind of emotional release, cathartic experience, or important shift. but with the snowballing, as tom notes, all the fluid stays inside him, which means his bachelor party blowjob is kind of robbed of its emotional valence for him. it becomes a humiliation instead of any kind of release. analogously to how shiv is emptionally constipated and therefore rarely shown in bathrooms, tom in 'prague' is emotionally repressed and stuck and therefore can't get his literal fluids flowing. i think for tom this is tied to the way he later expresses his misogynist ownership over shiv's body by fretting over 'wasting' his jizz. his distress about power and his relationships is expressed and shown thru the flow (or lack thereof) of his jizz.

if you expel something bodily and you're a roy, you want that excretion to either accomplish something (shiv spitting, logan pissing) or at least just disappear tidily (kendall shitting, logan yerfing). what you don't want is to have it hanging around inside your own body, or, god forbid, for you to be the one who cleans it up yourself. i think you're right to pair roman and tom in this sense: they're the two characters shown failing to deal with their cum in an appropriate manner according to roy standards.