Cronenberg has referred to Schmeerguntz as one of his biggest influences, describing it as “the most gross film you could imagine”. It was conceived as a hallucinatory collage in which images of the messy, dirty domestic life of a pregnant woman are contrasted with pristine portraits of the families appearing in the media of the times. With a frenetic approach to editing, the film forms a grotesquely funny critique of the idealised American housewife — and was the inspiration behind the feminist “bra burning” protest against the Miss America pageant in 1968.