The Swimmer

I still have dreams where I'm at summer camp; 10 years old and running through the woods. The sun barely breaks through the thick forest canopy. There is no way for me to recapture that feeling in my adult life. No backpacking trip in a national park or well-planned vacation to an unspoiled beach can provide it. This is the problem of privilege: What seems to be a gift is really a loan. We spend the rest of our lives paying back this debt. This movie is fantastic. Burt Lancaster is the man. If you are a film fan and an American and you have not yet seen this film, then be careful! Save this one for a rainy day because you won't find many more like it. It's about living in the past, in a dream of what the present should be. It's about a privileged, womanizing, self-obsessed middle aged man who comes up with a plan to swim home that is clear only to him. "Why would you want to do that?", people keep asking him. Watch this movie alone and then don't talk to anyone about it. Keep it secret. Let it fuel you.

I saw this movie in 1968 when it came out, and have never been able to forget it. I never found anyone who had ever heard of it--a shame. It's my favorite Burt Lancaster performance: I can't imagine anyone else doing the role justice.

When Neddy is ready to leave the garden cocktail party he has been invited to, he looks out across the valley and sees the row of pools, all belonging to his neighbors. He's obviously a poet, and sees the chain of pools as a river (Metaphor). He decides to swim back home. Little does he, or we, know at this point what going home means! He goes from house to house, he greets his friends and jumps into their pools. We become a little worried as things seem to get a little out of hand--a little more so at each house. It's not long before we realize that this "river" is (Meta-Metaphor!) a trip through time, through his life--and that he has made one fine mess of it. The ending is amazing, and almost unbearable.

What can you say about the swimmer that hasn't already been said. On reflection you have to feel sorry for Ned Merrill, certainly you can't have any sympathy for any of the characters he meets on his way! If he has suffered some sort of mental breakdown the question is why? This movie was set in the civilized environment of New England, Connecticut to be precise and it highlights the cozy drinks around the swimming pool and lavish dinner party Scean that is part and parcel of American culture.

It's perplexing to me that people would put so much expenditure and effort in putting in a pool something that you can only use in New England for about 5-6 months of the year. (Although in the Bizwangers case they added a sliding roof whereby at least they could use the pool all year round!) However the real reason for a pool in New England is to have your friends around, show off your pool and drink and eat to excess. However you can't be satisfied with that, in addition you have to have a pig roast with professional caterers and bar tenders to boot with a band playing in the back ground, thats real living. Material possessions are not just something to show off but are part of what is required to achieve status, without status in the US you have achieved nothing.

So how did Ned Merrill find himself in this predicament? In a conversation with Julie Ann Hooper he recalls that while on a transatlantic ship down in steerage he saw his wife to be, up in first class, he climbed over the barriers wooed her with his charm and that was the beginning of a whirlwind romance. So Ned Merrill found the inside track to achieve high social status. Next comes the huge wedding no expense spared, the grand house and soon the family. Status is not just 6 figure salary, but the house, the cars, the family, the job, throwing wild parties and being a member of an influential committee that's doing charity work. That's not it, being seen at $10000 plate political fund raisers, being a church deacon and basically rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers in your suburban community is a requirement. At one scene at the Graham's Betty says to her husband "I wish we couldm travel more!" A bemused looking Howard says" why we have everything we want right here? That just sums up the attitude that the whole world evolves around their neighborhood. It epitomizes the culture of contentment and it's world of self importance.

Yet Ned Merills found to his cost that when his wife left him, or threw him out he found that everything else became very imbalanced and just like a house of cards once one falls the rest all comes down. Well you can figure out all of the sordid scenarios in sequence, many reviewers have tried but the bottom line is that your life and status can nose-dive into a downward spiral with marriage and work upheaval i.e. friends suddenly don't return calls, invitations to regular events don't turn up but worse you find that you are tapped of favors from colleagues and employment prospects start to very look bleak.

For people who live in such circles this must be their worst nightmare because you lose one you can lose it all. How do you adjust to such a dramatic change! In Ned Merrills case he became so obsessed in pursuing his American dream and totally absorbed in what he regarded as important that he fell into a state of self-propelling delusion.

Shallow, selfish people who put so much emphasis on status and material possessions as a sign of success find it hard to cope with such misfortunes . Why didn't Neddy just pack his bags and move to the west coast and start again? He can't, partly because of his pride and the fact that he was handed a lot probably makes it all the more harder. But the answer to the question is that he was conditioned to believe in a certain way and that without all of the above he was nothing, and he can't accept it?

All in all Ned Merill made things worse for himself, nothing to fall back on, nothing for a rainy day,no safe deposit box full of gold Krugerrands or cash. He threw everything into his lifestyle took himself too seriously and found very little sympathy from former friends, colleagues and acquaintances when the tide turned! Burt Lancaster was proud of this movie and so he should. His performance is very believable, he exuded confidence, happiness and the American spirit. Interestingly at the beginning of the movie he in no way portrayed a middle aged man on skid row which makes the ending even more disturbing when you see the state of him at the end. It could happen to the best of us, Was this what Cheever was trying to portray?

Judging by the comments here, apparently I'm not the only one who was incredibly moved by this masterpiece--a masterpiece of storytelling on Cheever's part, that is, and a more than passable film portrayal of what one might call "the perfect short story." If HBO had existed in the 1960s, and Rod Serling had written for it, this is what "Twilight Zone" might have looked like: a tangled, twisted terrain of the human psyche that leads to the deepest of our fears--and the most profound of our hopes. The stakes for Ned Merrill, as we come to discover, are about as high as they can be for any character not caught in a literal life and death struggle. But he might as well be, judging by the size and fearsomeness of the phantoms that haunt his way. For this reason I think I'd say that other than *Glengarry Glen Ross,* this is the most terrifying film ever made.

In contrast to many others, however, I don't think Ned is delusional: I think he's spent so long believing his own publicity, as it were, that he hasn't fully accepted what has happened to him. (And of course, "what has happened to him" is almost entirely of his own making, which makes his predicament all the more painful because it seems to offer no hope of redemption.) And he's clearly one of those hail-fellow-well-met types who, when he promises he's going to do something for someone--as he continually does in the movie, right up to the point where he promises to pay his bill to a local proprietor--he truly means it, at least in the moment.

Additionally, "The Swimmer" seems like far too profound a work to tie it to themes as dreary and shopworn as the emptiness of suburban life or the dark side of the American dream. Granted, a great deal of powerful literature, dating back at least to Nathanael West's *Day of the Locust*, has been written around the second of these ideas, but "The Swimmer" seems to speak to something much deeper, a haunted place in the human soul. In the ads for the movie--which, in sharp contrast to the brilliant development of the story itself, attempted to lay out all the details in a way at once pedantic and almost pandering (as previews in those days tended to be), a voice-over asks if the viewer might see Ned in him- or herself.

*The Swimmer* is an epic, but an unusual one. Not because of the small scale and the deceptively trivial-seeming stakes involved it the epic journey--that's an idea Joyce introduced years earlier in *Ulysses*--but because of that journey's destination. Ned isn't going toward a new land, but back--back to nothing short of Eden. And if it's an epic, then he's a hero of sorts, and not entirely an antihero either. After all, even with all the things you learn about him along the way, it's hard not to root for Ned Merrill.

Here's a movie that turns out nothing at all like you'd think it would. Look at the cover box for the videotape and you'll see a picture of Burt Lancaster grinning broadly while swimming laps in a luxurious pool. Don't let the imagery fool you. In fact, this is a dark, depressing odyssey through one man's personal failure and wasted life.

Ned Merrill (Lancaster) is an affluent Connecticut businessman enjoying a poolside visit with some old friends. Out of the blue it dawns on him that every house between his friends' home and his own has a swimming pool. He will therefore swim his way home, stopping at every pool along the way for a dip. He is unable to explain why he is so determined to do this, but it becomes his mission and he cannot rest or linger until it is carried out.

Each residence Merrill visits brings back old memories of his own wrongdoings and shortcomings. He has not lived a virtuous life. He has cheated on his wife, snubbed his friends, and lived above his means. Everything has come easily to him because of his ability to make people like him and comply with his wishes. In short, he has spent his entire life BS-ing all those close to him, and is just now discovering that the love and respect he believed others had for him does not exist. As he gets closer and closer to his own home the resentment grows stronger, until he finally learns he is detested most of all by his own wife and children.

`The Swimmer' is partially a story of retribution – what goes around comes around. Merrill is mocked by those he tries to aid and comfort, and all his kindness is met with indifference and scorn. It is partially an allegory – it hurts most when it hits close to home. However, it is mainly a study of a misspent life, discovered as such too late in the game to amend. At the center of the movie is Lancaster's captivating performance, depicting all the pathos of a man desperately keeping up a front to hide his complete lack of character. The film is marred only by occasional grandiosity, as in an overlong and unnecessary slow-motion sequence and especially in the ending, which indeed packs a punch but upon reflection is too pretentious for its own good. Nonetheless, this is a powerful and often surreal story, the likes of which you will probably never see again on film.