The Swimmer: A life in a day.

The movie ‘The Swimmer’ was released in 1968, its one of my favourite movies: beautifully strange, with an undercurrent of darkness (excuse the pun) and bleak existential profundity.

The film opens with ‘Ned’ (Burt Lancaster) jogging in swimming trunks through a sparkling autumnal woodland in the bright early morning sunshine.

Ned looks tanned, healthy and happy as he drops into a friend’s backyard pool and announces to the folks sitting there that he’s about to embark on a little personal odyssey: he’s going to swim across the county in a wild loop using the pools of old friends and acquaintances and return back home again.

As the day wears on, Ned is confronted with the various aspects of his past and present as an affluent Connecticut Advertising executive, living in the picturesque suburbs with his perfect family and the party set clique.

In one meeting he attempts to seduce a former babysitter of his daughters when she confesses she had a crush on him when younger. But this ends in embarrassment and rejection for Ned, as does confrontations with ex-lovers and former close friends.
Something is wrong.

Ned’s glittering smile, gushing bonhomie and boastful remarks about his beautiful wife and daughters, are increasingly met with cool indifference, sarcasm, and finally, outright anger.

At a public pool Ned is confronted by angry shopkeepers and various creditors he owes money to for unpaid grocery bills and so on.
The summery, smiling façade begins to crack at this point, ‘the swimmer’ is not welcome and his attempts at joviality are interpreted as waffle and evasiveness.

In the final scene, Ned arrives home at last after his strange Homeric journey.
His ‘home’ is of course locked and empty, a storm is brewing as darkness begins to fall.
The swimmer breaks down sobbing on the porch.

The movie (originally adapted from a John Cheever short story) creates a fantastic contrast between the affluent, comfortable, suburban culture of cocktails and swimming pools, and the silent but ever present neurosis that accompanies it; the silent scream of boredom, insecurity, shallowness and existential confusion and loss.

Lancaster’s character is a ghost, he’s already dead to most of his so called ‘friends’. Ned has committed the ultimate sin…he can’t keep up appearances anymore, he’s fallen on hard times. A corpse that remains unburied, ugly and rotting under a cloudless azure sky.
The old life has gone, and Ned’s personal odyssey is like a final haunting, a brief funereal passage of the old self.

The movie is literally ‘swimming’ with symbolism and metaphor.
It’s ‘day-in-the-life’ narrative can be compared to Joyce’s Ulysses - Ned is Leopold Bloom of course.
Ned is always waving not drowning, desperate to stay afloat, to keep up appearances, to convince himself and others that its all okay, everything is beautiful and perfect in the blazing sunshine and glittering waters of his (and their) little world.

Its almost like he’s trying to purify himself too, he feels ‘unclean’ of low caste: he’s attempting to wash away the stains and stigmata of his shame in front of his friends, pool by baptismal pool.

The Swimmer is everyman and every woman, a superb allegory for a single human life.
We’re all just trying to stay afloat against the tides and hidden currents of life…and grinning like idiots while we’re doing it.

Apologies for cheesy voice-over on this trailer!)