Table Talk: The Swimmer (1968)

Bridging the Gap Between Old and New Hollywood

Aren: The Swimmer is one of those late 1960s Hollywood films that bridges the gap between classic Hollywood and New Hollywood. It’s a studio film starring a major movie star, Burt Lancaster, and is based on an acclaimed 1964 short story by John Cheever, but it’s also impressionistic and experimental in its storytelling. On the surface, it tells the story of a successful business man, Ned Merill (Lancaster), swimming his way home through the backyard pools of his neighbours and friends in suburban Connecticut. But the surface of The Swimmer only tells half the story.

As we follow Ned from yard to yard and watch his encounters with old friends, business associates, and lovers, we start to realize that Ned’s perception of reality and the reality we are witnessing on screen are working at cross purposes. It seems that a slippage of time has occurred and in a sense, we are witnessing the entirety of Ned’s adult life within the course of the film’s 95-minute runtime. Each new encounter reveals new aspects about Ned that we didn’t know—such as that his wife left him, that his daughters have grown up and left home, and that his business has failed. Ned seems unaware of these very facts himself.

The straightforward presentation of the film would seem to clash with the experimental nature of its storytelling, but it actually offers a brilliant synthesis between the two, as if the film is peeling back the veneer of Eisenhower and Kennedy-era America and showing the broken promises, bad decisions, and existential angst that lurked beneath the postcard presentation.

Anders: The Swimmer is a remarkable film, and it’s hard to imagine a film like this being made at any time other than in that last gap between the old Hollywood studio system and the rise of the New Hollywood, at least with a major star and not as a low-budget indie. I would describe it as being fully Hollywood, but also importing some of the social and existential influence of European art cinema from the previous decade or so.

The film looks back at the waning of the post-war consensus in America, as the counterculture is starting to crash in at this very moment, but also speaks to the sometimes vertiginous experience of time as one ages and finding oneself out of step, not only with the moment one is living in, but with one’s own sense of self. And so, The Swimmer isn’t simply about the collapse of the American ruling class at the end of the 1960s, but about Ned’s traversal of time and the slow realization of losses over a lifetime. It’s attuned to the shifting perceptions of a life lived and the mistakes made, and the way that we often paper over them. It challenges us to ask whether we really understand ourselves?

Viewing in a Pandemic

Aren: My experience of this film will always be wedded to the COVID-19 pandemic. I watched The Swimmer for the first time on March 17, 2020, which was the day of the first lockdown in Ontario and when COVID-19 stopped being a headline and became a reality in my daily life. I rewatched it on March 17 this year again, marking the anniversary and my own bizarre first year of COVID life. So it’s now a film that will forever be synonymous with one of the strangest days I’ve ever experienced.

I remember being stressed about being sent home from work in the afternoon and uncertain about what the coming weeks would hold. I assumed that things would go back to normal in a month or two, but they didn’t, and over a year out, we’re still living in this limbo state. It’s strangely fitting then that I watched this exceptional drama about existential awakening on a day that changed life as we know it. Ned is living in limbo, denying the consequences of his past actions, wanting to return to the idyllic life that he had, but finding the door locked to him forever. Maybe we’re all Ned nowadays, wanting to unlock the gate of our more comfortable past and retreat into the safe recesses of home. But we’re all left out in the rain.

The tagline is more appropriate than I thought: “When you talk about ‘The Swimmer’ will you talk about yourself?”

Anders: Oh yes, The Swimmer certainly has something to say about life during COVID, which I want to expand on. Like you, I first watched it at the beginning of last spring’s “lockdown,” along with a number of other films from the late 1960s I was discovering thanks to Criterion Channel, such as Seconds (1966) and Targets (1968)—which we talked about last spring.

I think you’re right in identifying the similarity between what Ned is experiencing and our experiences under COVID. There’s a central conceit of the film which is that in the course of an afternoon we experience with Ned the passage of time and the way that the sand shifts under our feet, until we no longer recognize our surroundings. There is some question of whether Ned is simply in denial of his changing life circumstances, or whether this is some kind of full Twilight Zone-esque supernatural experience. I think the truth is rather that it’s metaphorical. It’s not simply Ned’s denial, but rather an illumination of the way that the passage of time and the wax and wane of history work in relation to our own lives.

So, with COVID, many of the things that people find alarming—the realization of the precariousness of our global system, the move of more and more of our social life online, the startling inequalities in our society—none of it is new! But we, like Ned, have been swimming our way across the “Lucinda River” of our own lives, and we minimize, ignore, or create fictions in order to sustain our sense of self. As Ned notes at one point, “You see, if you believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true, for you.” But that’s the lie Ned has believed, and his belief can only sustain him so far.

I mean, I don’t want to exaggerate that affinity to the current moment, since The Swimmer is a story for any season in life or any age in which we become aware of the winds of history, but perhaps COVID just made us more attuned to it.

Aren: It’s a film about confronting reality, which is what we’ve all been doing each and every day for the past year.

Burt Lancaster, the Hollywood Icon

Aren: The Swimmer was a part of Criterion Channel’s excellent Burt Lancaster collection from late winter 2020, which I devoured during those uneasy first weeks of the pandemic. Those viewings cemented my belief that Burt Lancaster is one of the greatest actors ever. The Swimmer is a brilliant showcase for Lancaster because he’s an actor whose physicality and emotionality were always in tension with each other. As I wrote about in my essay about Lancaster and specifically his work in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Lancaster has the paradoxical ability to play hard and soft in the same moment. His smile and soothing voice can promise tenderness and relief, but the coiled tension in his body and the rage behind his eyes threatens violence at a moment’s notice.

The Swimmer taps into Lancaster’s physicality and ability to play multiple emotions across the layers of his performance. There’s the genial confidence of Ned on the surface, gladhanding old friends, patting folks on the back, and strutting around in nothing but his speedo, confident in his chiseled physique. But Lancaster also uses his iconic, toothy smile to reveal Ned’s desperation. His smile that comes easily in the early moments of the film becomes more forced as the film goes on, and so the wide grin becomes a pained mask the more we learn about Ned’s past. And then there’s the sadness of his too-blue eyes. What Lancaster looks at often tells us a lot about his characters in films, as the sharpness of his eyes forces us to focus on what he’s looking at, which usually reveals his true purpose. However, here, Lancaster lets his eyes wander and rarely seems to be looking at people at all. He’s often staring into the clouds or towards the horizon, letting his blue eyes grow cloudy, dreaming of swimming the “Lucinda River,” but not actually paying attention to all the clues of the reality in front of him. It’s a brilliantly physical performance. I couldn’t think of another actor pulling it off.

Anders: Yes, Lancaster’s performance is really great here. I don’t have a lot to add to what you’ve said, here and elsewhere, about Lancaster’s strengths as an actor, but this role really does seem tailor made for him. His ability to express both a sprightly sense of play, and then shift to mournful is really much more difficult than I think many people realize.

Aren: And the entire arc of the film is a brilliant demonstration of how an actor can use their body to convey the inner life of their character. The simple physical juxtaposition between Lancaster at the beginning—standing erect, a vision of Adonis—and Lancaster at the end— crouching and crumbled, a figure who has been crushed under a great weight—says it all.

Surreal Drama

Aren: The directors, Frank and Eleanor Perry—Frank was solely credited as director, Eleanor solely as writer—use visuals to convey the uncertain nature of Ned’s reality. The weather changes throughout the film. There are lots of visual superimpositions and almost musical interludes, such as when Ned frolics with the horse and jumps the equestrian course.

Anders: Apparently Sydney Pollack did some reshoots on the film as well. And I love that horse sequence. It’s almost absurd, but it expresses a physicality that is emotionally stirring.

But I also agree, there is a sense of surrealness to the film, without tipping over into true oddness or overtly off putting. It’s expressed in the edges of things, in the oddities of framing, superimpositions, etc. as you say. We sense something is “off” long before any “reveal.” The film has a sense of the melodramatic to it which few films since that time really capture. In some ways it shares some formal and thematic touches with some of the work of Douglas Sirk, in the way it photographs that postwar suburbia and the sweeping Marvin Hamlisch score. As in the films of Sirk, here the mise-en-scène plays a central role in communicating the disconnect between Ned and the viewer’s perception and the world of the neighbourhood as he swims across it. This is where melodrama is often made manifest. In those “excesses.” I think it’s one of the key connections to be made between The Swimmer and previous and subsequent cinema.

Connections to Mad Men

Aren: The Swimmer is also a film about a handsome, charming man in the 1960s who has all the pleasures of the world at his fingertips, but lets it all slip away before realizing just what he had. It’s a deconstruction of American suburban myth and an existential drama about facing the uncertainty of reality. It sure sounds a lot like Mad Men.

Anders: It sure does. It’s a common trope with which to understand the transformations of the 1960s, but also any era of massive social change as we noted with the experience of watching it during COVID. The difference between Don Draper and Ned Merrill though is that Ned’s existential crisis is as much or more a result of self-deception as anything. While Don believes he can beat the changing tides of his era, with the nature of his identity and his pure pursuit of self, Ned in contrast seems oblivious. But Ned is pulling one over on himself. It makes his realization perhaps even more exquisitely painful than Don’s, though in both cases there’s a sense of the tragic, even if it’s inevitable as a confrontation of the truth.

What both stories do is allow us to confront our understandings of ourselves against our social backdrop and recognize that so much of our existence is an illusion, a deception we tell ourselves in order to legitimate our sense of self. Confronting the truth of the fact may be necessary and prompt a melancholy much as the approach of autumn in late-summer can seem to sap some of the energy of those still warm days. I think that the best aspect of both stories is, as the tagline you already quoted suggests, they prompt us to think of our own stories and sense of self, regardless of where or when we live.

The Swimmer (1968, USA)

Written and directed by Frank and Eleanor Perry (Frank Perry credited as director, Eleanor Perry as screenwriter); based on the short story by John Cheever; starring Burt Lancaster, Janet Landgard, Janice Rule, Joan Rivers, Tony Bickley, Marge Champion, Kim Hunter, Bill Fiore, Rose Gregorio, Charles Drake, House Jameson, Nancy Cushman.