I'm puzzled by Neds first appearance knowing that he in fact can never go home as is evident in the sad ending. So where was Ned coming from?
He arrives at the first pool in swim trunks but nothing else of ownership about his person. no explanation (deliberate)is given to where he has just come from. Any suggestions anyone?
the same thought sprang into my mind as well, and while it isnt all that important to the story, it still is pretty baffling and ultimately unexplainable. id be interested in others thoughts on it too though.
shareI don't know if this helps at all, but in the short story the movie is based on, Ned is apparently at a friend's house with his wife when he decides to swim the chain of pools back home and over the course of the story, seasons and possibly years change with Ned thinking he is just doing this in one day. It is definitely strange.
shareI agree with the idea that this is taking place over a period of years. At the first party he went to with the young blonde girl, everyone there is glad to see him. This probably took place a few months or so after he lost his job. By the second party (years later), everyone either ignores him or they're mad at him- he probably borrowed money from them and never paid it back.
So, to sum it up in legal terminology: Get lost, you bum.
Later in the film when he's at his mistress Shirley's house she mentions "I heard you've changed your place of residence." Then later she says "you got kicked out of your golden palace."
It's obvious that he's coming from wherever he currently lives and my guess is it's out of town and probably an apartment or something low-rent.
When Ned himself is posed the question, he responds: "Here and there." His wealthy friend feels guilty about his failure to help him; and Ned can't seem to recall the last two years.
My interpretation: Ned Merrill flew into a fit of drunken rage and psychosis after being forced out of his position with the ad firm and then discovering an affair his wife Lucinda had with his neighbor's driver; he subsequently murdered her and his daughters during a psychotic episode, was hospitalized and then recently released at the beginning of the story with no recollection
His former cohorts' various inquiries about his family are really tests to determine whether he really couldn't recall the killings (a fact about which many in the community are dubious) or not.
Note the bartenders hushed whisper into Joan River's ear after she chats with him for a brief moment.
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I don't think he does know he can't go home. I think the whole point of the film is that he is genuinely deluded in thinking he still lives in the house on the hill. Many references to his thinking he still lives there are in the film, for example at the swimming pool party thrown by the vulgar Irish American he says his wife and kids are at home waiting for him, and at his ex lover's pool he says his daughters are at home playing tennis, to which Janice Rule replies 'Oh you poor man' refering to his obviously fragile state of mind. And when he arrives there, he breaks down when he sees the house is derelict. I've always imagined that the man has had a recent breakdown, and one day, really missing his old life and his family, he convinces himself that he still lives there, and that things are still fine, and that these people are still his neighbours. It really is a beautiful story of...I guess a kind of regression, where a person who has lost everything he had, suddenly wakes up convinced that it was all a sort of terrible dream, and here he is safely back in his comfortable life as it once was. It is sublime it really is.
shareThere's no easy answer to this and that's part of the difficulty, and charm, of the story and movie. I was baffled, too, the first time I read it. I've since come to the conclusion that although the story on the surface is quite realistic and is about the evening swim one summer of a middle-aged man, at a deeper level it's mysterious and not at all realistic.
He begins at a normal summer cocktail party, but during the swim, he seems to age years, not hours. He also loses memory of key parts of his life and becomes obsessed with his journey to the exclusion of other things. It's not as simple as anything being symbolic of another, but his trip does suggest a lot of things. It suggests the sense of loss and nostalgia that many of us will have when we look back on our lives: is that what I really did? was this what my life was all about? where did my youth and friends go?
His swim home, like many of our youthful plans for the future, turn out to be less simple that was thought at first. And when the journey's over, there's the confusion about how we got there, where everyone else is, how time passed so quickly.
I have not read the book or seen the movie in many years, but I would imagine that there is really no clear cut sequence of events. He may be trying to relive a youthful dare to swim all the pools that is actually years old and he has forgotten how old he is. He may actually have visited his old house several times for all we know, and is trying to forget his past by pretending his old friends are ready to be the same new friends he knew in the past. He may be perpetually homeless but is able to fool people into thinking has some semblence of a life because his goal of swimming all those pools 'looks' like a life a rich person would lead, but for all we know, he stays in a succession of cabanas and tool sheds waiting for the weather to get warm and "pretend" his way into his past. Andy Warhol once wrote that he would meet homeless people at the many New York Art Gallery openings he attended. They would put great effort into keeping clean and having nice clothes to wear at these social events even though they lived on the streets. Andy Warhol also noted that they had the social skills to manage what to us would be a horrible lifestyle because they must have had a different sense of reality and time and could pull it off. Also, such a lifestyle is easier when one is younger, but becomes horrific as the greyness of old age starts to set in. I may have the details wrong so I will have some rereading to do. The theme of constantly reliving the past in order to avoid the pain of years of failure is so universal.
This is the question the story leads you to ask.
Lancaster played it well, whenever someone tried to bring up his reality you could see his subtly aggravated and puzzled look - which he would quickly shake off and he would resume his present day fantasy on the river Lucinda.
At least a couple times the camera bore into his eyes - you could tell the past was all there for Ned, but he was able to blink it off. By the time he got to the big party where he had the hot dog cart meltdown - it was fully obvious he was deluded and trying to swim away from reality.
In a physical sense the Cheever story gives you less of Ned's backstory. Lucinda is at the party where Ned starts. In the movie, it appears that Ned has just escaped from the trap of his low-rent busted apartment for a hurrah with old chums.
My sense of Ned is that he's died, reviewing his life from the beyond or, more precisely, the near-death or the near-beyond. In the ending he finds himself locked out of his own life. But that's just my take - and that's the magnetism of the story: it lets each one of us want to feel for Ned, but each pool visit is a cipher, or touchstone, that has us watching Ned, listening to him grope in the dark as we grope our way through time and experience, listening to others tell their sense of Ned (ourselves) compels each one of us to reflect on how we've lived our own lives.
I enjoyed the babysitter as Ned's counterpart in mutual love felt acutely but never expressed and thus lost. Ned's loss of the babysitter and she of him was, of course, a case of timing: he was at his peak while she was an awkward, self-conscious teenager, and his loss of Julie foreshadows his loss of his wife, Lucinda, his daughters, and his incapacity to come to terms with his loss is the same sense each one of us feels, knows in our increasingly freighted bones, as we live our lives' fleeting joys, poignant sorrows, and longing for a past we may neither revisit, nor recapture. Julie telling Ned that she hadn't saved the shirt she'd taken when she'd babysat his daughters comes as a body - no, a soul-blow - to Ned. In the film's narratie this is the first hard knock Ned takes in his involuntary and fragmented look back on his past thoughts, words, and deeds.
Julie tells him that after a while she'd thought of it as "just another shirt." For her Ned was a jejune fantasy, and when Ned meets her in the narrative Julie is at an age at which she thinks herself grown-up and she hasn't yet had the experiences that teach one that some things - or people - that we throw away often burrow themselves into a recess of our souls, and that they later surface in our consciousness - as they have here for Ned - to haunt us for their having been the "road not taken" which is now irretrievable and which thus becomes a past-one's-prime, on-the-downslope ache that cannot be relieved, a longing that cannot be satisfied.
Like Ned, when he says he thinks himself a fine fellow and "splendid," so too is our own self-regard which only upon reflection to us of how others saw and felt about us - which, if one is honest with oneself in one's senior years - comes to us also upon our own self-reflection. The story compels us to contemplate our human imperfection and how we shall never feel satisfied with it.
I was seventeen when I saw 'The Swimmer' on its 1968 theatrical release, and it bored me to stone. From the preceding paragraphs you'll have grasped that on this second viewing, in 2009, the film reached me, plucked so many soul-strings which, when I was seventeen, I had not yet learned I had in their packets, all fresh and coiled - strings which the thoughts, words, and deeds I would go on to think say, and do would wind the strings to the tuning of my choices, and much later play a song of regret and never to be satisfied longing.
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piafredux's words written 8-29-09
i would just like to compliment and thank you
for those words
you say the swimmer made you think
and compare life's recollections to sounds plucked strings produce
some pleasent and pleasing others (too many?) dissonant and coarse
yours is an an interesting analogy
the swimmer was to me a series of inceasingly jarring notes that
finished with a jolting - bracing - absolutely terrifying chord
ive only ever seen the swimmer once many many years ago now
i remember its ending terrified me - please forgive my cowardice
sometimes life's sounds are truly nightmarish - a cacophony
of staccato dissonant notes & rhythms you cant seem to shut off
but life can be lovely melodies too - sometimes absolutely wonderful
your comments struck me as beautiful - tho melancholy - music
some parts of life
are like a haunting wistful tune coming from a distant speaker
we only hear it in passing
never to know the title
but we did hear the song we did hear it
even if that is the only thing - recollection - we get to keep
the swimmer effected me quite much
i dont know how the film cannot bowl people over
to me it is a horror movie - the most frightening ive ever seen
we're watching a man unravel
quite terrifying in its implications
but also enlightening too in its lingering effect
what is real? what is make believe?
how strong is one's grip on reality
when reality becomes too heavy - too much - to hold up?
i think that is what happened to ned
his guilty reality broke him
and his mind retreated to a safer place - his past
to contemplate mental breakdown is a disconcerting if not outright frightening thing to do
and hellish (and that is the word) when youre actually forced to face it yourself
unfortunately i can identify all too readily with ned
i think of it - the reality break - as a gauntlet one manages to stagger thru
there is no victory over it only survival ... and a certain insight (wisdom) gained
the wisdom brings a single but important benefit tho - peace
having been thru the grinder
(never thinking in my wildest dreams i would
a) find myself in it and
b) not be strong enough to defeat it if i ever were - what arrogance!)
my view has come to be
life is short
mistakes get made
youre allowed to forgive yourself
the innocent ones
but
the guilty ones you get to live with every day
as the inescapable current of life carries you along
and you try to keep your head above water sanity-wise
all the while struggling with the options you chose to take
the swimmer uses pools - water - as the pathway
what an exquisite choice
for some seem to swim so effortlessly so gracefully
while others (myself) thrash about wildly
but we manage to stay afloat if only barely
til we find waters still enough to float again
(and hope not too many saw us flailing away)
the river doubles back too - sometimes
when it does you must be prepared to swim for your life
if the waters get rough
but youve been thru it - the panic - and know it will pass
it does
or surprisingly too
you can find a new found stream filled with mountain spring water
a break in the maelstrom
oh the friend is very welcome - truly
like floating on warm waves under sunny clear blue skies
but the find can never really match what youve lost
that is gone forever sadly
tho that doesnt preclude pleasant times alltogether
just ones viewed thru a different lens
and that is life
that's how i see it anyway these days
having had my own 'ned' moment some years ago now
long after having seen the swimmer
the movie was a preview of my own experience
tho of course i could not know that at the time
i wonder how many others have realized that too
i hope none but know that is not the case
psychiatric wards the world over prove otherwise
filled with shattered psyches - both innocent (it's so sad to see this)
and guilty (broken apart by remorse, a self imposed sentence)
just some thoughts on a film and a comment about it
both that have struck a lasting chord with me
and an attempt at my own
word improvisation (tho certainly not music) to follow suit
a poor try at a call & response
to be sure tho
your solo was fine
and peace to all who find themselves in the water
that they may reach the shore again
Thanks to all who posted on this thread. Some very interesting and thoughtful replies.
shareAh, my friend, your remarks I actually felt. You made them years ago, and I hope now, years later, you'll see my thank you. They were real to me--unaffected, expressive. You presented them in a way that communicated! So very rare for on-line comments (I ALWAYS have to overcome writers' grammar/punctuation to understand their syntax and intent; so frustrating). I will tell you the truth: I myself would have been terrified by this film were it not for Jesus Christ who "gives me a hope and a future" and who makes "all things work together for the good of those who love him." Regret. What a very sad word. Who escapes it? Do you know, I don't think anyone does, not anyone at all. The young can perhaps see it coming--I did, in a way--but they can only guess what we seasoned ones know: that we likely would make very different choices if given the chance to do it all over. As Bob Seger said, "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." My unasked for advice to young and old alike: choose Jesus. He's the granter of do-overs.
sharePiafredux: very beautifully put, poetic, like the movie itself. Thanks you.
shareTo me, this is the fatal flaw of the movie. In the short story, he at a party with his wife, who he is definitely still married to. The stuff later on about him having gotten a divorce since he started the swim makes it clear that large amounts of time are passing without him being aware of it, and that the odyssey is not over a single day. But the filmmakers bizarrely chose not to include Lucinda in the opening scene, and have him come out of the bushes in swim trunks. Such a waste.
shareMy immediate thought after the movie was that he somehow escaped from a mental hospital...
But all the other posts have me thinking now. Will have to re-watch the movie now!
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