Swimming

An interesting moment in Robert Breer's ostensibly atypical Pat's Birthday (1962), which follows Claes Oldenburg and friends as they celebrate Pat's birthday ... we see an idyllic scene at a swimming hole, a waterfall, friends & children, a relaxed time. And I think I realized something about the rhetorical functions, in American film at least, of the 'swimming hole' and the 'swimming pool.' The hole can be a private place (as it is for Reese Witherspoon in The Man in the Moon) or a group one (Pat's Birthday), but it seems to serve many of the same functions regardless--it's peaceful, restful, primordial, upfront, it's where we "get away" from life's harassments.

The pool, on the other hand, is just another source of life's harassments, its inanities (even when, as Herman Blume and Benjamin Braddock try to do in Rushmore and The Graduate, respectively, one wants to use it to escape). The pool, when private, is a conspicuous sign of prestige--the great Jason Robards, as Al Capone, shows up on his Miami vacation in his swimming pool in The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (Roger Corman, 1969). When public, the pool is a veritable factory of hijinks, impersonality, manufactured emotion--above all, performance. Robards' Capone, in fact, has reporters over to his poolside as he gives a very 'performative' interview! (And, also, in contrast, in Pat's Birthday Breer has several shots of a public swimming pool--in long shot, impersonal, wearing none of the lyrical beauty of the swimming hole scene.) One can think of the great sequence in The Cameraman where Buster Keaton struggles to clothe himself properly and then, once in the pool, to keep his date--or one may also recall the plucky kids in The Sandlot (maybe only a movie people my age and younger know at all!?) among whom one, bearing a crush on a blonde lifeguard, schemes to get a CPR kiss by faking his own drowning, since the pool is apparently no place for honest admissions ...

Reese Witherspoon's swimming hole is frank, earnest. The swimming hole is where one can be naked, where a glimpse (or more) of bare skin asserts some innocence and straightforwardness of its own. (Maybe it takes us back to The Garden.) If it's natural water, flowing water, if it's surrounded by trees, one "goes back," or represents a "going back," like Jodie Foster's semi-civilized Nell, or one's secrets are revealed, as with the young man and young woman in Dragonslayer (Matthew Robbins, '81). Images from the opening of Sternberg's Blonde Venus flash through my head, too--but I can't bring back the narrative context!

The swimming pool sees nakedness only when it's "naughty," that is, one does not emphasize anything natural about it--it's a performative opportunity, as the notoriously showy pool fucking in Showgirls (not to mention John McNaughton's Wild Things, 1998) demonstrates. Or if there's no performance per se, there's another kind of 'imaginary' at work here--like the famous Phoebe Cates fantasy sequence in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

And just to make myself clear: I'm not trying to celebrate the 'swimming hole' and damn the 'swimming pool'--I'm just trying to clarify the connotative spaces these two settings tend to make for themselves. (And the "tend" is important--I make no claims to clear, cut-and-dried divisions here!) It's the same cultural, rooted ordering system which presumably assigns "honesty" to the hole and "performance" to the pool, if I'm even correct to propose these assignments. Perhaps I'll get comments from unconvinced readers with a laundry list of exceptions to disprove my 'rule.' Which would be OK, as at least it would mean I won't go on enamored of my own crackpot idea.

All of this ignores the figure of 'the ocean,' which is something else altogether, but that's OK because it's clear that this is anything but a rigorous stream of thoghts ...