Burt Lancaster and I share a birthday.

So does Shah Rukh Khan.

That pleases me.

It creates a small private bridge

between Hollywood and Bollywood.

Between one swimmer

in suburban Connecticut

and a man who could almost certainly turn the same journey

into a three-hour emotional epic

with songs

tears

and at least one scene in the rain.

I would watch that film immediately.

But this one is Burt’s.

And the crazy hot weather we’re having.

And The Swimmer belongs, for me,

to that broad shimmering territory called the sixties.

Not because it explains the sixties.

Films rarely explain decades.

They just carry some of their weather around with them.

The Swimmer carries sunlight

status

confidence

cocktails

lawns

pools

and a creeping sense

that something has gone badly wrong.

It was released in 1968.

That year keeps turning up.

Not always in large historical ways.

Sometimes just in these smaller personal flashes.

A film here.

A birthday there.

Another actor.

Another coincidence.

A year behaving like a stepping stone.

That may be why The Swimmer sticks.

It is built from stepping stones.

Pool to pool.

Garden to garden.

Encounter to encounter.

A route made not of roads

but of separate territories.

Each one slightly different.

Each one altering the journey.

Each one altering the swimmer.

I like that.

I like systems made of stations.

Tube stops.

Tarot cards.

Ogham trees.

One named place after another.

A sequence that is also a story.

Not just water

but a stop on a line.

A point on a map.

A social station.

A threshold.

An Ogham stone

in chlorinated form.

He does not simply swim home.

He portages home.

Or tries to.

That lovely word matters.

A swimmer treating a county full of private pools

as if they were one connected river.

Swimming where he can.

Walking the dry bits in between.

Joining the water up

by force of will.

He passes through a chain of little worlds.

And every world tells him something different.

At first, Ned Merrill seems merely eccentric

in a very American way.

A handsome man

with enough confidence left

to turn a county full of private pools

into a route home.

Why not swim it?

Why not join the pools together in his head

and call it a river?

Why not set off in blue trunks

and assume the world will welcome him through?

It is absurd.

It is also wonderful.

And then, pool by pool,

the film starts quietly taking things away.

That is the clever part.

Each stop punctures another part

of Ned’s private mythology.

He still behaves as if he is admired

expected

intact.

He behaves as if home is waiting for him

in exactly the form he last imagined it.

Wife at home.

Daughters nearby.

Life still in place.

The world around him

grows steadily less willing to agree.

People have not seen him for some time.

People ask awkward questions.

People know things

he does not want to know.

The route home becomes something else.

Not a quest.

A dismantling.

A man crossing suburbia by water

and finding, at every stage,

that the story he has been telling himself

is no longer supported by the landscape.

That may be the sadness of it.

Not simply that he is broken.

But that he keeps going

as if charm and athleticism and determination

might still be enough

to hold the old self together.

Lancaster is magnificent in this

because he understands

that the body is part of the performance.

The Performer

Before he was Burt Lancaster, film star,

he was an acrobat.

That matters here.

The Swimmer is not just a film

about memory

status

and denial.

It is a film about a body moving through space.

Wet paving.

Garden walls.

Diving boards.

Ladders.

Lawns.

Changing weather.

Tired muscles.

Old confidence.

Fading elegance.

The body boasts.

The body persists.

The body tries to keep up with the legend.

And then there is the unfairness

of the whole thing.

Burt Lancaster was in his mid fifties

in The Swimmer

I mention this partly out of respect

and partly because he looked amazing.

Lean.

Tanned.

Athletic.

Entirely convincing

as a man who might decide

to cross half a county by water.

This has not improved

my relationship with exercise.

I really need to do some.

There is something else going on too.

Ned is not only travelling through pools.

He is travelling through perceptions.

Through other people’s versions of him.

Through his own fading image of himself.

The landscape changes

because the people change.

One garden offers hospitality.

Another discomfort.

Another pity.

Another contempt.

Another confusion.

Another quiet alarm.

So the route is not only physical.

It is social.

Emotional.

Mythological.

He is swimming through a broken reputation.

Which is one reason

the stepping-stone feeling matters.

Each place has its own tone

its own weather

its own truth.

One of the pleasures of London

is that it can feel like that too.

Not one city

but a chain of stations.

One stop

then another.

Green Park.

Piccadilly Circus.

Mile End.

A route made of names.

A line made of little worlds.

Swimming the Tube.

I like the idea of that.

Not literally, though in London

one should never rule out

some fresh sewage-based innovation

in public transport.

I mean as a structure.

A journey by stations.

A city understood

as a sequence of atmospheres.

The Swimmer already works like that.

He moves from pool to pool

as if changing lines.

He surfaces into different versions of America.

And perhaps that is why the film feels so close

to things I already love.

Ogham trees arranged in a wheel.

Tarot cards laid in sequence.

Tube maps.

Little systems of movement.

A route that becomes a reading.

The original story, of course,

was by John Cheever.

A short story first

then a film.

That matters too.

I like it when a thing changes form

and survives the crossing.

Story into film.

Film into memory.

Memory into some other object altogether.

The route through things

interests me almost as much

as the things themselves.

Which brings me, perhaps inevitably,

to Gustave Doré.

This is not a sensible route.

It does not matter.

Doré painted an acrobat family.

Three times, more or less.

A family of performers

gathered around an injured child.

Grief.

Theatre.

Bodies.

Spectacle.

The kind of image

that arrives already carrying

a whole story inside it.

Lancaster’s acrobat past

pulls Doré in behind it.

The acrobat never entirely leaves the swimmer.

Or perhaps the swimmer

never entirely leaves the acrobat.

There is a performer’s pride

in Ned Merrill.

A performer’s relationship to the body.

A sense that he can still carry the role

if he just keeps moving.

Still charm the audience.

Still make the risk look graceful.

Still turn strain into style.

The trouble is that the audience has changed.

And then there is Forest Grove.

A strange little web-based thing

from years ago.

It had its own site.

Or had had one.

By the time I went looking, it was already half gone.

I even contacted the creator on LinkedIn to ask if the original files still existed.

They didn’t.

So Forest Grove now lives for me in the same sort of state as many older things I seem to care about.

Part memory.

Part fragment.

Part reconstruction.

Images.

Voice-over.

A little boy made out of plastic models

moving through one of those big American housing communities.

Pool to pool.

Street to street.

A suburban dreamscape

or a suburban nightmare

built in miniature

and narrated in an eerily calm female American voice.

It is not The Swimmer.

But it rhymes with it in my head.

Strongly.

Enough that I can no longer think about one

without the other wandering in.

That may be the point

where this article gives away its real agenda.

Because as soon as plastic figures

and miniature housing estates

enter the picture

I stop being a film viewer

and start wanting to make things.

That is the danger.

One film leads to another image.

That image leads to a half-remembered website.

That website leads to a model estate.

That model estate leads to thoughts of

plastic

card

tiny paving slabs

little hedges

painted figures

resin water

suburban lamps

small windows lit from within.

One film

and suddenly I want the knives and glue out.

I want to make my own little worlds.

That may be what I really like

about The Swimmer.

Not simply the film itself,

though I do love it.

Not just Lancaster,

though I love him too.

Not just the odd private connection

of birthdays

decades

and favourite actors.

Not even 1968

that year surfacing again

like something lost but not entirely gone.

No, it is the route.

The way one thing leads to another.

The way the film behaves

like a map made of fragments.

Burt Lancaster.

Shah Rukh Khan.

Pools.

Tube stops.

Ogham stones.

Doré’s acrobats.

A little plastic boy

in an American estate.

A workbench waiting for attention.

I increasingly suspect

that memory is less like a filing cabinet

and more like a badly planned housing development

connected by swimming pools.

You think you are setting off for one house

and end up somewhere else entirely

wet through

carrying an acrobat

a Bollywood star

and a Tube map.

That seems about right.

Perhaps that is why The Swimmer lasts.

Not because it can be summarised

as a clever allegory about denial

class

and the collapse of masculine confidence,

though it can.

Not because it is a puzzle to be solved.

Not because it belongs neatly

to one decade

one reading

one meaning.

It lasts because it moves.

It moves through water.

Through gardens.

Through memory.

Through forms.

Short story to film.

Film to thought.

Thought to model.

Model to whatever comes next.

And somewhere in all that

a message arrives.

Make something.

Do some exercise first, perhaps.

Then make something.

Put some life into it.

Though today it’s just a bit

too hot.

Time for

a swim.