solanas invictus

The Swimmer (1968) based on the homonynous short story by John Cheever.

The poster is quite straightforward to its (male) audience, shortly you'll now why.

The Swimmer (both movie and short story) is about a middle aged man who, when swimming at a neighbors' party, decides to swim back to his own house via the garden pool circuit made by the neighborhood's houses.

What starts as a joyous journey where everyone invites him a drink and openly welcomes him, becomes an ardous journey with increasingly hostile neighbors.

On the background, and by pieces of conversation, the audience starts to realize there is something dark and just wrong with the Swimmer. Offhand comments about a drunken car accident, about him owing people a lot of money after losing a job, startled looks when he mentions his daughters, etc, gives you the feeling that this guy is not right in the head.

This is where the short story and movie diverge. While in the story only female characters interact with the guy, in the movie it's mixed company even though the weight of the plot is still female lead.

From the beginning, we are shown he is a manwhore. He slaps a neighbor's ass to greet her, tries to seduce every woman in his vicinity and makes constant comments regarding his sexual powers. His half naked body is the focal point in almost all the scenes and you're left with the sensation that at any moment he will pop a boner. This is intentional, as Cheevers said the character's journey is about "travelling with a hard on"...

In the movie he tries to assault his daughters' former nanny, who now is in college, after he convinces her to follow him in his insane mission. After her confession of a past crush on him, he tries to kiss her, she gets scared and escapes, leaving him with an injury he made himself by trying to impress her by imitating a horse.

The nanny represents a childish point view, an idyllic and infantile past where married men wait for you at a Paris cafe after you made it as a foreign actress in the parisian scene. The nanny tells this as what it is: a childish fantasy, and she is well aware it's just a child's dream. The protagonist, however, gets carried away and thinks that it is still true because it reassures his self image of a handsome and younger man.

Every interaction with the neighbors is interesting but the nanny's and the former lover, the second to last house, take the cake. Almost at the end, he goes up to his former lover's house. The woman tries to shoo him away but he stubbornly refuses, making sexual advances that, instead of arousing her, make her cry.

She confronts him and calls him out on his hypocrisy of playing the perfect married man while having an affair with her and "all the waitresses in the county". She finally confesses he felt at ease with her because she was pretending, acting like he wanted her to act but she was never happy with him and in fact, is already seeing someone else. He leaves after, again, trying to assault her and receiving a blow to the head.

The final scene is him reaching his house. A dilapitaded and abandoned house with nobody inside.

The end.

Now, when it released it was a bomb office failure. Audiences got mad for the confusing ending, and the same as with the story, demanded an explanation.

It is true that is a strange movie, there are flashbacks and certain elements that reminded me of Luis Buñuel's movies, but this adds to the dreamlike environment the short story also has.

The acting is amazing and the soundtrack quite straightforward. But you have to contextualize the movie. Its a 60s movie!

Now, what is the story about?

Like the poster says, is about a man. But it's also about alcoholism, about the decay of the american dream after WWII, about the hypocrisy of the middle class, about Cheevers own family problems over his closeted bisexuality, about a delusional man who thinks the waitress is flirting with him because she is doing her job, it's a retelling of the Odyssey...

It is all of them at once. But specifically about the social standing of men (white men specially, there is a scene where The Swimmer mixes up a black driver for a former one, it is not stated overtly but it's implied he mixed them up because both were black and look the same to him), and how their delusions of power always always require sexual violence against women.

The women who little by little wake him up to reality are women who refuse being his victims. Other men are just enablers at worst or spectators at best. In a sense, this shows how little men actually like each other, they will let one of themselves die of stupidity rather than actually listen. I mean, they're not wrong as any advice or help women give to the guy is ignored. Get bent, then.

This is a movie that ends up being more feminist than it intented because it's an honest and self aware assesment of men's minds. This is what they are doing: going into made up challenges to show themselves they still got it and ending up sad and alone because they're annoying pricks who live in fantasyland.

In "Pretend it's a city" Fran Leibowitz talks about false challenges, like climbing the Everest, that people set themselves instead of realizing mundane life is challenging too. She argues that these fake challenges give people a false sense of acomplishment and that grandiose missions are often distractions from real life. This is a movie that takes the premise and runs with it.

If this movie were made today, you bet you'd have the r/film bros burning the studio down. It's obvious and very very blatant in what it describes: male entitlement as delusion.

Maybe this is why audiences back them hated it. Maybe this is why it still is a cinematic and literary masterpiece. Or maybe I liked the story too much and got obssessed with it.

Anyways, I watched it with my husband, and he, being a man, got uncomfortable with the bravado and delulu of the guy because he told me, all men feel the same. And he got afraid he might look as stupid and moronic.

As women we can point and laugh, maybe remember our dads, brothers, ex boyfriends, who fit the protagonist to a T, and go on with our lives.