"I'm a very special human being. Noble. And splendid."

Says Burt Lancaster to Joan Rivers in "The Swimmer."



The movie came out 50 years ago — in May 1968. I saw it at the time, when I was 17 and interested in figuring out what the adults viewed as high-class film art.

And I DVR'd it when I saw that it was on Turner Classic Movies this week, and Meade and I ended up watching it straight through last night.

We laughed at it a lot — the Marvin Hamlisch music, the nature photography, the endless observation of the torso of Lancaster, the taking seriously of a type of man no one today takes seriously — but we've been talking about it seriously for a long time this morning, and I took the trouble to read the 1964 John Cheever story and a contemporaneous Roger Ebert review:

As "the swimmer" has a drink with his friends, it occurs to him that a string of other backyard pools reaches all the way across the valley to his own home. Why not swim every one -- swim all the way home, as it were?....

The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer's experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man's life.

What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. The journey Cheever's swimmer makes has been made before in other times and lands by Ulysses, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Augie March.

Joan Rivers has only a very small part, and this was her first acting role. She wrote in her autobiography:

"Frank [the director, Frank Perry] wanted a happy girl who then got hurt. Lancaster was going to be Mr. Wonderful who came up against a mean bitch, and was right not to go off with her. Trying to please both men, I was going back and forth between line readings, and nothing made sense."

That's quoted in Wikipedia, which also says:

After the film's restoration and re-release by Grindhouse Releasing in 2014, Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com gave the Blu-ray release five stars, commenting that "It's a strange picture, but engrossingly so, taking the viewer on a journey of self-delusion and nostalgia that gradually exposes a richly tortured main character as he attempts to immerse himself in a life that's no longer available to him", commenting that Lancaster gives a "deeply felt, gut-rot performance ... and communicates every emotional beat with perfection". Commenting on the same release, Ain't It Cool News reviewer Harry Knowles commented "This is also Burt Lancaster's journey to ... The Twilight Zone ... it is friggin brilliant! ... It is fascinating! Spectacular film!”

The aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 100%, based on 22 critic reviews.

Amazing really, because it seems just as likely that everyone could say it's a ludicrous, terrible mess. Where's the line between reality and fantasy? It's never revealed. You'll have to puzzle over it, and reading the original story won't hand you the answer.

I am still working on the theory that "the swimmer" was a sperm cell (or salmon swimming upstream to mate). Don't you think a sperm cell — if it could think — would think, "I'm a very special human being. Noble. And splendid"?

Back in the 60s, it was understood that literary fiction revealed the complexities of the mind of wealthy suburban males. We the theater audience spent 2 hours gazing at the near-naked and naked body of a 54-year-old man. Nowadays, Harvey Weinstein/Louis C.K. begs an audience of one to please look at him naked, and the theater audience is captivated by a swimmer who isn't a very special human being. He's not a human being at all.



Noble and splendid!

"Susan Cheever... includes a heart-lacerating quote by her father: 'If you are an artist, self-destruction is quite expected of you.'"

"'The thrill of staring into the abyss is exciting until it becomes, as it did in my case, contemptible.' She notes that 'all five of our twentieth-century literature Nobel laureates were alcoholic — Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.' (A proud tally.) And those are the ones who made it to the top. Lots of other great writers who didn’t receive the Nobel laurel were just as pie-eyed. Today, the pendulum seems to have swung again. Cheever says that most of our leading literary figures are fairly abstemious. Whether this will make for more interesting biographies remains to be seen."

From Christopher Buckley's review of Susan Cheever's "Drinking in America: Our Secret History."

"On the desolate beach that is the lot of the contemporary book reader, the footprints of one companion can still be found."

"They belong to the writer, who needs the reader not just to pay her or his wages but also to give meaning to their words."

As John Cheever put it: “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.”

The troubling thought occurs, however, that this last remaining cohabitant may also be about to depart the island. With falling advances, writing is evermore dominated by people who don’t need it to earn a living: Tenured academics and celebrities spring to mind. For these groups, burnishing a résumé or marketing a brand is often as important as satisfying the reader.

And then there are the hobbyists, those for whom writing is primarily an act of self-expression....

But if it's precisely like a kiss, isn't the hobbyist exactly what you want? Worrying about falling advances and people who don’t need it to earn a living? Prostitutes don't kiss!