From surreal odysseys to sexual awakenings, the swimming pool has long been depicted as a site of transformation, nostalgia and fluid identity. In her seminal 1979 essay collection ‘The White Album’, Californian writer Joan Didion sought to summarise her relationship with water and its many forms, including swimming pools. She noted that while pools, which she defines as “water made available and useful”, are often regarded as a measure of affluence or hedonism, they are, in fact, “a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable”. As Didion suggests, few other architectural typologies encapsulate such ambivalence as the modernist swimming pool. In the UK, the swimming pool first gained popularity in the 19th century as a site of public leisure, however, it was in postwar America that pool culture was truly born, as the expansion of the middle class and increasingly liberal attitudes towards sex and sexuality led to a sharp rise in mass leisure. Mixed swimming was no longer forbidden, and many young people began to experiment with revealing their bodies, with the introduction of the modern bikini in 1946 revolutionising swimwear. For the first time, swimming pools were widely available to young people, and they quickly became a focal point in popular cinema. Film theorists Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch wrote in their 2014 book ‘The Cinema of the Swimming Pool’ that the swimming pool frequently appears in film not merely as a setting but “as a dynamic site where social, political, cultural and aesthetic forces converge.” Beneath the surface, the swimming pool on screen serves as an open space for emotional, sentimental, aesthetic, and relational experimentation, which is essential to the portrayal of burgeoning youth identity. Perhaps the most famous example of a film where these identities converge and a pool is placed at the heart of the narrative, is 1968’s The Swimmer. Based on John Cheever's short story of the same name, the film stars Burt Lancaster as the handsome and wealthy Neddy Merrill, who visits an old friend’s pool and, upon realisation of the number of pools in his affluent neighbourhood, decides to “swim home” to his family. The Swimmer has a distinctly surrealist tone which feels significantly ahead of its time, with cutaway scenes of crystal blue water and well-kept gardens appearing dreamlike in quality. As each pool owner lounges around, planning their summer parties, having afternoon tea or reading newspapers, it becomes clear that each pool represents a critique of middle-class suburbia; a kind of “suburban odyssey”, according to Roger Ebert. The film’s comparison to Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’, while not a new one, can also be applied to the pool’s link to youth. As Neddy embarks on his Odyssey-esque journey, his neighbours exclaim that swimming is so “healthy and young.” With each swimming pool Neddy visits, he is further tempted – much like Odysseus – by his desire for youth. This is first reflected in his obsession with 20-year-old babysitter Julie Hooper (Janet Landgard), whom he meets along the way. The scene in which they walk through the forest evokes the Garden of Eden, with shots of the pair intentionally sun-dappled and blurred as she recounts her childhood crush on Ned, highlighting his distorted optimism about regaining youthful desirability. Later on, we see Ned teaching a little boy to swim in an empty pool, the water having been drained over safety concerns. Upon witnessing the boy’s skepticism, Neddy says, “If you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you,” because, “when I was a kid people used to believe in things.” This scene effectively summarises Neddy’s own delusion, with his attempts to revert to a state of childhood innocence shattered in the film’s final pool scene. Unlike Odysseus, Ned’s ending is not one of triumph. For the first time, we see him outside of the pool setting; having finally reached his own home, he finds the property overgrown with weeds, the tennis court unusable, and his family long gone. Back on dry land, Neddy’s childish illusion and dream of his “all-American family” is no longer contained in a pool-shaped fantasy. If The Swimmer is considered the pinnacle of the swimming pool canon, then 1967’s The Graduate is a worthy companion. The film follows Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), who has just graduated from university. Upon moving back into his parents’ house, as he desperately tries to figure out what he wants to do with his life, he soon finds himself pulled into an affair with bored housewife Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft).Benjamin’s feelings of uncertainty and loss of freedom are best summarised in an extended sequence depicting a bronzed Benjamin floating at the bottom of a pool after being forced into a scuba suit on his birthday for the amusement of his parents and their friends. By shooting the scene from Benjamin’s submerged perspective – through narrow goggles, completely surrounded by water – director Mike Nichols invites us to view the world as Benjamin does. The camera pans to take in the suffocating blue abyss, emphasising Benjamin’s feelings of isolation in his own home. In this moment, the film also masterfully utilises sound, with the only noise being Benjamin’s exaggerated breathing as he drowns out the sound of the party and therefore the expectations and responsibilities of adulthood. Later, we see Benjamin lounging on a lilo, after sleeping with Mrs Robinson for the first time. He remarks to his father upon his questions about whether he will be attending graduate school, that “it’s very comfortable just to drift here”, perfectly summarising his feelings towards this shift. Lying on the lilo, he doesn’t have to choose between swimming or not swimming; the pool is a liminal space representing his awkward transition from boy to man. Elsewhere, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 road movie Y tu mamá también, charts the transition of late teenagers with similar intensity, at a time of sociopolitical upheaval in Mexico. In a recent interview with Movie Maker, Cuarón revealed the film’s intrinsic link to youth: “For us, this movie is about identity. Two young men seeking their identity as adults…together with that is an observation of a country that in our opinion is a teenage country looking for its identity as a grown-up country.” Both Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) have finished school and are seduced by the allure of being by the water during the long hot days of summer, free from their highschool girlfriends and as fluid as the element they inhabit. In a demonstration of their infantile energy, we see these two boys compete against each other in swimming and masturbating contests in the Olympic-size pool at the country club where Tenoch’s father is a member, while fantasising about Salma Hayek and Luisa (Maribel Verdú), “la españolita”, the wife of Tenoch’s cousin. A high-angle long shot shows the boys side by side lying on adjacent springboards, engaged in simultaneous masturbation, before an underwater shot shows a squirt of semen entering the water, foreshadowing their journey of sexual discovery. As their relationship with Luisa intensifies, the boys once again swim together, this time in a distinctly less well-kept motel pool overflowing with leaves. This change in setting embodies the boy’s evolving relationship, which is now entirely symbolic of their competition for Luisa’s affection. Julio has seen Tenoch and Luisa having sex and walks out to sit at the edge of the pool. The narrator says that Julio has only ever felt anger like this when he saw his mother with a man when he was a child. Instead of talking, they decide to race again. A victorious Julio reveals that he slept with Tenoch’s girlfriend; the narrator states that Tenoch had only ever felt like that when, as a child, he read an article about his father selling contaminated corn to the poor. It is critical that the boys’ ambivalent relationship with one another is backdropped by swimming pools because it allows us to understand how they each construct their concept of sexual identity in relation to their own youthful experiences. They are not yet mature enough to express certain emotions which continue to bubble under the surface. At the end of the film, a significant shift occurs when the constrictive, self-contained pool is exchanged for the vast expanse and unknown of the ocean. Choosing to stay in rural Mexico alone, Luisa submerges herself in the ocean, and so enacts a kind of symbolic death. Tenoch and Julio were drawn to Luisa just as they are drawn to water, yet their eventual return home signals their acceptance of meeting their parents’ expectations. As both the boys and country open themselves to the unknown, Cuarón leaves us with a final message: “Life is like the surf. Give yourself away like the sea.” More recently, writer/director Luca Guadagnino borrowed the title for his 2015 film A Bigger Splash from David Hockney’s iconic 1967 painting, which depicts a typical Californian pool with a hyper-realistic, alienating gaze. Notably, Hockney includes no human presence – only a splash of white breaking the crisp blue surface, indicating that someone has just dived in. It is within this moment of suspended time that the viewer wonders what has happened before, after and around the pool, in which the relationships in A Bigger Splash are questioned. Rockstar Marianne (Tilda Swinton, giving an almost wordless performance) is recovering from throat surgery in a secluded Sicilian villa with her younger partner Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). Their holiday is interrupted with the arrival of Harry (Ralph Fiennes), her former lover and record producer, and his newly-found daughter, 22-year-old Penelope (Dakota Johnson). It is important to note that Guadagnino based the film loosely on Jacques Deray's classic 1969 film La Piscine, with both plots being broadly similar and crucially centred around a Mediterranean-style swimming pool. However, unlike La Piscine, A Bigger Splash adopts a distinctly darker, sexual undertone in its exploration of youth. Harry and Penelope’s arrival disturbs Marianne and Paul’s calm retreat from the spotlight. As the film’s equivalent to a young Jane Birkin in La Piscine, Penelope uses the pool to test the boundaries of innocence and sexuality. After flaunting her body and half-jokingly implying she’d like to sleep with Paul, she behaves like a child in the pool with him, playing games and performing handstands. Similarly, Harry embodies a Peter Pan-like refusal to grow up, clinging to his past excesses and youthful exuberance, although his hedonistic tendencies and jealousy of Marianne and Paul’s relationship quickly begins to escalate. Harry’s supreme insensitivity sees him filling the fridge with bottles of liquor, despite Paul being a recovering alcoholic, and insisting that Marianne reply to his endless questions and teasing, despite her health-wary protestations. The pool soon becomes a battleground of simmering tension between Harry and Paul over Marianne. The dynamic is complicated by the revelation that Harry used to be good friends with Paul and in fact introduced him to Marianne, and that him pushing their union to combust ultimately results in his drowning. Thus, Harry’s body in the swimming pool signifies the guilt and shame with which gilded youth and privileged middle age atone for their pleasures. By the end of the film, the pool has facilitated the liquefaction of adult responsibilities, the fluidity of desires, and the nomadism of identity, with life-altering consequences. Freudian dream theorists posit that swimming pools are among the most common dream symbols reported by people in therapy, representing a direct manifestation of inner thoughts and feelings. Similarly, when it comes to filmmaking, the swimming pool is not just a place to cool off as the summer heat intensifies. Amid changing lives and confrontations, the pool remains a constant, a space where questions of identity can be explored and brought to the surface. For the characters in these films, both young and old, the pool is a link between past and present, freedom and entrapment, stillness and transition, all themes associated with their attempt to maintain or recapture their youth. For each protagonist, water makes possible what cannot be achieved on dry land. The post Long Hot Summer: The mythos of the pool on screen first appeared on Little White Lies.