WHEN HOLLYWOOD WENT NUTS: The Swimmer.
The film was not a success when it was released in 1968, but its narrative ideology and influence would be lasting. The 90-minute story, a mix of Narcissus and Odysseus set to a backdrop of class anxiety and cultural decline, is basically the same one that would take place over seven seasons of Mad Men; if you knew your Cheever, it was easy to imagine Ned sharing the commuter train into Manhattan with Don Draper. When the AMC series began, it even had Don and his family living in Ossining, NY, the same bedroom community Cheever called home when he died.
I was born the same week Cheever’s original story was published in the New Yorker, seven months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic whose family had excelled in their imitation of high WASP style. Ten years or so later, a teacher at my Catholic grade school would screen a very expurgated 16mm print of the film to us during English class. I remember finding it baffling, even scary; if this was what being an adult involved, I was in no hurry to grow up.
The world of The Swimmer was recognizable to me years later, when Ang Lee made a movie out of Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm, set in a Connecticut commuter suburb less than a decade after The Swimmer. It told a similar story from a very Generation X perspective – the unsupervised kids growing up with Watergate and stagflation, their parents active soldiers on the front lines of the sexual revolution, hooking up and coming apart.
When we talk about the youthquake that unsettled and remade Hollywood in the late ’60s, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider gets cited inevitably. But in hindsight it’s difficult to see that the story of Wyatt and Billy crossing America on their motorcycles was more influential than a flop like The Swimmer, made by a movie star, a post-studio mogul and a pair of middle class bohemians that helped fix the image and pass judgment on a whole social class that, just a decade earlier, was certain that it had taken the commanding heights of society.
As James Lileks recently wrote on advertising in the 1950s and ’60s, “Turns out that living in near-Utopia has the worst possible effect: you decide to strive for a different Utopia altogether. Come to think of it, though, the roots of it all are in the ads. They’re testaments to happiness, a goal, a mode of living. But it’s not happiness you get because you’ve earned it. It’s happiness that you deserve as an American. That’s where things started to go sideways. It’s a short hop to thinking you deserve it all because you exist.”