MISCELLANEOUS

Yes, I understand. That doesn't mean they still couldn't show a fence or have Burt enter a yard through a gate.

I'm taking it that you believe the answer is like the lack of window screens in movies (all they do is slow down a plot when someone or something needs to go in or out a window), so a fence would be similar.

But I'm still asking if the movie possibly reflected the reality of the time... were fences around pools always mandatory? At points in the 20th century we made leaps & bounds regarding safety (does anyone remember the days when any food stuffs you brought home - like ketchup - didn't have a safety seal that you have to remove?) Child-proof lids for medicine didn't even come out until 1967!

So maybe the laws about fences weren't as mandatory in the 60's. Does anyone know?

I've read a couple of your post to Minio and others, and you seem intelligent and well versed in film study...I'm impressed. You seem to know alot of stuff about film that I don't have a clue about.

So what I'm saying about The Swimmer is: it's a conceptual film and the 'swim home' can be viewed as a symbolic mental journey. In fact one could view the entire journey home that the swimmer takes as a distorted POV as if you remember the ending it clues us in that we might not fully trust all of the swimmer's experiences at face value.

Maybe it's just me but there's a tranquil beauty about the swimmer journeying home cross country while swimming freely in swimming pools. In my mind a fence says keep out, I bet that's what the director/scrip writer thought too.

Yup, exactly what I mean.

I don't know about safety laws and fenced swimming pools but people with pools generally want them to be private. The only open (non fenced or non hedged pool) that I recall seeing in a movie is in The Swimmer. A lot of the TV shows and movies made in that time did show fenced backyards. We had a fenced backyard in the 60s.

I did a little research which MAY suggest that the lack of fences not only helped the story flow, but may have also reflected the times (and thus it never occurred to anyone to obstruct the story with fences).

From the Internet: Currently, all states except Alaska, Colorado, and Delaware have statutes that require some type of fence surrounding a residential pool.

I actually find this fact hard to believe! There are still 3 states where you can have an inground pool without a fence around it? Also, there are no federal laws regarding pool fences, only state code requirements.

One of the reasons that pool laws are more comprehensive than they were in the 1950s is thanks to one government agency: the CPSC. This group was formed in 1972, and they’ve worked to improve product safety ever since.

That's several years after The Swimmer was even filmed.

So, since there are still a few states with no mandatory fence requirements, and pool safety laws didn't advance until the 1970's, then we can assume the depiction of a lack of fences in the movie may have well been the reality of the time.

Let's face it, nowadays, the Swimmer would have to contend with fences, gates with electronic combo-codes, screened-in pools, home security systems, Ring doorbells and dogs before he could even get a toe in the water!

Well thank you very much for the compliment, I'm glad to have made a good first impression here.

I think I am actually saying something a lot less interesting that you might think here, more reflecting my own lack of awareness of what the movie was going into it! haha

I really like what you say about the "symbolic mental journey" represented in the film. One of the things that strikes me now, as I think back on it, was the weird cold opening to the whole thing---where he just emerges out of the woods into somebody's backyard (to their strange delight). Then the movie ends when he gets to his old home and has a breakdown.
Oddly, I think that's where my impulse to expect some sort of grounding in realism came from. It feels like there should be some framing/bracketing story that fences in the main plot of the film, one that accounts for his apparent amnesia and sudden desire to "swim" home---as well as the porousness between his fantasy world and reality (as seen through his sudden overtness with the ex-babysitter). But that would be too didactic/uninteresting overall.

This is probably a bad idea, but I'd love to see fan fiction that tells the true story of what happened to Ned Merrill (and how all those previously unknown details are only subtly but incompletely revealed in The Swimmer).

Then again... I'm the guy who thought Wolverine (from the X-Men comics) was so cool when we knew very little about him (and all we got were tiny hints from his shattered memory), BUT... that he gradually turned into a much less cool commercialized commodity as every story and movie revealed more about his origins.

P.S. Maybe Ned Merrill was Namor the Sub-Mariner during that period in the 60's when he lost his memory?

No, that was all the way back last week.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

I guess it might be the one classic movie that might actually have a good (unplanned) sequel. If they did the whole thing with a different stly/plot structure, it could be really interesting.

I was going to watch this movie but I will wait until the rating counter reaches a luckier number before I do.

At least you'll find out if he can do the fandango or not?

It isn't urgent. Probably a junk movie anyways.

This AI chatbot was hidden on a Quora page and auto-answered me before I knew it was there, having taken the text from my Bing search. It literally leapt from the edge of the screen and covered everything else.

Is the website Effed Up Movies dangerous in terms of virus and such? My antivirus has been only recently preventing it from loading, stating it's an URL Blacklist.

Only recently noticed that when my husband has an appointment for, say, 12.30 p.m., he leaves the house at 12.30 p.m. This is his system & nobody seems to have complained.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

When scientists say they can now make a room temperature super conductor the best way to explain this process to a layman is to say "We can now allow sunlight to pass through your house walls without making them clear like windows."

I cant help but feel uneasy about room-temperature-super-conductor. Theres gotta be a trade off or ultimautm.

Novel thought of the day:

Electrons live in vast darkness while photons bring the light.

Correct? I don't know.

I've used it many times without an issue, just a pop up.

@Citizen Rules @Captain Steel @Balor
Here's a link to the original John Cheever story The Swimmer, if you are interested.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1...18/the-swimmer

Thanks, did you read it? If so your thoughts? Or anyone's thoughts for that matter?