Making The Swimmer Understandable

What makes John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” a story worth noting is the strange progression of time that is not as it is perceived by the main character or even the reader. While this strange phenomena is a strength of the story it is a weakness of the filmed adaption. The film adds several additional scenes in some cases trying to reconcile the book’s ambiguous plot and others seem added just to add length.

In the short story, we are privy to many details that would either be difficult to transpose to film or were neglected by the director. In the story, the fact that time is progress in a manner different than Neddy observes is stressed by the changed colors of the trees leaves, the cooling of pools, the loss of weight, and at the end of the story the realization that the constellations in the sky are not those of midsummer. The movie makes attempts at this by having Neddy make observations about ash trees, by having partiers be surprised that he is willing to swim at the pool, and later by wrapping his arms around his chest and shivering (despite the fact that none of the other characters, swimming or not, felt the need to). Both the film and the story also show Neddy’s cluelessness in his confusion about recent events involving his family, his friends, his neighbors, and his borrowing of money.

The film does, however, make a genuine attempt at explaining some points that were left unclear in the book, not unlike how Smooth Talk gives a definitive conclusion despite the book’s open-endedness. In the book, Neddy’s madness is left unexplained and none of the characters treat his cross-county swim as anything but original despite the fact that it seems Neddy may have spent years doing it (after all, he doesn’t realize his friend had major surgery three years prior). In a not too subtle way of explaining what Neddy is going through, the director injected the scene where Neddy meets the boy who is selling lemonade outside his house. Neddy explains to the boy something along the lines of “if he imagines something hard enough, it is true.” Even to a watcher unfamiliar with the short story, this is an obvious suggestion that Neddy’s confusion is caused by him imagining a different reality and rejecting the one which seems to have a family tragedy involved.

The public pool scene is also changed and Neddy encounters two couples of a lower standing who reveal that not only do his daughters not respect him and wreck cars whilst drunk but that he is in debt to both of them and they don’t expect him ever to be able to cough up the cash. The addition of this scene may have been used to give a more concrete idea as to what could’ve pushed Neddy over the edge as well as to show his fall from the wealthy upper class.