by JaneAnn Fisher

Abstract:

American cinema was one of our nation's greatest success stories in the previous century. Hollywood cinema, both art and industry, delivered a sense of American values and helped create American attitudes, a sense of our land, purpose, and aspirations. Consequently, movies have reflected, entertained, and produced images and types, sometimes forming archetypes for its audience. The swimming pool was an icon used repeatedly by filmmakers to quickly present a complicated, but well understood message to its audience. Swimming pool depiction introduced Americans to a pleasure-seeking lifestyle as it flaunted sex and wealth in a single image. However, pool portrayals in Hollywood films also represented America's complicated attitudes towards class and the American dream of success.

This work shows how film representation of pools depict and comment on wealth and success, the American Dream of making it. I have inspected seven pool representations in movies from the thirties to the mid-sixties. Audience's expectations were well formed by viewing movies with similar attitudes and themes, therefore, I analyze these pool scenes considering their role in various genres. Two romantic comedies(Dancing Lady, 1933 and Philadelphia Story, 1940) and two movies-about-movies (A Star is Born, 1937 and Sullivan's Travels, 1942) used the pool to display cultural dualities and ambivalence towards success. They display the opportunities wealth provides while also concluding that the most important things in life are within in the audiences reach: middle-class convictions, love, and sex. As numerous Americans procured their own "modest holes in the ground" swimming pools in some Hollywood flicks took a dark turn. Three postwar films, one film noir (Sunset Boulevard, 1950) and two New Hollywood youth oriented movies (The Graduate, 1967 and Goodbye Columbus, 1969) use the pool to represent the underside of postwar angst and an emergent suburban "American Dream".

Who might be interested in reading this work:

Students of film would enjoy reading a paper that considers how one particular icon is used in various films to represent and interpret sex, wealth, Hollywood, and the corruption of American society. This could also be an intriguing topic to general American Studies students for its close analysis of a singular American symbol and medium over three decades of the "American Century reveal many trends and concerns of its contemporaneous people. Furthermore, although not prepared as a curriculum, this topic could be a great introduction to middle school or high school social studies students of mid-twentieth century American society. The changing style and importance of Hollywood's creations, gender and generational politics, and the American public are well represented through analysis of the swimming pool in these seven films.