[0:00:00] Harry Scott Sullivan: You are listening to a Death by DVD director's cut. Stick around after the show to learn more about this episode. The Swimmer originally broadcast, has here's to Sugar on the Strawberries. This is Death by DVD. And I am your host, Hank. And on this episode, we are going to get wet. Tonight's, movie stars a golden era hero, Burt Lancaster. I know a good portion of our audience is probably wondering who Burt Lancaster is, which is a sad fact. But we can go into a brief history lesson. Burt Lancaster. You know, from here to eternity. He was the Hollywood intellectual. He played Wyatt Earp in Gunfight at the OK corral, one of the most legendary versions before something like Tombstone Birdman of Alcatraz. Airport.

[0:01:27] Harry Scott Sullivan: We can never forget airport. He's in Atlantic City, a legendary old world hollywood actor. The movie is The Swimmer from 68, directed for the most part by Frank Perry, based on a screenplay by his wife, Eleanor Perry, partially directed. And we might get into this later. Might I'll explain why I use that word? By Sidney Pollock, based on a short story by John Cheaver. Now let's get into that might. There's two ways that we can talk about the Swimmer. We can talk about the movie and what it's about and the characters. And we can get into some themes and some concepts. Or we can talk about how the Swimmer was made, which is almost as interesting as the movie. It really isn't. You hear that a lot. It's as great and it's a lot of technical crap and it's not that much fun. But this really does have an intriguing story behind it.

[0:02:14] Harry Scott Sullivan: And it's a very charismatic story. And it really lets you know about the people that were involved. And I think it's very sincere and interesting. I kind of want to talk about the movie. I want to talk about the Swimmer. So we're going to leave a lot of technical aspects out. We're going to leave a lot of backstory as to the making of this movie out. And I know usually I really like to get in depth into things here, but I think the focus deserves to be on the story of the swimmer, because there is a lot of information already out there on the making of this movie that you can find. The best way of doing so is heading over to grindhouse pictures and getting yourself the new Blu ray. It is a three disc set DVD Blu ray. It's got over two and a half hours of special features telling you everything you need to know about the creation of this movie, all the behind the scenes stories. And it comes with the soundtrack. That's a bonus. When it comes to Grindhouse, they throw in soundtracks for a good few releases, really enjoy the Cannibal Holocaust and the Cannibal Fairox soundtrack. Those are always great to have in collection.

[0:03:09] Harry Scott Sullivan: The Swimmer is a really interesting movie. It's a very different movie. It's a different career choice for somebody like Burt Lancaster. He was always known as such a strong guy. He wasn't quite the John Wayne type. He didn't really play bruiser jock cowboy as he played more of a white hat hero. And yeah, John Wayne did too. But he always had an edge to him. And just using it as a description, I think you can understand the difference. I mean, he was always clean cut, very handsome, always in incredible shape. And he always played, for the most part, a heroic character. And Lancaster is a really interesting guy. He was an artist. He was a man about messages. He was sometimes more interested in the message of a picture over the story or the plot, that if it was a strong enough and good enough message, it might outweigh what you're actually visually seeing on screen, as long as you can understand and feel things.

[0:03:58] Harry Scott Sullivan: He was always known as the literate star. He was an avid reader. He was an interesting character. And he took some risks, definitely in the 1960s, one of the biggest being the Swimmer, something that was drastically a bomb when it came out. But to the end of his career, to the end of his life, I believe he died of a heart attack in 1994. He said the Swimmer was one of his favorite productions, one of the favorite shows he ever committed to. And there's great reason for that. I'd honestly say. I think this is one of the grandest, if not the greatest performance in Burt Lancaster's career because of the amount of depth and emotion, but emotion at all the different places. That the character that Bert Lancaster gives the character. And this really is an onion. This whole movie is an onion. The character is an onion. It's so layered. We'll try and get through all the layers.

[0:04:44] Harry Scott Sullivan: We're going to do this differently than most shows because I'll just shoot, I'll just go as deep as I can and I'll try and get everything out there. I go through my notes and I attempt to make a big piece out of it. But this time we're going to do it chapter by chapter, and we're going to see what happens with that. Maybe we'll abandon it, I don't know. But like I said, we're going to really focus on the story of the Swimmer husband and wife team. Eleanor and Frank Perry were pretty inexperienced when it came to shooting the Swimmer. They had only done a short film, david and Lisa. Ladybug, ladybug, ladybug four. Ladybug, ladybug. Wait, no, only two. Whoops. A TV movie. And then the swimmer. Now, later on, you've got Mommy Dearest, Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Rancho did it X, which is just fun to say. I think out of everything, the swimmers speaks for their career.

[0:05:35] Harry Scott Sullivan: And it speaks pretty loudly now. I bought up Grindhouse a little while ago, they put this out years ago on DVD and it's now being re released on Bluray. But primarily it's like outside of catching it on Turner Classic Movies, probably the best way that you're going to be able to find the Swimmer. And really when it comes to grindhouse, we'll do a little ass kissing here. You're paying for absolutely fantastic quality. There's not a release that I own personally, I don't own every grind house release, but what I can speak for is always excellent. It's always hours of special features. You can really dig into it. And slip covers are your game. The new Blurays, for the most part, I believe, have them. I don't know if things like American hippie and Israel do, but still you should buy American hippie in Israel because that's a pretty weird movie itself. We'll talk about that one another day. Now on to The Swimmer, a story that on one hand you could say is about a man who decides to swim his way home. And at that rate, it kind of sounds like a family friendly movie that's going to have some really deep seated message about trying hard and you'll succeed and you can swim your way home. This guy's going to swim roughly 8 miles to his house.

[0:06:41] Harry Scott Sullivan: The whole entire county a river, essentially a river of swimming pools. This man has realized with the new construction of a nearby neighbor's swimming pool, that he can essentially, with some hiking, swim his entire way home. Sounds kind of dopey, but a little riveting. And especially knowing that it's a 1960s movie, you're going to assume that it's got some tacky big band soundtrack and everything works out and it's really happy at the end of the day. Stars, Burt Lancaster. Well, you're wrong. I'm here to tell you you're wrong. But it is about all of those things. The Swimmer is a movie about failed dreams, from rich to poor, popular to disdain. It is a fantasy fallen, living in the past, not accepting the future. It literally is repeating something enough until it's true. One of my favorite things about the release is the back of the box, which reads, the Swimmer is a film like no other, a feature length Twilight Zone episode by way of The New Yorker. And that is a really great way to put it, because the journey you're taken on is an egotistical psychotic trip, truly fit from the brain of Rod Sterling. But like I mentioned, it comes from the short story of John Cheaver. And there is some discrepancies between The Swimmer from 1968 and the short story.

[0:07:55] Harry Scott Sullivan: You've got a very human story, a story of man. The characters are all stark depictions of people, boring, drab, self obsessed, proud of nothing, really proud of nothing in particular but objects and things they own, but not so much things they've achieved. They're proud of stature, but stature that they've by no means accumulated. They're proud of being above other people. They're proud of separating themselves and considering themselves a different percentage because they're rich or they can judge themselves by the objects they have, not so much by what they've actually achieved. Unfortunately. Mindless, self obsessed, self indulgent boorish. I mean, that's kind of what people are as a whole. I'm not trying to be a doomer and constantly negative, but in general, people are self obsessed. They just care about what's directly in front of them. People are more worried about what their neighbors have instead of what their neighbors don't have. They look in jealousy. Instead of looking and going, do they have enough? Are they okay? Is there something I can do for them?

[0:08:52] Harry Scott Sullivan: This is a story about that side of human nature. It's not always doom and gloom, but it is something that needs to be examined. And it is something that's inside of all of us. Everyone has those tendencies, and everyone has that nature. And something that is very important is that you really don't know what you look like through other people's eyes and you don't know what other people's perceptions are of you. But unfortunately, for the most part, people build such a high wall that their reality is now completely lost and jaded between what they want to believe is true and what is actually true, or what other people might have a perception of truth to be. Are you with me? That's the kind of story that The Swimmer is. A story of emptiness and loneliness and madness. So we'll try and break this try. I stress the word try into nine parts because essentially that's the movie. There are nine parts, nine chapters, the first of which being rather awkward. Now, again, there are so many comparisons between this and the short story, but we have to try and separate that because what we're dealing with here is The Swimmer, frank Perry, Eleanor Perry, their movie, the Swimmer. So we have to stay in this universe. And the source material, although very similar, it does have some discrepancies, like I've said before.

[0:10:00] Harry Scott Sullivan: So I guess a gathering of sorts of pool party is going on. And the upper rich, upper white 1%, I don't know if they're celebrities, but everyone is incredibly well off. Connecticut, it's a very rich, very, very rich I mean, I hate using the term but trump money. When Nietzsche talked about decadence, that type of money, okay? And this dude kind of appears I mean, this really is the beginning of the movie. This dude just comes out of the woods, man, and he does it's. Bert Lancaster, he literally just appears out of the woods and swimming, trauma, absolutely nothing else, and dives into the pool. And when he comes out, he's greeted really happily by the people whose house he's pretty much invaded. Well, I mean, he's not invaded their house, but pool invasion. I guess you could say this is a part of the subgenre home invasion as it is sort of a pool invasion movie. You could describe it that way. But everyone's pretty genuinely happy to see him. They're calling out his name. They're really surprised. Bert Lancaster is playing a fellow named Ned Merrill who is affectionately called Nettie.

[0:10:57] Harry Scott Sullivan: And all the women are just ecstatic. Oh, Nettie, I've not seen you in so long. Oh, wait, let me do my Catherine Hepburn impersonation. Oh, Nettie, I haven't seen you in so long. Nobody really sounds like Catherine Hepburn in the movie, but I've been dying to do that on an episode for a really long time. I think it's spot on. I don't care what you think. I think it's great. It's not the right place. Catherine Hepburn is not from Connecticut, is she? She's one of those places. God, what audience am I making this show for? It's a Burt Lancaster movie, and this asshole is making Katherine Hepburn jokes. I don't get it. I don't get it.

[0:11:37] Harry Scott Sullivan: What's going on here? Everyone is so kind, and they're just so happy to see him. And there's an obvious stance that he's not been around for a while. No one's seen him. No one knows what he's doing. They're asking about his wife and his kids, which immediately is a little standoffish about. He constantly brings up the fact that his kids are at home playing tennis, and his wife, Lucinda, she's just fine. Everything's okay. So our character's just kind of like birthed into this reality and immediately goes into water, which I thought was kind of symbolic. We're going to get a little deep here. You know, he he just comes out of nowhere, and there's no explanation to what he was doing previously, to this, why he decided that he was just going to go swimming at his neighbor's house. And you definitely are given the understanding that he really isn't swimming. This guy cares about nothing more than swimming. It seems to be a fascination and obsession with his life. And he dives deeply into the water, deeply into the birthing pool of the reality of this movie.

[0:12:31] Harry Scott Sullivan: And your real introduction to him when there is a line of dialogue, is once he kind of births himself, quote, unquote, and comes out of the water. And he's now introduced into almost a pseudoreality, because one thing that we're going to get into here is identity or the lack thereof, or identity crisis in general, turning 50 something and just not knowing what to do with your life. Getting a mistress, buying a new car. Some people do that. Other people, they decide to swim their entire way home through all of their neighbors backyards. But that's one of the concepts. But it's brought up over and over and over. No one's seen you for ages, but you haven't changed one bit. You're just the same. Nothing about you has changed. And he says something to the effect of, I was just around and wanted to go for a swim, which really, when you examine the situation, is kind of psychotic. Your neighbor just barefoot and swimming trunks, pops out of the trees and dives into your pool. And here's really, I guess, where it gets a little psychotic because staring vacantly into the void, he decides that he can swim his entire way home. That because of a construction of a new pool by a nearby neighbor. He has essentially a river that he can find his entire way back to his home, an eight mile river.

[0:13:33] Harry Scott Sullivan: It's going to be this glorious, self important thing. He's convinced the character, you get this feeling right off the bat, has a very, very big ego and a very big feeling of self importance almost to the fact that he feels he's the stuff of legends, that he feels that he is something much more vast than possibly a man. And deep down inside, we are all merely men. And of course, I mean that in a vague terminology of the human race. We are men, okay? And that's about it. I mean, he's going to do it like the Nike logo. Just do it. He does it. He decides at this moment in time, this is what he's going to do. That it's. Again, going to help purport his ego. It's going to help report his legendary status. The man, Ned Merrill, who swam across the county all the way home. People will talk about that for years.

[0:14:19] Harry Scott Sullivan: People will never forget me. People will remember all those great, wonderful, fantastic times. Something too. One of the other themes that we're going to be diving into diving, you get it. It was a joke is the past. Now, some people, most people, a lot of people, they live in the past. They've got these memories of the good times and when they were successful, when they were pretty, when they were thin, when they were popular, when they were loved, when they had a really nice car. And they can't really escape that because reality sucks. Not for everybody. I mean, some people's, reality is just constant crushing slow death and depression, and they just can't get past that. One time in 1994 when things were really cool, everyone was getting slices of za, and four non blondes were popular. And they just can't get over it. They just can't let it be. They can't move on or find any form of progression. But a lot of the time that happens because of faults.

[0:15:14] Harry Scott Sullivan: A lot of the times, it's because you can't move past certain things that you've done or done to other people. Your behavior, your ego, your inner self that makes you think you're a god. But that's not everybody, right? You're caught by the ghosts and the demons of the past to the point that it almost drives you a little insane. It causes you to become a disassociative mess. You're just drawn to these good times. You don't have any concept of what is or what isn't. And that's where Ned's at. He just has this hairbrained idea that he can do this. And yeah, I mean, it's kind of a cool idea, but I assume you're going to have to know what you're doing to do this. And it's not like this movie is about training for an iron man triathlon or something like that. Ned just literally, with nothing but a pair of swim trunks, runs off pretty much into this wilderness area. It's like where Gizlane Maxwell got arrested, giant mansions, huge Olympic size swimming pools, and then a vast amount of nothing and well manicured woodland areas that he's got to traverse until he gets to the next pool. So some things to note here in this first chapter, whenever Ned is asked about his wife, he genuinely is a little upset about it. He seems to be a little aggressive.

[0:16:24] Harry Scott Sullivan: She's home, she's fine, and the kids are just playing tennis, and he doesn't really want to talk about the subject matter. Another is the constant referencing to the fact that he hasn't been around for quite some time and everyone is very surprised to see him at this portion of the film. They're overjoyed and happy to see him. And it's very warming and it's very exciting. And everything is fun in the sun. The sun is burning hot and everything is wonderful and the day is clear and perfect. But you can tell Ned is a man who lusts for a time when he was on top. You can see that he has not been able to let go of the glory days. And with that, Ned disappears from the pool and into the woods, leaving his friends standing there thinking it's all kind of a joke, reminiscing on also the good times they had with Ned. And we move into chapter two. Ned arrives at the next pool, where he's greeted by an old friend, and they begin having a discussion, like it's a little cross where she begins to remember how he used to treat her husband, and he doesn't seem to remember it. Something else we're going to have to note here. Get a pencil and paper and write down all the things I say. You have to note that at the end I'll quiz you. Let's be honest, I won't remember that.

[0:17:27] Harry Scott Sullivan: No quiz. We're not quizzing. Whenever it's addressed his previous behavior in life, he just doesn't remember. And it's not like a game. It's not, well, gee, Davy, I don't remember. He genuinely seems confused, and he's always confused and almost upset by people's behavior when they seem to have a problem with him. A flaw. A flaw with me. But I am God. I am Superman. There are no flaws with me. I am absolutely perfect. And everything I did was perfect. And he loved every absolute moment you spent with me. There is no other side to the story but mine.

[0:17:59] Harry Scott Sullivan: That's Ned's perspective. So it's addressed and brought up that he was really rude to her husband years beforehand. And he has a story. He always has a story. He always has a card, he always has some charm to get him out of the situation, which you start to round up and realize in the long run might have actually not worked for him. And it's just this last dying breath of someone attempting to fit in again, attempting to be something, attempting to go back to the past and reconnect with those glory days, getting a slice of Zah and listening to four non blondes in 1994 of all bands to reference. I don't know why I went with four non blondes, like Nirvana, Alison James. I don't know what's going on. And his excuse, of course, is, I was mad about you. I thought you was the greatest thing. That's why I got drunk at your wedding. And every time we go to a different pool, we start learning a little bit more about the inner workings of Ned. And we find out here that it looks like he got into his relationship with his wife, Lucinda by cheating or having heard sheet on her spouse with him, because there's a whole little reference about it. But the main point here is the fact that he will always use some form of charm, something that he feels he oozes to get his way out of a situation. And then two were presented.

[0:19:17] Harry Scott Sullivan: Once the husband finally shows up with his brand new toy, one of them fancy, alone, mowers you can ride. He has to oh, it's idling too fast. I've got to check this out. I've got to tinker with it. You can tell more and more his sense of authority, his sense of, I'm grand, I'm above you, I must be able to do something you can't do. Let me interject. Let me explain. Let me man explain. Let me let you know what actually is going on, because this is my reality, this is my world. You have to believe it, because it's what I'm seeing. And there's this thing, and again, just pointing out the boorish, lame nature of human beings. The wife is so excited to tell Ned about the pool and all these faculties and all these fancy things that it's. 99.99.99.99.99.99 point. Sorry. I was stuck percent clean and you could even drink from the pool.

[0:20:05] Harry Scott Sullivan: But the second the husband appears, he has to say the same thing because they're proud of these false achievements. I mean, shit, yeah, it's cool. If you get something cool, you want to talk about it. But it comes to a point that it's identity almost. It comes to a point that it's all you're consumed by are these things you have and not the things you've done or not who you are. But two, there's another side to that coin, because you can also end up being consumed by the things you've done and by what you were instead of progressing forward or evolving or changing or metamorphicizing turning into a cockroach, you know what I mean? There are so many different sides to everything because you can take something absolutely positive and still have a regressive and downfalling side, like getting stuck in the past. It's good to remember the things you've done and to grow from them and to change and to mold yourself into different things. If you have achieved something wonderful your entire life, then of course you're going to continue achieving. You're going to find out new ways to achieve and new ways to become successful. You're going to keep growing. You know what I mean? There's a positive to it. But if you're caught on that one thing you did 15 years ago and you just can't get over it, you're going to be consumed by the fact that you're a loser and all you can do is lose, and all you can do is fail. So side A, side B, ying and yang, one and the other.

[0:21:12] Harry Scott Sullivan: Am I making sense? So everyone seems to know Ned's story, but Ned again, when his daughters and his wife is brought up, he is hesitant to give a clear answer outside of their home. Everything's fine. Don't worry about it. And here's really where you start getting to see other people seem to really understand and know maybe a little bit more than him, that it's just the general reactions of confusion, maybe just a teensy bit of disdain. You can start feeling things get a little bit colder and you can start seeing, even at the second house, that not everyone seems to think Ned Merrill is as good as Ned Merrill thinks he is. And he is explaining what he's doing to everyone. He explains his idea that I'm going to swim the whole county. I'm a legend. I'm going to do this awesome feat, and it's going to be really cool. Hi, I'm Ned Merrill. Welcome to Jackass. He does the whole spiel and explains what's going on and just moves along. He's offered a drink constantly and never seems to finish one. Most of the time it's an alcoholic beverage and I'll have a few sips and maybe alludes a little bit to some of his previous behavior, but we'll get into that in some of the following chapters.

[0:22:18] Harry Scott Sullivan: So chapter two of the story, ned is at his second hole and he is falling further into a disillusion of life. He has this idea that everything he does is pure and perfect and he's wonderful and that everything he touches can be fixed and there's no worry about it because Ned's here, Superman's here. I'm the obermench to make another Nietzsche reference on the show and unnecessary Friedrich Nietzsche reference. There is no wrong with me. And he has to move on. So I guess it's time for chapter three. You start to get this idea, and it's just a theme that's within the movie, something that I think really adds to why this is such a terrific film and why it is absolutely horrifying. You can read into a lot of different directions and have a lot of different theories, but you know, something has happened at this point to his wife and daughter. You don't know if maybe his wife has left him or his daughters have left him, but there seems to be multiple open avenues that things aren't quite as nice on his big white house on the hill as he makes people think they are. So the third chapter, the homeowners aren't home, and he comes across a teenage girl and finds out, lo and behold, it is his old babysitter and she's grown up. He just doesn't seem to remember when. He remembers when she was knee high. Her brother enters the scene and he's again surprised. He even makes a gesture to your brother. No, he was only knee high.

[0:23:38] Harry Scott Sullivan: There's no way. And he's certainly enchanted, which the role is played by Janet Langard. She plays a character named Julie Hooper, and she is very, very beautiful and blonde and angelic, and he's overtaken. At first you start to think maybe by the innocence of the character, but he just doesn't seem to have a frame of reference in time. And here again, we move into what has happened to his family. You really start to get a little bit of crack in the egg of this movie. The yolk hasn't seeped out yet. We've got one firm egg, but soon we're going to have a whole omelet. He tells Julie that, of course, he still needs a babysitter, and she just seems a little taken aback by it. She asks what he means and of course, no, I need a babysitter. I can come pick you up this Sunday. It would be perfect. And Julie says, well, the kids would be so mad if they could hear you say that. So I thought at first something horribly had happened to the children, but I think at this point, he's just devastatingly alone. I think you're starting to find out that everyone else really knows something about Ned, and he either has completely neglected to bring it up, he's faking it, he's completely lying to everyone, or he has become disillusioned and disassociative.

[0:24:44] Harry Scott Sullivan: He has let his lies and what he wants to believe become reality to the extent that he actually can't see the future, because he is so obsessed with the past and he is so obsessed with what he thought was reality and what he took to be his level of reality that he is almost permanently stuck on. And she's just baffled. Okay, I completely understand. Maybe whatever. She takes it a little lightly, but you can really tell. And again, this is the second time that you've sensed with the background characters that something's wrong. The other characters, the other teens in the scene, are offended. Well, why wouldn't they have called us if they were back. They don't understand quite what's going on. And Ned has this concept that his children are nine and ten years old. As to where you're shown with the Julie Hooper character that she's 20, his children aren't children. They've grown. But for some reason, Ned doesn't have this concept or the recognition that this has happened. I mean, where are the years? Where are the memories?

[0:25:37] Harry Scott Sullivan: This takes us back to chapter one with where did he come from? He just popped out of the woods in a swimsuit and dived into his neighbor's pool. Where the hell was he? What was Ned Merrill doing? But after this awkward situation, he explains to Julie what he's doing, that he is swimming his way home. And she thinks it's legendary. Of course it appeals to her. She's 20 years old. She thinks it's a heroic act. She thinks something amazing is going on here. And I'm not saying the average 20 year old is a dimwit, but the whole point, I think, why Julie becomes part of the cult of Ned Merrill is because she's infatuated with the idea of just doing something when you're young and haven't done anything. Anything sounds fantastic. Anything sounds like something, and we find out. Well, I guess this is the next chapter. We find out that Julie has been obsessed with Ned since she was a child, that she had a little girl crush on him.

[0:26:26] Harry Scott Sullivan: She stole one of his work shirts, and she always dreamt when he would take her home from babysitting, that they were madly in love and couldn't be together, and she had to leave for Paris, so there was an ocean between them, and she was a little girl with a crush. But Ned, with his ego, with this concept that he is the greatest thing in the world, when he hears the sprummer, it just changes him, and it's incredibly uncomfortable. But at the same time, you're almost given this idea that Ned just wants to feel a sense of importance. He wants to feel that he's protecting and doing something, that he's missing something inside, that he had an inability to do that previously, beforehand, that perhaps maybe he wasn't the huge superman, white knight god. Maybe he wasn't all the money. Maybe he wasn't all the power. Maybe he was faking it the entire time, which is pretty much leading to this odd, disassociative state that he's gotten himself into the psychosis of really not being able to recognize his past. So Julie decides to leave with him. We got a little bit of a head, though, ourselves, but she loves this idea. She's enamored with this idea. So she goes, all right, let's go surfing now. Everybody surfing now. No singing. We're not going to sing. I'm not singing.

[0:27:31] Harry Scott Sullivan: And they're not surfing. They're swimming. But let's go swimming now. Doesn't sound anywhere near as fun. Imagine if the beach boys were just called the pool boys. Pokemon would have just been about a pool in Hackensack, New Jersey. So Julie and Ned leave, and they're on their merry way to chapter four. Like I said, we got a bit of ahead of ourselves because a lot of the things I just explained are what happened. At the end of chapter four. Julie tells Ned that she was infatuated with them as they're on the rise to approaching a nearby pool party. A lot of pool parties, I guess, are going on the moment they arrive. Everyone liked the first chapter, is incredibly excited to see them, but this time the difference is all of them ask, where have you been? What's going on? One character even says, and I quote, how can I diplomatically say this? How's your wife?

[0:28:13] Harry Scott Sullivan: So you really get a sense that there is some form of separation. That, for one, no one has seen Ned. No one in this social surf, this upper class, white, super rich society. Everyone parties together. Everyone knows each other. They're all part of the same little clubs. They all golf and eat finger sandwiches and mock the poor together. Everyone knows each other, and they're just shocked but excited. At this point. He's still warm and the sun is still shining and everything is beautiful. Oh, you know what? On the sense of that? There was something we left out from chapter two. Talking about warmth, talking about how everything is absolutely beautiful. That's what jogged my memory.

[0:28:48] Harry Scott Sullivan: In chapter two, there's a really potent scene where he's standing and Ned is standing, and they're on the edge of the pool, and they're looking up at the clouds. And the neighbor that he's barged in on, she mentions it's a beautiful day. The husband says something to the effect of not for that big, ugly cloud in the sky, something which Ned overlooks. He chooses to see in his reality the absolute beauty, and not this horrible big black storm cloud that is moving closer and closer and closer, but let's skip all the way back to where we are, chapter Four, and he has the same excuse. The kids are playing tennis. My wife is fine. Everything's okay. And he's got this essentially child with him. She's 20 years old, but he's got this very schoolgirl youth with him, which most people are taken aback by, that is very quick to get Julia away from everyone. They stand for a moment, have a glass of champagne, where he spouts out one of the most iconic lines of the film toasting Don Perry on with a child. Here's to the sugar on the strawberry. And he's very quick to not have her around anyone else. He introduces her awkwardly as his babysitter, which leads to another really intriguing scene giving some depth to his family and possibly the identity crisis that he's having. The house in which this pool he has to swim through is owned by a foxy milk, someone who's recently separated from her husband and clearly has some interest in Ned when they're standing and talking, and he introduces her to Julie. She has no regard.

[0:30:10] Harry Scott Sullivan: She's only about Ned. She wants to talk to him. And to his surprise, I mean, he obviously has been away long enough that he didn't even know that his neighbor has been separated, somebody that he seems to know somewhat intimately, at least, judging by their conversation and behavior. She invites him over for dinner, and you can tell that there's something sensual about the entire thing. And he mentions his wife Lucindo, which she has a great deal of disdain for. And it's one big joke to him. He even makes a face to Julie, like, who cares? And he's got to swim at this point. He's got to finish the pool, because that's one of the essential things. He might be able to stand and talk, and as he says, let's make sure everything's okay with the locals. He'll have a drink that he never seems to finish, but he's got to swim. He's got to do the entirety of the pool. So he dives in, he finishes, and then it's leaving the reality. He births himself each time into this new reality by jumping in and then washes himself free of it, Pontiacs pilot style, and moves away. Just assuming all the people love me still.

[0:31:08] Harry Scott Sullivan: Look at how many people shook my hand and wanted me to have a drink and told me how wonderful I am. And lady. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. DA. My farts smell like beauty, and I don't know what beauty smells like. Andy Warhol said it smelled like Chanel Number Five, but Andy Warhol also painted a lot of chicken soup cans. So I don't know if you want to take that opinion. I like him. And now we move to chapter number five. Or is it chapter six? I don't know. There's a tail end to this because as they leave the party, they escape into the woods, and there's an unnecessary scene. You start getting into some of the territory here, and I mentioned we might talk about it.

[0:31:41] Harry Scott Sullivan: I guess we're going to end up talking about it. So for the most part, this film was shot by Frank Perry, but the producer, Sam Spiegel, just didn't want anyone to have a nice time. And Sam Spiegel, unfortunately, had a great deal of power. This is the fellow that produced on the waterfront the African Queen. Lawrence of Arabia. Bridge on the River Kwai. He had some power behind his name. He wasn't interested in this. And something that I really think can be said about the swimmer is that it is an exploitation film. It is you can call it a cult film. The back of the box says it's a cult film, but it really, at its core, is an early exploitation film, a Columbia exploitation film. A big budget, a lot of money put behind this. And that's honestly the reasons why it didn't fly the way it did. There was a lot of recasting. Ilya Kazan's wife, had a scene in which he supported Frank Perry and Eleanor Perry's idea and what was going on with it.

[0:32:32] Harry Scott Sullivan: But he, behind the scenes, had a lot of disdain and worked with Sam Spiegel to get it cut. There's a lot of manipulative stuff that happened behind the scenes here. And this is why I said at the beginning, we can only do this one of two ways. We can talk about the swimmer, or we can talk about how the swimmer was made. And again, I will lead you to grindhouse pictures. Go buy yourself a copy of this movie, and you can learn all the fascinating things and all of this backstory. But this sequence was shot by Sydney Pollack. And I don't mean to just say, like, Sydney Pollock. I mean, the great Sydney Pollack, the guy that did the yakuza tootsie. You know, tootsie. That guy again, I don't know what audience I'm doing this show for. You know, tootsie? As the entire audience shakes their head, no, no, I don't. I don't know any of the things you're talking about. Hank, it's okay.

[0:33:13] Harry Scott Sullivan: I'm sorry. Actually, I'm not. You should learn all this. It's fascinating. You should enjoy yourself. And there is some importance to this scene. You've got Ned almost putting on a show, almost performing for Julie. He's not so much trying to serenade her, but at this point, he already knows that she's infatuated or was as a child with him, something that he kind of neglects. His feelings always remain the same, but he doesn't seem to recognize or deal with the fact that other people's realities and emotions have changed over time. Some things change over time. It might have been the connection and the affection attached to an old T shirt or an old love or somebody that has died just using all these as references. The T shirt being one of witches in the movie. It's a dress shirt. It's not a T shirt. But all things change.

[0:33:56] Harry Scott Sullivan: Everything. Like the seasons. It's aging and trying to recapture it, trying to even rekindle that flame, that passion that you had in that moment, something you might have not even known about 20 years ago. It's completely impossible. And more so than anything, it's uncomfortable. So Julie has opened herself up to Ned and has told him these things, these feelings from when she was 1112 years old that he now seems to just be obsessed with. And it doesn't even come off overtly sexual. There's a very awkward scene where he makes a biblical reference while touching her stomach and she withdraws. She's not happy about this. There was a sense of safety and respect in the legend of Ned Merrill, but now that she's dealing with the personal reality of him, there definitely is discomfort, something he is just not aware of. He can't even recognize and see outside of. I'm great. I can take care of you, and that's what I'm going to do. And that's what he says to her. You work in the city.

[0:34:47] Harry Scott Sullivan: I could go on the train with you every day, and we could go to lunch, and I could take care of you, and I could make everything okay. He doesn't say, I'd fuck the shit out of you. He doesn't say anything outlandish, but it's just so out of place. It's just not really something that you should have said. You've not seen this girl in years. You don't even remember the last time you saw her. You thought she was a child. You don't know anything really about her, and now you just want to take care of her. This overwhelming need, a sense of reality through taking care of someone, a sense of power through maybe taking care of someone, a sense of identity through taking care of someone. Because now you're something again. And you're starting to get this sense that maybe Ned wasn't so much of a something as he thought he was. Maybe he did have the power and the money, but it might not have been his. It might have been something he married into. And as you're getting this kind of picture that his wife is out, she's gone. It doesn't matter if she's dead.

[0:35:38] Harry Scott Sullivan: It doesn't matter if his daughters are dead. They're not in the picture anymore. And you're starting to realize that Ned is devastatingly alone, and he's trying to do absolutely everything to reconnect to his reality, to his past, to his beauty, to what he considers the absolute truth through his eyes, refusing to recognize anybody else's emotions, thoughts or feelings along the way. Thus, by doing this, absolutely frightens Julie, who thinks that she's in harm, she's going to be raped, that something awful is going to happen, and that definitely is the illusion that you're presented in the situation. And she fucking runs. She gets up and she jets. She gets out of the situation, leaving Ned once again devastatingly alone. Which leads us to an end of chapter four. Or, wait, were we on chapter five? We were at the party. Have we moved past the party? Tim Allen noises intensified. I don't know. Chapter five, I think we're on chapter five. This is going to get rough.

[0:36:37] Harry Scott Sullivan: So Ned is alone, and he's hurt. His dog and pony show, dancing around and jumping over equestrian props for Julie has led him to injure himself. And now he's weakened, and he feels a little bit of disdain. The day is starting to take its toll on him. He arrives at the next pool and finds a young boy with a lemonade stand. And he has no money, mind you. He's wearing only swimming trunks, no shoes. He's been hiking through the Connecticut wilderness, getting from pool to pool. He's tired, he's dirty. And he starts to haggle with this boy who's charged $0.10 for a glass of lemonade that he'll get him back the next day. No worries about it. Just like a crackhead outside of 711. Yo, let me get a cigarette, man. They never have the money. They'll come back.

[0:37:15] Harry Scott Sullivan: I just tossed it, man. You went inside? I was going to get the cigarette and you got the cigarettes for me and I got the money, man. A fucking chupacabra came out of the woods and they got me, and now there's nothing I can do about it. I can't even give you back the money and can the cigarettes that you still got the cigarettes. Ned Merrill is a crackhead outside of a 711. What a segue goddamn. We got off there. Sorry. Exactly like that haggling with this child that he'll pay him back tomorrow. The kid's parents, who you assume Ned knows he knew their names and he mentions them. They aren't home. And the kid has some wacky dialogue. It reminds me a little bit of that Cassavetti's movie Gloria with that fast talking Puerto Rican kid. God, the dialogue was wonderful.

[0:37:50] Harry Scott Sullivan: It's a shame that little dude didn't go on to make some amazing cinema. You can't beat the system. What's the system? System. I don't know. Then how do you know you can't beat it? This little kid has some just hysterical dialogue about his family and just a reflection on, really, life in general. I have to rely on my mom for news. My dad's in love with the manicurist, and my mom's on a honeymoon. I can't go on it. And it's just this little kid that's been left alone with the maids that Ned has come across, and he seems to show no real emotion toward the situation. He just wants to finish his journey at this point. He's had another beverage after haggling with the child for ten cents to have lemonade that he doesn't finish, doesn't even get his $0.10 worth, and he decides to truck onto the pool. The kid tries to warn him that it's empty, but by the time he gets there, he realized his dreams are crushed. There's nothing he can do.

[0:38:38] Harry Scott Sullivan: Everything counted on him being able to swim across the county, and now he can't do anything. But he ends up having this discussion with the child who lets him know the pool was emptied. Because I'm not good at anything. I'm not good at swimming. I'm just not really good at anything. And Ned tells him, and this is really important. This is a big note it doesn't matter being good at things doesn't matter. It's overrated. You don't want to be captain of the football team. You don't want the responsibility. You don't want to have to deal with all this stuff. You should just float through life. You don't want to have to deal with things. Which is a very big key into who Ned is and Pop possibly that all of these things that he relished in and his luxury and how much things were wonderful, he definitely isn't the god he thinks he is. His ego at this point is just absolutely raging.

[0:39:20] Harry Scott Sullivan: And he tells the child, if you believe in something enough, you can believe it's true. Underlined, underlined, underlined, you believe it's true. If you believe in something enough, you can trick yourself into making it your reality, into making it your existence, into you not recognizing what's going on around you because you're so concerned with your ego, with your past, with the reflection of how other people see you without even understanding and realizing you might have a perception of yourself, but there's no way at all anybody else in the world could ever have that same thought. You are something completely different from somebody else. It doesn't matter how James dean you are. Somebody might think you're marlon Brando. Ned is not willing to accept this. But what ned is willing to accept is the fantasy, something in which he instills upon this child by swimming, quote, unquote, the pool, despite it being not filled with water. He does all the strokes, and that's something he teaches him. If you do all the strokes, if you do all the things, you technically did it. So you can cheat your way through things. You can fake your way through things. You can fake it till you make it. But as long as you did the motions well enough, it still counts. It's still like it's real.

[0:40:22] Harry Scott Sullivan: So let's put this into example of having a wife and kids. You can have a family. You can go to work every day. You can work absolutely every single day and have yourself convinced that you've done it for your family, that you've done everything for them. But did you do anything in the reality that they wanted you to do? Did you spend time with them? Did you love them? Did you show them affection? Did you care? Were you there when they had great achievements? Were you there when they were in trouble? Did you actually care when they were in trouble? And this is something that is somewhat interesting with the concept of these daughters, because you start slowly realizing that his kids are definitely older than he has the perception of them being. And they're not the greatest kids. His wife seems to have left him, and his kids kind of look like monsters.

[0:41:03] Harry Scott Sullivan: But none of this is apparent to Ned. None of this seems to even reflect in his mind's eye, because he's convinced himself everything he's done has made him the greatest thing in the world. I worked for everyone. I worked at the office. I've done all these things. Look at my house. Look at my swimming pool. The big bulge in my wallet. Isn't it big? It's so thick. But none of these things essentially matter at the end of the day because love, compassion, family, familiarity, just peace of mind knowing that somebody acknowledges your existence and and loves you. These are the wholesome things that actually matter. And build relationships and build families and build all of the wonderful things that people call know is love something that Ned only seems to have an idea of? He seems to love the idea of all of these things. But when it comes down to how he actually did it, we're starting to understand it might not have been the best way.

[0:41:54] Harry Scott Sullivan: So he instills in this kid, if you believe in things enough, it's reality. And it's time for the chapter. At the end, he's got to go on his merry way. As he's leaving, he hears the little boy jumping on the diving board and realizes what he had just told him. And he rushes back limping. Age and time, and the day has started to truly affect him and pull away some of his super powers. And he grabs the little boy, and he grabs him and hugs him, and he holds them in an embrace. And the child goes, what's wrong? Why'd you come back? And he tells him, I just thought you were going to jump. And the boy looks at him so astutely and says, well, the pool is not filled with water. And that itself is a nod, letting you know again that everybody else's reality is reality. That Ned somehow keeps birthing himself into these worlds, that he won't recognize that he won't be a contender with, that he won't realize what is going on and what has happened to him and what he's doing to these other people by just showing up and abruptly birthing himself into this reality that he has been lacking of for years. He's been in literally the abyssal void. Nobody fucking knows what he's been doing.

[0:43:03] Harry Scott Sullivan: But this child has a completely different perspective, and that's the point I'm driving here. And he doesn't take that for any advantage. He doesn't realize his words aren't gold. He's just kind of happy about the situation, and he goes on his merry little way to the next chapter. Oh, God, is it chapter six or chapter seven? I said this was a nine part chapter, so I guess we're going to figure out at the end. I'm either really, really bad at math or I missed something. I don't know. The 6th chapter leads us into a slight bit of comedy, but there's not much allowance for laughs. If anything, it's a bit of social commentary that is smirkish. You can grin a little bit about what's going on. So Ned appears, and he is found by the driver of the owners of the house of his next venture, the next pool that he has to swim in the river Lucinda, on his quest to get back home, his eight mile quest to get back home. He can't seem to remember the driver. He recalls him as somebody else. And it's a little bit of a commentary here on racism, because all you black people look the same, that sort of thing.

[0:44:06] Harry Scott Sullivan: It's an African american driver, which was going to be played by Billy D. Williams. I think scenes were shot with Billy D. Williams, but these were some of the things that Sam Spiegel didn't think were that great and had reshot by Sydney Pollack. And that's really the direction of the scene going into Burt Lancaster even. Apologizes. I'm sorry I mistook you for Sam. I don't know why I thought you'd be him. And it's incredibly uncomfortable. And the driver doesn't seem to have he seems to show some disdain for Mr. Merrill. He doesn't seem to particularly enjoy the presence of Ned. He's very quiet and everything he has to say back there's a lack of jocularity. And it clearly is a representation of the upper white middle class mistaking anyone of color for the same person because of their own ignorance and xenophobia. But what makes it well rounded in the scene to pay off is the fact that he is stopping by the house of a couple, an older couple who are nudists, but it's not for some sensual nature.

[0:44:58] Harry Scott Sullivan: It's not exotic, and it's not a kink to them. It's the fact that they think the world is a little bit too prude. They're not communists. They're told by other rich, upper class white people that they're communists and they seem to have some enjoyment with it. And again, you're looking at the political nature. This movie was shot in 1966 and eventually released. Got 65 and 66. Get that grindhouse DVD. You'd know all the facts and you don't have to worry about me getting them wrong. But when it came out in 1968, the political climate, especially dealing with something as sensitive as topics like communism, is really unique. And that's kind of the depiction you're shown with these characters and I guess why they tried to use this little bit of it's not so much that Neds are racist. It's just the average, typical behavior of somebody that wouldn't think of anybody but themselves that, oh, gosh, I'm sorry, I thought you were the other African American gentleman that worked here. I can't tell the difference. And that's the tone that you're being given with this perception of Ned's mistake. But he genuinely seems upset about it.

[0:45:55] Harry Scott Sullivan: But again, he doesn't genuinely seem upset about anything. It's all sort of a fake bravado. It's kind of a Patrick Bateman American Psycho thing. You may shake my hand, but I'm not actually there. There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there. As he approaches the couple, they're talking amongst themselves and they're really worried he's going to ask for money. And you start realizing, and there's been a nod to it here and there that he has gone around maybe drunkenly, maybe out of his wits, and asked for money, begged for help. And obviously, it's not some small sum of money. It's not like he's tried to bump $50 here and there. It's in the thousands, and God knows how much higher. You're really starting to understand that Ned has nothing and that everything everything not just like a collection of his albums got lost, but everything has been thrown to the dust, and that he is now just existing in the wake of it in some strange void, that he is a hero to everyone and beloved. He just is in like a psychosis. He doesn't ask them for anything. He approaches them.

[0:47:14] Harry Scott Sullivan: He strips to the nude. You get to see Burt Lancaster's ass if that's something that you've craved for years and years and years. Yes, the swimmer from 1968. It includes Burt Lancaster's ass and again tells him what he wants to do. He's very defensive and upset when anything's brought up with his daughters or his wife. He tells them the same story. They're playing tennis, and she's at home. Everything's okay. You don't need to worry about it. And in this instance, he gets pretty rightfully upset, and he dives into the pool and decides to leave over it, because to him, it's badgering. To him. These people are invading his reality where everything is fine. I'm a god. I'm Superman. Don't worry about me.

[0:47:53] Harry Scott Sullivan: You should worry about yourself. I can deal with absolutely everything. And people keep bringing up to him like, well, because of the situation you're in, we're blah, blah, blah. We feel bad for you. We're sorry about this. He wants to even attend a ball that's being set up by this couple. And this is right before he dives into the pool to continue his journey. He insists that his name is written down for $1,000 a table seat. And immediately, once he finishes swimming, the husband is sort of jocular with his wife and says, well, he must be back on his feet. Everything's okay. And it's very clear she crosses his name out, because that's the not just woman's intuition. That's the cold, bloody fact something's wrong. Everyone knows something's wrong but Ned Merrill. And now we move on to the next chapter. Wait a second.

[0:48:41] Harry Scott Sullivan: Oh, no. One chapter is before the next one. I think we managed to give you plot devices before they were exposed, but not fuck up the story. My God, how have I managed to do it? Lower than expectation. Okay, it looks like essentially, we have recut the swimmer here. All right, this is the Hank edition, the Death by DVD cut of the swimmer. We did, in fact, get one of the chapters before the other one, but we haven't uncovered the glory here yet. And as usual, this is full disclosure. We're going to talk about what happens. You're going to hear what happens at the end of this movie. It's. All going to become uncovered. It's going to be the full monty, full exposure. So spoiler warning still where we're at right now.

[0:49:28] Harry Scott Sullivan: I've managed to not specifically ruin anything. Now let's go back and try and correct a little bit of our error. So after Julie runs away, discomforted by Ned's advances, that's when he meets the older, wealthy nudist couple. Well, everyone is particularly wealthy in this movie, but we got it a little reversed. So he meets the nudist couple, and once he leaves there, he meets Kevin, the little boy with the lemonade stand. And I still don't know what chapter we're on. Eight, I guess we're on eight at this point. So we've been a number off the entire time. Man, I bet it's a pleasure listening to Death by DVD. Fucking guide. Doesn't know what he's talking about. It's supposed to be a horror movie show. Talking about Burt Lancaster. I don't apologize. I'm not sorry.

[0:50:10] Harry Scott Sullivan: Not one bit. No, we're not. We're on seven. All right? Math is not one of my strong points. Simple math. It doesn't matter. Don't make fun of me. Don't shame me. All right, maybe a little bit. So the concepts of freedom and responsibility and or the lack thereof have become very evident and clear in what we're seeing in the swimmer. At this point, Ned is almost incapable of allowing himself to have freedom. He's convinced himself that he has to continue this route. By no means can he break it. And every time he tries to meet someone new, he just can't connect with them.

[0:50:41] Harry Scott Sullivan: He's stuck on the superficial level where nothing seems to matter, because no one's on his level, no one's on his little plateau of existence that he is definitely above them no matter what happens, because he seems to just know it. No one else seems to know it. He doesn't get it, but he doesn't understand why these people aren't facilitating his thoughts. And now the shift begins. He's started to get cold. And the more and more he realizes that people don't think of him the way he thinks of himself, a chill catches, and he just can't seem to get warm. And it's like the summer is just dissipating and that the seasons are changing, autumn is moving closer, an allegory itself. I mean, the entire movie is an allegory. But with him getting colder and colder and colder and the sun getting farther and farther away, you are given this perception an allegory of where he is and him realizing his true self, him realizing where he's at and what he's done, and that he is evidently alone. He arrives at a party, another party. It's a bebop and happy party, summer. But this time things aren't like the others. It's definitely a cold room. Immediately he's addressed by the homeowner as a gate crasher. And they don't seem specifically happy with his presence being there.

[0:51:54] Harry Scott Sullivan: He's chilled, he's tired, he needs some rejuvenation, and he asked for a drink? Could a gate crasher get a drink? And she doesn't care. And that's what she tells him at the bar. Ned attempts to understand the human plight by befriending Joan Rivers, the Joan Rivers in her very first film appearance, years before she became the melted plastic Barbie doll she was. And I say that with the utmost love and respect. I love Joan Rivers. She was a dirty, filthy bitch. God bless your soul. One of the funniest comedians of all time. She was great. Lastly, Ms. Rivers has asked me to mention that if, during the performance, she says anything that might offend any individuals, families, organizations, races, creeds, religious groups, states, countries or planets, please know that from the bottom of her heart, miss Rivers would like to say, just lighten the fuck up. He's a just joke. And she's playing a whoa.

[0:52:45] Harry Scott Sullivan: She's playing a whore. Your name for the sopranos. Ralph Siforetto. Could anyone say whore better than him? God. Whoa. I can't even do it. I just can't do it. There's something about Joey Pants that guy says whore the most entertaining. It's great. It's great. If you've never been interested in The Sopranos, please just check it out. To hear Joey pants say whore. Get it all cut, you little HOA. But all this over some dead hooah.

[0:53:13] Harry Scott Sullivan: She was a bleached blonde girl at the party. She's just there, too. Maybe we're being a little rough here, but I've been listening to some interviews with Joan, and this is what she took her character at. So I'm just taking this straight from the horse's mouth. And this is before she got her teeth fixed. She did have this big old horse teeth. I feel I have to make fun of her as much as humanly possible, because that's what she would have wanted. If you could just bash her and call all of her dresses tacky, as she did thousands and thousands of people on the red carpet all the time. I think that would be the best way to honor Joan Rivers. Caller at 30, bitch. But caller at 30, bitch. With love and respect, mind you. So he's trying to have this conversation with her, and it immediately becomes this egotistical driven, you've never met anyone like me. I'm absolutely amazing. Within three minutes of speaking to her, he asks, come on my journey.

[0:54:00] Harry Scott Sullivan: I'm swimming on my way home. And everyone says to him when he brings this up, like, I didn't know you could do that. No one's really interested or particularly cares about this quest, this legendary feat, this herculean I don't know if that's a term. This herculean feat that he is attempting to go through to what proved to himself that he's still a bad ass. It's it's all right. You know, he's attractive. He has a nice body. He speaks incredibly well, and that, at first, seems to be enough. But once people start talking to him, all of that charm just completely melts and goes away, and you realize he just is unable to even have a relationship. He cares so much about himself at Sociopathic, and that's one of the leading things he says to Joan Rivers, I want to take you away. I love you so much. This character who is just at the party, someone he's never met, somebody that he has no establishment, he even makes the point to tell her that he doesn't really know the hosts, that they weren't even part of his Christmas card list, that his wife Lucinda, didn't even seem to care about them. This omnius missing character, Lucinda, that he holds in this high Mother Teresa guard when he speaks of her, but absolutely doesn't seem to have an appearance, doesn't seem to even be in his life, and Joan's upset. The character also named Joan. It was actually written for her.

[0:55:09] Harry Scott Sullivan: It was specifically crafted for Joan Rivers. And again, as I mentioned it earlier, her very first role, her debut beforehand, she had just been working as a comedian. The advances are just as awkward as the weird love that he gave Julie the I'll take care of you. We could go into the city every day. Everything will be perfect. Run away with me. It's not even disillusioned. It's psychosis. He has no regard for other people's concepts and other people's reality. And Jones boyfriend quickly jerks her away, and he's kind of left alone again, something that is a constant theme. Every time that he is birthed into a new world, every time that he comes into a new pool, he is left devastatingly alone. At the beginning of the movie, the people seem charmed and happy to be around him, but it just seems like an inconsequential charm that they're happy because they haven't seen him for a while. But once he's gone, it's like a breath of fresh air. Oh, God. He didn't ask for money.

[0:56:00] Harry Scott Sullivan: Everything's okay. Something of which that he completely disregards. He doesn't seem to have any thought. He doesn't seem to recognize that he has done all of these things. Again, making notion to the fact that he keeps telling people his wife is at home and the kids are playing tennis, and everything's fine, but where are they? Where did he even come from? We have to go even back to the beginning and keep asking that question. Where did he come from? The void. So Joan is pulled aside by her boyfriend, leaving Ned devastatingly alone once again, where he dives into the pool upon coming out of this birthing canal. The new reality is something devastating because he recognizes something he sees something that was his own. The hot dog cart. The infamous hot dog cart. And I think that's something everyone can relate to. When you hit rock bottom, you lose your hot dog cart.

[0:56:51] Harry Scott Sullivan: It's something every boy and girl and everything in between knows. Hot dog carts. Like when you're 18 and you lose your first high school love and they take your hot dog cart. That happens to everybody, right? It happened to me. And again, this is a really big bourgeois party. So they have a hot dog cart coming by. I mean, like when I say party, it's not a couple of guys drinking some IPA, smoking American Spirits with a shitty bowl that's got a crack down the middle, and they're all smoking mids. It's a lot of rich people and really nice clothes, and they're all drinking martinis, and they're slamming 60s music like 60, 70 people. They're banging parties, not what you and your friends do on a Thursday night. Ned Merrill is up in arms over this hot dog cart. He just knows it's his. He knows it belongs to his. And immediately he's upset about it. He leaps out of the water and he addresses the situation where he finds out that it was sold at auction, that homeowner's wife purchased the cart, and it was theirs.

[0:57:56] Harry Scott Sullivan: It's definitely his. He recognizes pieces of it that he reconstructed and helped put back together when it was under his ownership. So it's not like he's delusional and he's just imagining a random hot dog cart as his. It was something that previously belonged to him, and it's established, and you're told it was bought at auction. Your wife must have put it up for auction. So he offers to buy it back for double the price. And he's assaulted at this point where he's pushed away and hit by the homeowner and said, get out of here. Beat it. You're a punk. Nobody wants your money. Nobody believes you. Nobody likes you. So our God has fallen. Superman has become the villain. This is better than Brightburn.

[0:58:30] Harry Scott Sullivan: I mean, that's the whole story of what if Superman was a villain? But really, I mean, you have the entire idea of Nietzsche's uber Mench. You have the perfection, the perfect man. He's doing every he's handsome, he's doing everything right. He has money, he's got mistresses. He's married with children and has everything you could dream of. But deep down inside, there's something hollow and imperfect about it. There's always a fault to that amount of perfection. And really, this could be that whole retelling. You can go watch Brightburn or you could watch the swimmer. So the homeowner knocks him on his ass and he's forced to take the walk of shame while everyone at this party this bebop and swinging happened in 60s party stands on the hill and watches him begrudgingly limp away. Still injured from his dog and pony, showed jumping around for Julie, attempting to be part of the crowd, attempting to sway the love of somebody that had a childlike crush for him. Lost in a senselessness. I mean, really, there's no reality for him at this point. He's just wandering, attempting to reconnect these emotions.

[0:59:31] Harry Scott Sullivan: He had these achievements that really are pseudo achievements, things that he never really did just this charm. He feels he oozes that is absent to everyone else but him. Again, how everyone seems to know his story, but he can't recall it. He chooses to not recall it. He's allowed his memory to become jaded and clouded by what he thinks is his reality because he's just so great. And mind you, he thinks this is all true. It's not so much that he thinks he's God, but he thinks he's much more than everybody else. He thinks that there is this notion of who Ned Meryl is and nobody seems to recognize it. And that makes me take it back to you don't know what things look like through other people's eyes. The Butthole Surfers, Pepper. You ever heard that song? Check it out. Pause the show. Go listen to Pepper by the Butthole Surfers and then come back. Just because you believe something to be true and you repeat it to yourself over and over and over again and your reality doesn't make it true in your perception, of course, yes, but your depth might not be the same as anyone else's.

[1:00:39] Harry Scott Sullivan: And the fact that Ned has truly convinced himself there is nothing more than his established persona that should be enough to tell you that there is something horrifying going on in the inner workings of his personal life. Now, like I had said, there could be an illusion that the daughters and wife are dead. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they're dead or they have left him. What is certain and what is significant is the fact that he is alone and the crushing brutal nature of being alone. Not lonely. I mean, he is alone and lonely. But what matters more in this essence is that he's alone. The crushing brutal reality that he is alone and that he cannot take it. To the extent that he has created this false world, this whole never never land he has become a lost boy. He has become Peter Pan, trying to keep this infinite youth, to keep his jocularity, to keep his strength. I am everything. I am beautiful. I am charming. I can always do right.

[1:01:32] Harry Scott Sullivan: And there is no way you can tell me anything different. It's really Peter Pan. I mean, that's the whole thing. These kids, they never come back home so they can constantly live within that beauty of the past. They can always be happy. They don't have to go to bedtime and they can eat cookies every single day of the week. It's very childlike, and it's very sophomoric just for the extent that he doesn't want to grow up. He doesn't want to deal with responsibility. He doesn't want to have these things haunting him. He just wants to be great. He just wants to be wonderful. Ned Merrill just wants to be God which is something every man wants to be. Everyone wants to be a god. They want to be the most significant, important thing in their reality. They want to be the master of that reality.

[1:02:13] Harry Scott Sullivan: But not everyone is a psychopath or a sociopath. I mean, Ned is sharing traits from both of these fields. At this point, he doesn't have any regard for anyone else. He acts completely on his own inhibitions without the thought or regard of anyone else. It's dangerous. It's becoming alarming. And you can start to see why Ned is alone, but he just doesn't know it. Ned also begins to become colder and colder and it begins to become more relevant that the chill he is feeling is caused by people. The opinion of him is causing him to just lose the sun, lose that warmth. He doesn't understand quite yet, but he knows that he's cold. And everyone around him is slowly, from that very first chapter that was excited to see him and so happy to be in his room. Where have you been, buddy? I've not seen you in a year or two. How's the kids? Now it's regressed and turned into a point of this son of a bitch.

[1:03:03] Harry Scott Sullivan: He's going to ask for money. Oh, you're back. How's your wife? It's all really sarcastic. It's all really hurtful and it's all really deep seated and something that Ned just doesn't seem to be able to even understand. It's like a confused child or even like somebody with Alzheimer's. You could take this to a different perspective of somebody. That's whole entire life is starting to disappear. I mean, I've been making this notion that things are incredibly similar to the innocence of a child. But really it is more apt to bring up something like an older person suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's because they've lived through all these glory eras and they understand certain things and they remember certain people attitudes and things. They acknowledge. But as the mind rots and the disease takes more and more and more, it's just these blips. It's these bits and pieces. It's like when you watch a clip from a movie on YouTube. You remember that one scene but nothing else.

[1:03:53] Harry Scott Sullivan: And all the other things, they fade away into nonexistence. He's got his own self according Alzheimer's. He has given himself situational dementia and choosing to not acknowledge the awful things he's done, but only regale and rejoice in the wonderful things he's done and how big his dick is and all these pseudo achievements and his tennis courts and his red jaguars, and his perfect, picturesque white picket fence family. He's very concerned with front facing. If it looks good on the outside, it doesn't matter what's going on on the inside. And you're obvious that things didn't work out on the inside. It's a horror story. There's no good. There's nothing he has touched that hasn't turned to rust. There's nothing that Ned has done that hasn't backfired. But he still has this obligation to himself almost to convince over and over and over again, I'm great, I'm good. There's nothing better than me and you love it. And that leads us into chapter eight. Chapter eight is a scene that was a reshoot by Sydney Pollack. The original scene starred Barbara Lauden, the wife of Ilia Kazan.

[1:04:57] Harry Scott Sullivan: Part of the problem with this movie, there were some sequences that didn't go right with this. With the shooting of this. It seemed like Burt might have been a little rough with what happened in the sequence. And we'll get into that and what happens in the sequence, but it didn't work out. Elia was really upset about it and he had spoken privately to Sam Spiegel about it not ending up in the film, much to the dismay of Frank and Eleanor Perry because he had come to them and had made it seem like he was all for it and that they were helping him out by having his wife. And I mean, it's Elia Kazan, so it's not like you're really helping the guy out. But at the same time, he was trying to be really nice to them while playing them in a different direction. So the scene was one of the many reshoots that Pollock did. What we have here is Ned coming across his mistress. Something that I thought was really interesting in the first chapter when he comes up with his entire plan and he devises how he's going to swim the 8 miles back to his home. There's a certain person whose name he just can't remember, and it's the last house. He just doesn't remember who lives there. And when the name is given to him, it said so coyly and with a sense of sarcasm that it's something that you need to take as a subtlety that Ned is having a hard time. He just doesn't seem to remember what's going on. And this person is somebody that he, with intent, has left out of his memory.

[1:06:12] Harry Scott Sullivan: And he's lost their name because he's done incredibly awful things to them. If not, the reasons he doesn't have a family anymore are because of this woman. I don't mean to put the blame on the woman. It's not that it's her. It's not that the things she did or why he might not have a family. It's the things that he has done with her and it's not her fault whatsoever. Again, we need to keep into restraint here that Ned Merrill, we're uncovering, is not a good man. He's not a particularly nice person, and he's got this egocentric complexity that he just thinks he's Superman. He just thinks he's the most marvelous thing in the world. And unfortunately, that's just a symptom of his psychosis, which you can clearly see. It's not something that just started with this movie. I mean, he appears completely randomly out of the woods and dives into someone's pool. But this is a form and this is a behavior that obviously has been something that has stoked his entire life, that he has consistently and continually thought of himself as more than he was, which is an all too human trait, and it's something that almost everyone is guilty with. But there again, like we discussed earlier, are two spectrums to that. Because there are people that think they are far more entirely important than they are, and then there are people that think they are far lower and lesser than they are and people that have problems not even coping or realizing that they're beautiful and perfect and wonderful in every way.

[1:07:28] Harry Scott Sullivan: And you are. And everyone that listens to the show absolutely is. Unless they are a shitsucking Nazi. That's all for the regime of fear. Her Trump, then I can't really speak about your beauty. Every man and every woman a star. A concept that Ned just can't get under his thumb. He is the star. There is no other person in this show. It is all about Ned. And he is unable to realize this as he comes upon his mistress because for once in this situation, he's going to have some relief. At the beginning of the story, everything was lovey dovey and wonderful, and everyone was so excited to see Ned. But as we've progressed through the chapters, it's become dark and cold and dreary and the seasons seem to almost be changing on him. It becomes one day, and then it's the next. He has no recollection of what he's done, who he's been or where he's at, and it's just this continuous search.

[1:08:16] Harry Scott Sullivan: He has to keep swimming until he gets home. But there's comfort now. This is my mistress. Everything's going to be okay. I'm going to receive that love I never got, that I had to hold secret that I couldn't let other people know about. This was something that was just for me. Another selfish notion that we received from ned Merrill. And this person doesn't reciprocate like the instance with the child. Ned is almost forced into realizing his reality isn't the concept everyone else has. But again, as with the child, he completely negates to realize and recognize what's going on. The scene was reshot by Sydney pollack with Janice rule. Janice plays a hurt and broken human being that has waited and hoped for the hero that ned Merrill feels he is. That she tried to believe in superman. She tried to have the same thoughts as he did. But unfortunately, like we, the audience, are presented throughout the movie, she saw the shortcomings and the fallings and the lies and all these awful things and the incomparability that these two could ever be together.

[1:09:21] Harry Scott Sullivan: She saw the ghosts. She realized and understood that there was no way that this man was ever going to let those ghosts that haunt and star in the picture show that is his past ever go away. Ned is so loving. He's so happy. He kisses her feet. He makes a drink in which she kicks him in the face and pushes him away. Somebody that finally is putting him in his place, somebody that finally is spanking the child. And he doesn't understand. He has no concept as to why she's being so upset. And he begins recanting memories, things that happened between them and all the sweet nothings while he cheated on his wife with her. But all these things are wrong. The memories aren't maybe her. He goes on to this whole tangent how they had this beautiful affair in Toronto last year as to where she lasted. She hasn't been in Toronto for three years. She doesn't know what he's talking about.

[1:10:07] Harry Scott Sullivan: He mentions that her bathing suit is lovely and she says it's last years. Oh, well, I don't remember seeing it. You weren't around last year. Again, something he has absolutely no recollection of, that he has become so despondent to reality, he doesn't know what's going on. He's so self obsessed with his conscious decisions of being the greatest in the world, the most dependent, the most wonderful man. He can't see the fact that there are other perceptions of him whatsoever or the fact that he has devastatingly destroyed people because of those perceptions, his own self perceptions. Surely his mistress, played by Janice Rule, tells him a story of where she spied on him one night after he had slept with her just several hours before. And he was with his family, taking them to the opera. And she watched his children and his aging VASER esque wife and how beautiful and everything was and the fact that he was so pleasant and happy. But it was because he had been with her an hour before and he was faking it. Every piece of his reality has been fake. Every part of his personality, every part of who he is has been faked. In fact, there really doesn't seem to be a Ned Merrill. And this is where we're at when we're at this 8th pool. We start to finally realize the person that we've been watching the entire time.

[1:11:22] Harry Scott Sullivan: And you have a lot of sympathy as the story begins to unfold and as things start to construct the beginning of the movie, you're wondering, like, why are people treating him this way? What's gone on? And again, this is your lead, your hero, just to use that term. You're given somebody that you know, it's a writer's term. You have to follow and acknowledge them. So you don't really want to have disdain for your hero. You want to follow them and have a representation of yourself inside of them and maybe something that at the end of the day, you can go, Well, I'm like that person. But when you watch this movie, hopefully you start detaching from that and slowly realizing this is inhuman. This is the farthest thing from being human that you can possibly be. This person is a character. He's a complete, absolute character of what a human is. He takes the story with little acknowledgement as to where Shirley Retorts with when you left and you went home and you called me from the train station crying about your wife and how you truly loved me but couldn't be with me. I was sleeping with somebody else. And we listened to your cries on the phone the entire time. And he refuses to believe it.

[1:12:23] Harry Scott Sullivan: He refuses to acknowledge what's going on. And she says something really potent back to him. You'll never know, as if he ever has. And at this point, I think what we're told and exposed to with the character is he hasn't known anything the entire time, and neither have we. We are lost in the same shrouded void as he is. We don't know what he's trying to connect to, but I think at the most, it's his past. He's trying to connect to this era, this point, this place where he was a something, where he wasn't anything, when he wasn't just lackluster, when he wasn't average, when he wasn't a poor person, when he wasn't just part of society, when he wasn't just a mere meagre man. He remembers and requests everyone to think of him as Superman. And that's just not how it is. People see you the way that they see you. You can't change it. Things go awry when Ned continuously pushes himself to Shirley, continuously tries to remind her of how wonderful things are. They eventually get into the pool with his internal quest of having to finish things. This is the first time he's managed to get somebody to come into his birthing canal to join him in this reality. And I think personally, he's hoping in this essence that he can convince Shirley to be a part of his new reality, to be a part of everything and that it's going to be okay and wonderful and beautiful.

[1:13:42] Harry Scott Sullivan: And she rejects it. He begins telling her about how they made love in the pool and how wonderful it was, and she tells them it was an act. You talk about yourself and how wonderful you are, and you talk about your wife and your woes and your misery and all of these self inflicted bullshit things. You talk about sports and how you're a swimmer and your yacht and how big your dick is and how wonderful you are. You talk so egocentrically about how you just might be the next coming Jesus Christ. But in fact, you're fucking boring. And I acted. I faked it. I just nodded and smiled. And you know what? Ned does the same thing he does the entire time. He nods and he smiles and he tells her, I'm a very special human being, noble and splendid. I was the best. And you loved it. You loved every second of it.

[1:14:29] Harry Scott Sullivan: You loved everything. You can't lie to me because I'm Ned Merrill, and there is no one that will ever be greater than me. And there's no time that you've ever spent on this planet that could ever be. Better than with me. Ned Merrill. She leaves him in his birthing canal and storms inside while he screams. I mean, it's just like Star Trek Two. Come on. But he's just yelling, you loved it. Psychotically, like an angry jock outside of a kegger when a girl throws a Bud Light in his face. You love it. You loved every second of it. You loved me. Not even just accentuating that he's such a great lover. It's just you loved me.

[1:15:07] Harry Scott Sullivan: You loved the experience. You loved being around me because I am the best. I am the best. What did I teach you? You are Duke of New York. You're a number one. I can't hear you. Something that he can't get over. He can't get past the fact that other people can't see this greatness his psychotic breakdown that he is God. Other people view and they're seeing this and they're feeling woe, they're feeling shame. Shirley is heartbroken. Shirley loved Ned. She wanted nothing more than the reality that he made for her, that he would lie and spin all these webs that things are going to be beautiful and we're going to have this wonderful nice sunset, picturesque van Gogh, starry, starry night. And every day you wait and wait and wait for a liar. Every day you wait and wait and wait for somebody that has gaslighted you and made you into a broken, nothing mess.

[1:16:12] Harry Scott Sullivan: And then they appear like they're God. What do you do outside of sharing how you truly feel? And what do you do when the person doesn't care? And that's where we're at with Ned. Because he's a man on a mission and this is just something that's beneath him. He is convinced. You loved it. You loved every minute of it. You loved it. And that's all he cares about because that's what his recognition of reality is. You love it. You love me. And I am a number one. The Duke King of New York. I'm that guy.

[1:16:43] Harry Scott Sullivan: Personally, if we're making escape from New York references, I'm more of a brain. I'm the brain. Just saying. You always were smart, Harold. Just one thing right now. Don't call me Harold. For one person, this is a crucial moment in their reality that is nothing but hate and pain and woe and a scab being ripped. But for Ned, it's just swimming. For Ned, it's getting wet, it's taking a dip. And he must progress forward because nothing matters more than to getting home because his wife is there and everything is happy and his kids are just hanging out, playing tennis. They're waiting for him. It's Sunday. They like to have Sunday meals together and everything is going to be picture. Ask him. Perfect.

[1:17:24] Harry Scott Sullivan: And now we move into chapter nine. And if this was the inferno, this would be moving into hell. This is when Ned has a meeting with Virgil, sort of. This is the public pool. This is finally coming down to the broken nature of all the things he stood up against, all the things that he thought he was better than all the things that made him a god. At this point now, Ned is a commoner. Ned is forced to go to the public pool. His last stretch of getting home, the one thing that stands between his house and it costs a mere fifty cents to get inside. But mind you, this man is wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks so he can't really functionally do anything again as he did with the child. He begs and he, barter, is attempting to get in. But the harsh realization of everyday life is nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares if you don't have money. Nobody cares if you don't have a place to stay, and nobody cares if you don't have food. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about anything.

[1:18:14] Harry Scott Sullivan: That takes us back to the sad and brutal realization of what humanity is. It's a bunch of people that are obsessed with false achievements and stupid products and things that don't actually matter instead of their own achievements and looking at your neighbor and seeing if they're doing well enough. If seeing the people around you are doing well enough. Taking care of other people, loving other people, having compassion, having a thought, your own singular thought about other people. Ned is demeaned as a common man. He's forced to shower before he can enter the public pool. He's forced to beg somebody that he knew in a previous life for fifty cents to get inside, and he has to wash his feet. And that's something I thought was really unique, that he is degraded. He is put down onto our level. And by our level, I mean the average man. I mean, if some billionaire is listening to Death by DVD, buy a T shirt, for God's sakes. Come on, hey, help us out a little bit. This shit isn't free. The average person has to stand in line. The average person that has to deal with the mundane, brutal nature of what life is, the boring essence of life.

[1:19:19] Harry Scott Sullivan: There are no get out of jail free cards for us. You can't pay your way out of getting in trouble or drunk driving or speeding tickets. The average person doesn't get to cut going to the movie theater. We don't get the box seats at concerts. We don't get to shake hands with Mick Jagger and meet the Rolling Stones when they play Our Town for $190 for the worst ticket available in the back bleacher seats of a stadium. No, the average person doesn't get to have those things. This is something that is elite. This is something that is given to those that don't seem to care about the others. And I'm using that as a reference for Ned and Merrill because it truly is something that is a constant theme from chapter one to where we're at now. This man has not been able to have even a conversation with somebody that doesn't turn into him, talking about how great he is. So he doesn't have a concept about anybody else's woe, anybody else's pain, anybody else's feelings. So he's degraded and forced through the circus of being average, the circus of mediocrity, the circus of what all of us normal people have to deal with, until finally he can jump into an ultra crowded pool. Everywhere he's been has been pristine and upper class and rich and beautiful. And it's had the greatest filtration systems. You could drink the water out of the swimming pools.

[1:20:32] Harry Scott Sullivan: It's just great. And now he's in a chlorine filled piss and shit pool with 800 other townies inside of it, lifeguards blowing whistles left and right. It's pure confusion, anarchy, chaos. It is anxiety. And we're reaching a point where maybe where he's realizing that he isn't what it all seems to be. He isn't cut out to be this golden god. He's got to deal with the common folk. He's got to deal with the poor. He's got to deal with the people he possibly could have wronged. And he struggles his way through the pool. They call it the east river crawl. It's where you throw your hand in front of yourself and just try and push trash out of your face like you're swimming through the east river, which is funny. Prior to taking this role, bert Lancaster had a disdain for being wet. He couldn't stand even swimming when he was a child, a youth. He was stuck under a pier, couldn't breathe completely, thought he was going to die.

[1:21:22] Harry Scott Sullivan: And since then had had a lifelong hatred of swimming and being wet. And his children would describe him as a pretty jocular guy and would play in the pool with him. But by no means was he a swimmer. He actually took courses with the UCLA Olympic swim coach to figure out how to perfectly be a swimmer, which I guess is a testament to Burt Lancaster. He didn't want this to just look fake, and that's something really about him. He was an artist. He really was into something, having a message, and that's what was important to this significant product and something that he was really proud of. To the fact that the production company, Columbia's Sam Spiegel, stepped out and he ended up paying about $100,000 of his own money to keep production online. That he was proud of the message that this movie was showing. He was proud of the art. He thought it had integrity. And that speaks volumes on Burt Lancaster. So he exits the pool and he meets the couple that he had met while he was going in. He begged from them to get the come inside the pool, and at this point, they've been enjoying watching him. They've had pleasure seeing how the mighty have fallen.

[1:22:25] Harry Scott Sullivan: And this is one of the most bitter scenes than when things truly become cold. Now, remind you this entire time as we progress through the story, ned has gotten colder and colder. He's caught a chill, and he's been unable to really shake it. And now he's just freezing. I mean, the sun is still shining. It's still beautiful outside, and Ned just can't take it anymore. And two couples are standing and waiting for him, two people that he seems to owe money to that are very angry about it, one of which is a somewhat kind husband who just attempts to speak to him and attempts to figure out what's going on. He seems to have the clue that everyone else does, that they know something Ned doesn't know, and he's just baffled. They bring up his daughters and how rude they are and how he's kept their names out of the newspaper when they've had a car accident, like George W. Bush's daughters. It's a similar situation to something like that, and he just is baffled. He doesn't understand why people are attacking him while they're being rude to him. And then you're given the idea that he owes money, that he doesn't pay his debts, that for the last year, maybe two years from the last pool party looks like three years he's been out of circulation and has just not existed. You're given this idea when he encounters his mistress and is attempting to circumnavigate through all of his problems that his wife owned everything, that his wife's name was on the lease, she was the money, and that whatever has happened has left him completely devastated because, one, he was a misogynist, a sociopath and a psychopath and absolutely doesn't seem to care about anything except himself and the front facing and this beautiful notion that I have things. Look at how proud I am.

[1:24:03] Harry Scott Sullivan: Look at all the things I have. Look at how great I am. When in actuality, you have nothing but a broken home and a basket full of lies. And then again, driving the point that he doesn't know what's going on. He doesn't seem to recognize and realize what's going on. So at the city pool, these people that he has wrong, they're people that seem to own a market from town. One man talks about having a restaurant and how Ned would come in and he could count on him having a couple of drinks and a hamburger. He's the only louse they've ever had. He's the only deadbeat they've ever had that everyone else manages to pay their bills but him. So these things are starting to connect this loneliness, this emptiness that he can't even have a fan base with the local people. He can't even have a follow ship, and the lower class, average Americans can't even look up to him. I'd say, like Donald Trump. But unfortunately, it's a psychotic following that still prays to the mass of this ludicrous Nazi. So I can't even make that allegory. What a fucking shame.

[1:25:01] Harry Scott Sullivan: Really. Like, what a fucking shame. But he takes it, and he takes it with such utter confusion. He doesn't understand why anyone would have something negative to say about his perfect daughters. He doesn't understand why anyone would have anger to say about his wife. Because in his mind and his concept of reality, he's done everything perfectly, and there's been no fault. He's done nothing but raise respectable, wonderful, grade A white Americans. And that's the dream, right? That's the whole thing. We're upper class, everything's perfect, and we're going to go to Yale and don't worry about it. When you get home, if you don't want to be a lawyer, you can just take the yacht out, enjoy yourself. Don't worry about it. We'll have the servants take care of things. It's this whole concept, this whole non reality where you don't function, where you don't work for anything, where you don't have any goals, where you don't have any pride. And I don't mean that in a sense of working as going to fucking a grocery store every single day of your life and making slave wages that you can't even live on and dying eventually.

[1:26:04] Harry Scott Sullivan: I mean, working for a goal or working for a better tomorrow for yourself or maybe the world. I mean, not everyone's going to be a Nobel Prize winning scientist. But hey, write a story. Make some art. Do something for yourself. That's the whole driving force. Do something in this existence, this short time that you're given to be in reality and your reality and everyone's reality and this shared consensus of whatever the fuck reality may be. Do something that pleases you. But if you're involving other people, you have to. If you're a family man, if you have a wife, if you have children, you can't just have a reality of I'm going to do this, and this is me, and I'm a god, and I'm going to jump out every single day and stick my dick in absolutely everything because, hey, that's what I can do. I know how to do it. There's no reality. There's no life. There's no passion. You're fulfilling a circle.

[1:26:55] Harry Scott Sullivan: You're just circle jerking. Let's use that as a term. It's just one big infinite circle jerk. Nothing really is productive, and nothing really happens, and then you die. Ned seems to be in the cycle, this infinite circle jerk of I got to do it, I got to do it because that's what you do, and that's how things are done. And he's confronted truly with the ghost of his past, like Ebenezer Scrooge at the pool, at the public pool. Because these people not only know who he is as some rich fuck, as some big one percenter, as somebody that's always looked down on other people, that's never had time for the common folk, but they also look on him now as a common person, as a commenter that's below them, that the equation has completely changed. The tables have flipped, and we are realizing and seeing what the common person thinks of Ned Merrill, what all of the people think of Ned Merrill. We go back to chapter one. Is this how everyone thought of him? The the oh so nice friends are they just showing concern because they know he's broken, because they know that ned has gone insane and there's nothing that anyone can do about it? Who knows? But what we are shown in the stark reality and the brutal, rude nature of reality is that the lesser class, the lower class, the bottom class, they have disdain for anyone else in power. And it's almost a tribal show. You get to understand and see collectively that these people all feel disdain because ned not just ned, but that 1% people like ned have wronged them.

[1:28:24] Harry Scott Sullivan: People like ned are the reason things aren't good, because people like ned only care about themselves and are only stuck in this situation where they care about themselves. There's no diplomacy. There's nothing beautiful about it. There absolutely is an inclusive nature. When you're rich, when you're successful, when you're beautiful, you're only surrounding yourself with rich and successful, beautiful people, and the rest of the world becomes a false reality that you just can't acknowledge or recognize anymore. That's where ned is. He can't deal with this. He can't take what these people are saying to him. So he flees, and he literally runs up a giant hill, hurts himself injures himself to escape the situation. He can't deal with the idea that these people don't recognize and see him as a golden deity for once. The things people say to him seem to have some sort of effect. They seem to stir and cause any form of emotion. They strike, and they cause anger, confusion. He's absolutely baffled. There's just no sense to any of this.

[1:29:22] Harry Scott Sullivan: He just can't see what other people realize. He's broken. He runs away. And this is finally over the hill. We've passed the 8 miles, and he's heading home. We've finished the river. Lucinda we've gone through all the heights and all the lows we've encountered the natives we've explored, and that was one of the big points for ned. He wanted to be an explorer. He wanted to come over new territory. So, really, you could even, like, throw this in with a comparison for heart of darkness. I mean, it's really somebody going upriver, and let's strip apocalypse now from this and just talk about heart of darkness. What you've got with the narrator and their reach and their search into finding curts is the deepness of their soul is unturning every single rock and stone and the bitter, utmost nature of being alone, not lonely. And what we realize and what we discover with Burt Lancaster's, ned Merrill is he is devastatingly alone, that he has done nothing but fabricated his own reality, because we get to his house, gates are covered with rust. He can't break past. He finally gets inside and it begins pouring down rain.

[1:30:29] Harry Scott Sullivan: That cloud from chapter two, that ugly cloud that was called out, finally comes over his head and starts bursting down rain and thunder, and he is stuck in despair. He is stuck in the absolute bottom level of hell at this point. He's banging on the door to his house. There's no salvation. There's no way of getting inside. He can't. He's struggling, and he's cold. And what you slowly start to realize is the dismay that this house is in. Everything's falling apart, and everything is ugly, and it's overgrown. It's not been painted. It's not been cleaned. The windows are broken. And we focus in on the broken window, and it lets us examine the true nature of not only Ned Merrill's home, but Ned Merrill's soul. Empty, lonely, and everything has been stripped and sold and auctioned off away to other people because he never once had his own idea. He never once had his own concept of a soul.

[1:31:27] Harry Scott Sullivan: He never once had any grasp of human nature. He lived specifically to go through the throes. He lived just as he acted. I mean, let's look at Burt Lancaster as an actor and something I discussed earlier in the show of his nonstop, heroic, tough guy role, something he later on had disdain for. That's what Ned Merrill is, just a tough guy role, but this person never had to stain for it. Ned Merrill actually felt they were the primordial essence of man, what mattered, what needed to be done. I have done everything possible. I have great kids. My kids love me. I've done everything for them. All I ever did was work for them. So they obviously have to love me because I did things for them but not loved them, not loved anyone, not shown any compassion or the nature of compassion, not showing any absolution and true love. This is a story of emptiness, loneliness and madness. The Swimmer screenplay by Eleanor Perry. Directed by Frank Perry.

[1:32:34] Harry Scott Sullivan: Some scenes by Sidney Pollock. Short story by John Sheaver. One hell of a ride. This truly is a gym. This is a beautiful movie and a near perfect movie. This is a movie where the message matters more than the story. This is a movie where the feeling matters more than what you're presented and shown. But unfortunately, there are a lot of dense people out in this world, and it has never been a favorite. It's a quote unquote lost movie. We can be so thankful for Grindhouse and Bob Murawski and company that have kept this title alive and have rereleased it. But what we're dealing with here truly is a late era, big budget, massive company, Columbia produced exploitation film. But this isn't like maniac. This isn't like New York ripper. This isn't like Suspiria. This is something different and the subtle nature and the growth and how each chapter grows, and each chapter starts to present a different form.

[1:33:36] Harry Scott Sullivan: Each chapter takes a different shape. Each story, almost like an anthology, separates itself and allows you to be exposed to who Ned Merrill actually is, to break down the god. That's what the beauty and just the amazing nature of the swimmer is just one hell of a movie, a big budget movie that just doesn't seem to have the attention with the exploitation and horror crowd that you'd think it would. I mean, you have so many people that rave and love, like, god, Clive Barker is so genius. Steven King, I love him. I think he's so great. Well, watch the swimmer, okay? I won't insult you. Watch the swimmer. I'm not going to say that one thing is lesser than the other, but when you sit down and you watch creep show, when you watch anthology films, when you watch things like NCIS and whatever, whatever with Christopher Maloney, you want that shock. You're excited about trying to figure out the case. Like Colombo. That's the fucking best thing about Colombo. Each episode starts off with the crime, and then the whole process is figuring out how Colombo solves the crime. That's the goddamn trick.

[1:34:48] Harry Scott Sullivan: That's the beautiful thing about the swimmer. That's what makes this movie money. It's a bear, baby. It's a fucking bear. It's money, the swimmer. It's money. Because each layer that you progressively get to each time you take a step with this character and each time he goes to a different pool, it essentially is a step. So it's like the entire movie is getting somewhere. It's going somewhere. It's going on a journey. It's going to the top of the stairs. Each time ned merrill takes a step, and you start feeling disdain and you start feeling disgusted, and you start realizing the true nature of him, what you're actually doing is recognizing the nature of man, yourself and everyone around you. Because, unfortunately, ned merrill is the greatest personification of an american, of an American man, of a white American. This is Ned Merrill, because he doesn't care. He doesn't care at all about you.

[1:35:40] Harry Scott Sullivan: He doesn't care about your family. He doesn't care if you're sick. He doesn't care about black people. He doesn't care. That's Ned Merrill. It is a man who doesn't care, which is funny, because you've got this whole crowd of people walking around and quoting things like, I'm a man who couldn't take it anymore. I'm Travis Bickle. It's the same personification, and it's scary. It's not something to think of as a hero. Travis Bickle, tyler Durden, Alex. From A Clockwork Orange. These aren't heroes. They're people that couldn't even feel the slightest bit of empathy, people that were so stuck in their own reality that they couldn't see the way the sun sent people like Ned Merrill, burt Lancaster, and the swimmer. 1968. The last chapter is Ned Merrill returning home at the end of his journey.

[1:36:30] Harry Scott Sullivan: He finally makes the 8 miles. He finally finds everything broken and lost. Nothing is he remembers. Nothing is his reality. And that's just the way it is. You focus and you spend so much time on those good years and those good times and all those things that made your life without the recognition of the people or the thought. All these things like tears in rain. God damn you, Ridley Scott. God damn you, Blade Runner. But yeah, time to die. I mean, really, what's left? That's what the end of this movie is. It's the broken thoughts. It is somebody that is coming to terms and realizing that they're not God, that they are not anything and really is anyone anything. You've got your dreams and your hopes and your aspirations, but the thing is, that's not what you are and not your reality.

[1:37:25] Harry Scott Sullivan: And you've got to work through whatever that is to figure out who you are, or you end up dying. Just some carbon copy of something else, just some hallmark card. They were a good man. They were nice. A generic, non statement. Ned Merrill, he faked it the entire way. He faked it until he thought he had made it. But in actuality, there's nothing there's nothing but emptiness and the inevitable return to emptiness. He faked it until he thought he made it, and there is nothing. There is nothing for him. At the end of the day, he's got an empty home of things that were sold at auction and no family, no life, no wife. But the concept of I'm a god, broken and lost in the rain. What happens to those thoughts? What happens to those memories? What happens to those people?

[1:38:11] Harry Scott Sullivan: Where do they go? Where does Ned just return back into the woods as he appeared so briskly at the beginning of the movie, diving into a pool full of life, full of ego, full of concepts of love and sex and how rich and wonderful he was? Does he just disappear as broken and despondent? Does he just go with disdain into nothingness and seep into the void? What we're left with is all of these questions, and we have ultimately the thought and the construct that Ned has never known anything. What we've gotten is a story of pain. While with his mistress, as she pushes him away, ned says something to the effect of, what's wrong with the sun? Why isn't it warm anymore? He tells her nothing has turned out the way I thought it would be. Well, unfortunately, that's life. That's reality, but not the reality that he chose for himself. Ned Merrill, a man constantly lost. Ned Merrill, a man who can't recognize the future. Ned Merrill, a man haunted by the ghosts of what were and what could have been. The astray is full, and the bottle is empty.

[1:39:31] Harry Scott Sullivan: Thank you for listening to Death by DVD. Hello. Is it me you're looking for? You are probably looking for the end of this episode. And don't worry, it's near what you were just listening to. Is the first entry of what I am calling Death by DVD Directors cuts. This is where we take something old and make something new. The idea here is to take old episodes, clean them up, recap them, redesign them to be more listening. Is this even a word? Make them more betterer for you to hear. The episode that you just heard was originally called here's to Sugar on the Strawberries, and it originally came out September 18, 2020. It's not a very old episode, but it seems to be a fan favorite, and I'm pretty happy to bring this one back. The original episode ran 1 hour and 46 minutes. A beef, a boy. This version, not counting intro or this, the Inside the Actors Studios segment I've got going on here, or rather inside the Death by DVD Studio is 1 hour, 38 minutes.

[1:41:20] Harry Scott Sullivan: Still a beef. A boy. Regardless of runtime, though, I think it's a very different listening experience. It's much more focused on the swimmer, and I think it's a little bit more fun to listen to. And before the show finally ends, I have one last thing to say. The original episode here's, two Sugar on the Strawberries, will remain available wherever you get your podcast, whether it be our website, Deathbindvd.com, or an app, you will still be able to hear the original and listen to this. You can compare the two, listen for what's missing, what's new, all of that stuff. But this will not be customary for every Death by DVD Director's cuts. Some episodes will just be completely replaced. But I will let you find folks know more about that when the time comes. And now, for the second time on this episode, I am Hank, the world's greatest. The astray is full and the bottle is empty. Until next time, be pleasant. Death by PVD is recorded in front of a dead studio audience. Portions of today's programming have been mechanically reproduced.

[1:42:58] Harry Scott Sullivan: The management and the staff wish you a pleasant good night and good morning.