Abstract
The final freeze frame of Frank Perry’s The Swimmer offers a disturbing suburban tableau, highlighting the vulnerability of the suburban male. After tracking Neddy’s trek across the ruined grounds of his home, Perry’s camera frames the protagonist against the backdrop of the deserted house and shows him pounding on the outside of the locked door, crying, sinking to the ground, and growing increasingly weak until the camera finally freezes on this scene of utter despair. At the completion of his suburban “odyssey,” Neddy Merrill bears little resemblance to Homer’s Odysseus, and his return “home” brings the devastating realization that there is no home to return to. This closing reinforces the notion, alluded to throughout the film, that for men (and particularly male heads of household), the suburban milieu is fraught with peril.
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Notes
Dana Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 54.
John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 181.
Richard E. Gordon, Katherine K. Gordon, and Max Gunther, The Split-Level Trap (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1960), 28.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1961), 494.
Consider, for example, the case of Levittown, New York, the prototypical postwar suburban development town. In the early years of the town’s existence, utter control over the landscape remained in the hands of the developers/town planners, Levitt and Sons, who prohibited even minor alterations to individual plots. For a description of life in the early days of Levittown, see William Gans, The Levittowners (New York: Pantheon, 1967).
In a more recent theoretical formulation of “corporate” placelessness, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have argued that the global spread of capitalism has entailed a process of “deterritorialization” that effaces connections to landscape even as it inducts workers into the machinery of corporate culture. While Deleuze and Guattari’s argument centers on the “schizophrenic” effects of capitalist expansion into developing nations, their argument resonates with the spread of “placeless,” corporate suburban landscapes in the postwar United States. They see deterritorialization as part of the “cruelty” of the capitalist system, in that it serves to efface the distinction between the individual and the corporate altogether: “Cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them... [making] men or their organs into the parts and wheels of the social machine.” For the authors’ discussion of territoriality and deterritorialization, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 145–153.
As Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak note in The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977)
Donald J. Greiner, “No Place to Run: Rabbit Angstrom as Adamic Hero,” in Lawrence R. Broer, ed., Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels, 8–16 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 9.
Mary O’Connell, Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma: Masculinity in the Rabbit Novels (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 2.
Sandy Finkelstein, Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 244.
Howard M. Harper, Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin and Updike (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 171.
Gordon E. Slethaug, “Rabbit Redux: Freedom Is Made of Brambles,” in Critical Essays on John Updike, ed. William R. Macnaughton, 237–253 (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1982), 240.
John Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Knopf, 1971), 3.
Robert Detweiler, John Updike, revised ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 132.
J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), xii.
Ralph C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption: Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 202.
Donald J. Greiner, Adultery in the American Novel: Updike, James, and Hawthorne (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985), 38.
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 153.
Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 180.
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 181.
Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorcese, Spielberg, Altman, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 325.
Quoted in Glenn Man, Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967–1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 47–48.
Ivone Marguiles, “John Cassavetes: Amateur Director,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis, 275–306 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 280.
Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, American Film and Society Since 1945 (New York: Praeger, 1984), 88–89.
Ethan Mordden, Medium Cool: The Movies of the 1960s (New York: Knopf, 1990), 180–81.
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© 2004 Robert Beuka
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Beuka, R. (2004). Babbit Redux. In: SuburbiaNation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73210-4_4
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