Issue #310: Bella Baxter Would Love Swimming Pools
This week is AGDQ, an annual speed running marathon and charity drive in support of the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It runs for a full 24/7, an uninterrupted week’s worth of activity that began mid Sunday. I like to watch as much as I can. There’s a sense of excitement I feel being able to turn on Twitch at any time during the week and catch something interesting. I enjoy the gameplay itself, but also watching the crowd, seeing how the commentators conduct themselves; there’s a lot of sociological intrigue to be had. So far, I’ve enjoyed the runs for Donkey Kong 64 (1999), Jet Set Radio Future (2002), Mega Man 3 (1990), Mega Man 8 (1996), Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004), and Final Fantasy XV (2016). I didn’t get to watch some of the late night runs like Clock Tower (1995), The Typing of the Dead (1999), and Ganbare Goemon 2 (1993), but everything is getting uploaded straight to youtube, so I’ll at least get to go back next week and watch if not sooner.
AGDQ always makes me want to play games myself, and the less intense (or interesting) runs can serve as great background noise for other activities. Some of my most productive periods of house cleaning and home improvement have come during AGDQ. I’ve finished plenty of novels or papers during the marathon. This time around, aside from working on my dissertation, I’ve also been playing Monster Sanctuary (2019).
The game is free on Xbox Game Pass, so I’ve been playing it on my phone. It’s a pretty fun little game. A “Metroidvania” platformer, Monster Sanctuary distinguishes itself by making all the combat turn based and having a Pokemon-like monster collection element. Because you can’t trip and fall into some enemy you are supposed to shoot or throw holy water at, the platforming is low stakes. Like I said, I’ve been playing on my phone with touch screen controls. That’s never felt restrictive. For an easygoing distraction, I recommend it.
2024’s Early Cinematic Frontrunner (and Poor Things)
Night Swim (2024) is a surprising movie. I try to see every horror film that hits big screens as long as it doesn’t look really bad. For this one, Wyatt Russell was the selling point. But I would’ve been foolish to sleep on it.
In addition to seeing these kinds of movies religiously, I tend to read a lot into them. Night Swim, I think, genuinely deserves it. The premise is simple: Russell plays a professional baseball player, Ray Waller, forced into retirement by his multiple sclerosis. In a search for a new home where Ray can get treatment and PT, the family turns their nose up at a number of assisted living facilities and medically minded townhomes for a suburban home that signifies a normalcy the family has never gotten to enjoy. In fact, it’s Ray’s illness that brings about the possibility of “putting down roots” as the family is no longer subject to abrupt moves due to Ray being traded. The final flourish on this vision of upper middle class living? An empty pool, unexpectedly spring fed.
Based on this premise, one might already be able to identify some thematic concerns. Night Swim is about Ray. Which part of his life is fundamental to his identity? Is it his profession, or vocation, as a baseball player? Or his role as a husband to Eve (Kerry Condon) and father to Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren)? Baseball, and Ray’s inability to play it, takes a toll. Though he projects satisfaction with his lot as stay at home dad, he’s conscripted into supervising Elliot’s baseball practice and continuing to work out in excess of his PT regimen. Ray’s investment in baseball is a cathexis of his excessive desire, and his relationship to the game is greater than one’s “normal” relationship to a game or job. He is a baseball player, through and through.
Spoilers for Night Swim follow
It’s a common setup for a character to be torn between some calling that serves as a cornerstone of their identity and “normal life,” often the character must eschew productivity as such to satisfy the demand at the nexus point of desire and sinthome. Whether it’s drumming in Whiplash (2014), ballet in Black Swan (2010), trumpet in Mo’ Better Blues (1990), or gambling in any one of the six gambling movies I wrote about last year: a character’s excess is expressed through an investment in an activity. That excess moves through the channels of desire.
Night Swim is more clever than your average film in exploring this issue. Aside from the existential dread inherent in Ray’s situation, recognizable to any person who has had to put aside a deeply valued pursuit in deference to the vicissitudes of practicality, the pool is the primary site of horror in the film. There are, ostensibly, some kind of monsters menacing the family from within the pool threatening to drag a family member to non-Euclidean depths. The real threat, however, is the water itself. It serves as a hazy barrier between the world of desire and the world of sense or practicality. It both surrounds and penetrates the subject, within and without in an incidental symbolization of Lacanian extimacy.
As Ray swims, he finds himself recovering from MS and exhibiting even greater physical prowess. In exchange, however, the pool’s waters seek to divest Ray of something important. In this case, it’s his son Elliot. Ray’s satisfaction with Elliot as a son and overall failure to discharge his parental responsibilities suggest that Ray might willingly commit infanticide if it means returning to the most important thing in his life. During the birth of his daughter, the eldest child, he was working — playing baseball. He has a romantic story about the surge of strength that he experienced at the moment of her birth, but his wife Eve resents him for his absence. The strength, it seems, came at her expense, as she later describes her overwhelming feelings of fear and loneliness delivering a child without her husband. Elliot is also physically weak, unable to live up to the example set by his dad.
The film’s ending offers at least two readings. Ray, who has been possessed by the calculus of the water and attempts to sacrifice Elliot, finally comes to his senses and tries to escape after Eve pulls Elliot from the depths of the pool. However, the trade of a life for another’s physical ability has already been set in motion. Instead of sacrificing his son, Ray sacrifices himself in exchange for his son’s survival. The surface level meaning is the triumph of family over all else. Ray’s suicide is a testament to his love for his son and shows that he is a father before anything else. A video he records, shared posthumously and played in the film’s final moments, attempt to corroborate this reading.
But isn’t there another, more logical, way to read this conclusion? Rather than the ascendency of the family, an escape by Ray and his family means an abandonment of his briefly regained physical capacity. If he’s not willing to sacrifice his son, he’ll never play baseball again. And if he will never play baseball again, is his life really worth living? It seems to me that what Night Swim really shows is a subject completely consumed by their excess, the desire to be a baseball player too overwhelming to relinquish. Beneath the water’s surface, he doesn’t suffer the physical limitations MS imposes. Rather than tow the ideological line of the inexhaustible existential satisfaction family offers, Ray’s suicide shows the audience that nothing could possibly replace baseball, the sinthome that is fundamental to the construction of his subjectivity.
End of Night Swim Spoilers
It’s funny to think that Night Swim might have more in common with Whiplash than any movie I see this year, but the thematic connections are undeniable. It just so happened that the same night I saw Night Swim, I watched Poor Things (2023) afterward and found more unexpected similarities.
Both Night Swim and Poor Things are movies about desire and excess. In the case of Yorgos Lanthimos’s film, the principal character is also a mark of another’s excess. Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is literally a body of work — that of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), affectionately called “God.” God’s creation of Bella, though just shy of the relationship between Dr. Tenma and Atom in Pluto (2023), is an act of science beyond humanism, and, indeed, humanity itself.
Bella also must follow the demands of her desire, with her triptych (Poor Things has more than three sections, but let me cook) chronicling a discovery of what her desire demands. As she makes such a discovery, she finds herself in the same position as God, happiest in the operating theater of God’s home laboratory.
Speaking of operating theaters, what is with Lanthimos and surgeons? In Poor Things we have Godwin, Bella, Max (Ramy Youssef), and other supporting cast all harkening back to Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), a cardiothoracic surgeon, from Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). I wrote about Killing alongside The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) back in 2018, with a Richard Brody review as my ongoing intertext in that essay.
While Bella’s sexual appetite and naïveté seems to me to be the embodiment of a masculine fantasy, the most feminist dimension of Poor Things might be Bella’s ascendancy to the role of phallic authority previously occupied by God. The Killing of a Sacred Deer shows the failure of phallic authority, asserted through surgery1, to organize the world against the irrationality of desire. In a reversal that is slightly naive in its own right, Poor Things supplants the phallic father with a non-phallic authority, Bella emblematic of some alternative non-organizing principle both because of her gender and the circumstances of her being. Bella’s demands are satisfied, but her authority is one that “lives and let lives” rather than demands something of those who are subject to it.
That brings us back to Night Swim, where the act of baseball playing and phallic authority are coextensive. Just consider what the bat symbolizes. If Ray can’t hold his bat, he believes he has nothing. Maybe the triumph of desire isn’t so subversive after all.
Weekly Reading List
Charles Melton talking about his favorite Criterion films. I’m ready to see this guy as the solo lead in something. He reviews the number of running drop kicks in Memories of Murder (2003), a man after my own heart.
https://viewpointmag.com/2015/01/19/letter-on-meeting-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-march-25-1957 — It is a day honoring one of our great historical leaders and thinkers. One way you probably haven’t honored him in the past is by reading this letter about him by C.L.R. James.
Until next time.
I wrote in my 2018 essay:
The film’s climax, diegetically, is precisely the opposite of surgical. With Murphy’s family bound and gagged, he covers his eyes with a winter hat and spins around, firing at random. Eventually, it is his ‘effeminate’ (in the logic of the film) son that is killed. Just like Hank McKenna, Bob Murphy is a son born under the sign of the mother. Bob wants to be an ophthalmologist like his mother rather than a cardiologist like his father. While Ben insists Hank must become a doctor rather than a singer or performer, Bob’s last plea for life is a commitment to his father to cut his lengthy, luscious hair, do his chores, and become a cardiologist just like dad. But a last grasp at phallic authority and power becomes a last gasp as Bob pays the price for his father’s own impotence.