Very Deep Blue

“It’s not far to the pool. It’s only over the lawn, in the birch grove -- it will be lovely now...” -- Tracy Lord in “The Philadelpia Story”

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In literal terms, a swimming pool is a hole dug in the ground and filled with water. In literary terms, it is the whole Freudian universe--the womb, the tomb, the baptismal font, the lover you cannot live without. It is the most powerful of the elements tamed and laid out in the backyard like a bear rug in Valhalla. It is sex and death, bliss and escape, and the soupy place between worlds. The swimming pool is a symbol of summer and childhood, of wealth and the lengths we will go to deny physical reality. Fly over Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles and read the hieroglyphs in the desert, carved out in chemically treated turquoise: “We’re hee-re.”

Or just go to the movies. Think “Sunset Boulevard,” “Diabolique,” “The Graduate” and, of course, “The Swimmer.” Where would these movies be without a swimming pool? More character than scenery, it boils down the action into metaphoric message. It’s surprising the number of movies that use swimming pools as visual shorthand, and for so many disparate things. Or maybe not--swimmin’ pools and movie stars remain logos of a city known in equal parts for Oscar night, earthquakes and drive-by shootings.

So here is a swimming pool, that familiar robin’s-egg blue water housed in that familiar rectangle, its surface still and glassy--perhaps a leaf rucks up a few ripples, or a child’s toy dawdles in the corner. Then the body rises, or the troubled socialite dives in, or the young man in the wet suit staggers to the bottom and stays, staring at nothing while his parents and their highball-waving friends try to harangue him into movement.

So it’s not just a pool, after all.

The swimming pool is the sort of visual paradox filmmakers love. It is the beautiful woman with the murderous heart, the stone-faced cynic who falls in love on an elevator. Here is the symbol of man’s control over the environment, of the best money can buy, and here is Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby face down in its embrace.

The beauty of water is its impartiality, and a swimming pool is particularly impersonal--no mighty white whales roaming around beneath, no stoic clown fish on a mission. You see what you bring to it: your body, your past, your silent hopes. In “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” when two young men dive in for their ritual race, everything is bleached clean, everything is clear. But as events bring them closer to fulfilling their desires, they find themselves pondering a tiny hotel pool littered with leaves--who can tell what lurks beneath, it might not be water at all--and only one is brave enough to dive in.

A dive into a pool is an act of faith--an action that in another environment would surely end in death. In “The Philadelphia Story,” heroine Tracy Lord sheds the protective skin of her tailored clothes, bounces a few times on the board and dives. Not just to showcase the swimming prowess of Katharine Hepburn, but to foreshadow the baptism to come: Doused first by champagne and then by “a quick swim” with another man on the eve of her wedding, Tracy is turned, by the power of the water in her Philadelphia swimming pool, from statue to living woman.

George Bailey, hero of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” has his defenses dissolved by chlorine as well. During the local Charleston contest, the gym floor opens beneath the dancers’ feet, and George and the girl he would rather not love fall in. Getting wet together, even fully clothed, breaks the bounds of chastity--a woman wearing a man’s bathrobe is never just a woman wearing a man’s bathrobe. Subsequent films are more overt. In “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” going to the pool house with a boy was shorthand for sex. The image from the 1998 movie “Wild Things” of Neve Campbell and Denise Richards preparing to seduce their teacher in the dreamy blue of underwater lights remains in the cultural imagination, while the rest of the film probably does not. And last year’s “Swimming Pool” is an homage to its almost hallucinatory sexual pull: the heat drawing sweat from taut tan skin, the constant temptation of immersion, surrendering to the dangerous beauty of the water.

But the pool is such an effective cultural signpost, it can conjure those feelings even without water. In “Poltergeist,” it is the digging of the swimming pool that provides the final insult to the uneasy spirits of those buried by suburbia. (They could put up with all those two-car garages, but a pool, man, that’s the last straw.) And when the little girl goes missing, there is that classic moment of a particularly Southern California nightmare, when the parents’ eyes meet and widen and the mother breathes: “The swimming pool.”

In “Sexy Beast,” the pool is one big death pot, from the moment a boulder lands in the pool after careening down the hillside and narrowly missing Ray Winstone. His retired thief is then coerced into a caper in which he gains entry into a bank by drilling through a pool. For a few horrifyingly beautiful moments, the contents of hundreds of safe deposit boxes, including someone’s ashes, float around the water like the detritus of the Titanic. The climactic scene, in which the beast is roused then slaughtered, takes place poolside, and the remains are buried--you guessed it--under the pool. Snarling brutality covered by a posh social veneer.

The swimming pool can evoke an altered state and, unlike other drugs, can be tailored to need. In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Blue,” and in “Children of a Lesser God,” women immerse themselves in an attempt to find peace, an environment where all things are equal and speech unnecessary, while the Hollywood pool party--big-breasted babes drunk on sun and tequila, oil-slick men in Speedos and black wraparounds--evokes ancient Rome in its most hedonistic days. Even TV’s “Love Boat,” surrounded by ocean, needed a swimming pool in which to play.

So here is a swimming pool. That familiar robin’s-egg blue, that familiar glassy surface. But what is it really? It is shaped like a grave, or a lover’s bed. Its color is playful and false; it is hard to gauge its true depth. It looks like a swimming pool, but what will it become when you add people and stir?