Whether it’s squared in by a hedgerow on a Greenwich estate or enclosed within an aluminum-sided “cowboy bucket” in blue-collar suburbia, the swimming pool endures as the embodiment of the American Dream. No other status symbol can measure up. It is elitist and populist, tranquil yet often treacherous.
In television and film, it’s a mirage often used as a foreshadowing device, luring characters into the craggy rocks of depravity and danger—the American Dream gone nightmare. In the real world, even though far more fatalities and injuries occur in the below-ground gunite variety, aboveground pools come with an especially bad rap: splashy and trashy. Last month, five million pre-fabricated versions sold in Big Lots, Home Depot, Walmart, and Target were recalled due to a safety malfunction that may have caused the drowning of nine toddlers over the past two decades.
The origins of the backyard swimming pool have a dark legacy that traces back to segregation, when Black Americans were banned from facilities in white neighborhoods. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended that practice, many wealthier white residents decided to build their own pools rather than share the public ones. It was a power move that also managed to erode community and waste water—a 500-square-foot pool can lose up to 31,000 gallons a year by evaporation alone.
And yet, 60 years later, the post-pandemic pool boom shows no sign of drying up. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry, perhaps guided by the private pool’s uninspiring history, continues to portray them as reservoirs of sex, menace, and even isolation.
In The Better Sister, a series on Amazon Prime starring Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks, the drama begins when a two-year-old is left unguarded in a swimming pool in an affluent Long Island neighborhood. In the morality-play comedy series Acapulco, an upstairs-downstairs tale set in the Mexican resort town, the main character’s dream comes true when he is selected to be a pool boy. (Tips and hot chicks sure beat folding sheets in the gloomy laundry room.) To get to the top rung of the ladder, though, he sells his soul.
The pool as a place where bad things happen is nothing new. In The Sopranos, the black bear that haunts Tony Soprano’s pool represents the danger that’s always tracking him. In Breaking Bad, two planes collide above Walter and Skylar White’s pool, and remnants that land in the water include a singed pink plush-toy bear that foreshadows Skylar’s suicide attempt three seasons later. In the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, a failed screenwriter, played by William Holden, is found floating in the backyard pool of a once famous silent-film actress. As the paparazzi gather, one says, “The poor dope—he always wanted a pool.”
In the dénouement of 1974’s The Great Gatsby, Robert Redford, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s antihero, is seen as bullet-riddled driftwood, floating in the new-money pool he had finally dared to swim in on the day of his murder.
If you want to make a theme-movie night out of it, continue with 1967’s box-office hit The Graduate or 1968’s The Swimmer, based on the John Cheever short story. Both are drenched in suburban dystopia.
In The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) simply wants to float on a raft all summer. Simon & Garfunkel’s song “The Sound of Silence”—“Hello darkness, my old friend”—is his anthem. The scene became so memorable that it’s been reverentially parodied in the terrific man-child comedies Rushmore and Old School.
Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) in The Swimmer is a fallen Master of the Universe who has gone off the deep end. He hatches a romantic plan to pool-hop through his neighbors’ crystalline waters to get home to his house on the hill, where his splendid daughters play tennis on his grounds. He returns to discover his wife has left him, the house has been emptied out, and the girls are gone.
In Jonathan Glazer’s crime caper, Sexy Beast, released in 2000, a retired bank robber named Gal Dove (played by Ray Winstone) suns by the pool at his modernist Spanish villa. Wearing a yellow banana hammock, his chubby body greased with oil, he nestles a cold washcloth on his groin, stands up, and then a boulder from out of the blue comes rumbling down the canyon, bouncing just over his head and landing dead center in the swimming pool.
Enter one of the scariest villains in history: Don Logan (Sir Ben Kingsley), who demands that Gal mastermind a final heist, or else. Water sports of the homoerotic variety ensue. (Spoiler alert: Logan is killed and buried under the swimming pool.)
It isn’t all so glum. In a 2021 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm called “The Five Foot Fence,” a burglar falls into Larry David’s pool and drowns. Larry’s non-regulation fence is determined to have been the cause, and the consequences provide the storyline for the entire season.
Our obsession with pools will not be deterred. And last week, a new aboveground model arrived in stores. BuzzBallz, which makes pre-mixed cocktails, now offers an inflatable, five-foot-deep pool that resembles a giant cocktail cup, and it costs only $20. Drinking and swimming is a dangerous proposition, but what do you expect? This is America.
Steve Garbarino, the former editor at BlackBook magazine, began his career as a staff writer at The Times-Picayune. Once again New Orleans–based, he now contributes to The Wall Street Journal and The Hollywood Reporter and is the author of A Fitzgerald Companion
