You are slippery and newt-like in lycra, in a changing room, at a lido, in a park in Stroud. You like it here – the quiet part of the morning reflected in the slowness of the bodies in chlorine. The water’s cold, rippling with rain.
Sometimes, if it has been windy overnight, leaves skirt the edges of the pool and line the water with a green ring. You bob among the ash leaves to catch your breath. You pick up spiders and put them on the side, on the concrete. Watch them unfold then crawl away.
Sometimes the best thing about swimming is not swimming. You like to stand at the end of the lane, breathing through your nose. Your head is completely emptied of thought – it is good to start from scratch.
You fiddle with the blue tiles. Watching.
Sometimes, the best thing about a painting is the frame.
Afterwards, you sit and listen to the sound of wet costumes peeling away from bodies. They remind you of Airing My Dirty Laundry, a 2018 Polly Nor exhibition you went to in London after your first day working what you thought was a ‘real job’. Your boss called you a bitch because you mis-formatted an original Marina Abramović on Adobe InDesign. She fired you nine days later. Maybe that’s what you get for lying on your CV.
Sometimes, a red haired lifeguard watches over you. Gives you an encouraging nod when your front crawl is neat. Sometimes, a bald lifeguard watches over you, and jogs to the filter every couple of minutes as though he’s waiting for a secret message to arrive in the drain. Sometimes, a gelled lifeguard watches over you. He is your least favourite lifeguard. He shakes his legs against the spokes of his seat and swings his whistle from its lanyard in fast circles. As the wind hits the whistle, a whirring sound comes out. Against his leg metronome and the spinning plastic, this lifeguard sings. Sometimes he sings Roy Orbison. Sometimes he sings Coldplay. You hate it, so you get out of the water. You are embarrassed by how quick you are to combust.
Today though, he sings Swim Good by Frank Ocean. The whistle, the leg, the water, the words – they’re alright, so you stay in the pool until he blows the whistle. You walk home singing the lyrics in the street.
I'm going off (oh, my pretty love)
Don't try stopping me
I'm going off (throw me a line)
Don't try saving me (broke my heart)
No flares (broke my heart)
No vest (drove my love)
And no fear –
Waves are washing me out
I’ve been turning the ‘manipulative-female-writer’ trope over in my hands and head for a few weeks. In books and in films, in conversations with my self in my diaries, in bed with my friends. I guess I relate to it, find comfort in it, push against it, resent it. There’s so much power in unlikeable women on screen. It’s like we’re finally allowed to be more than palatable. I love it when a woman is horrible. I love the cleverness of it. The newness of it, or really the not-new-at-all-ness of it. I don’t like films about magic or witches, I like films about bitches.
Black Bear –
ironic, sarcastic, with a good red swimming costume. I liked this film for a few reasons. Allison, an uninspired writer and actor (played by Aubrey Plaza), retreats to a lake house and manipulates her married hosts in an attempt to create her next film. I think Plaza’s face lends well to dry humour and apathy, so her performance as a conniving writer and actor in this lands head on. She contradicts herself, flitting between anti-progressive and forward thinking comments about climate, government and gender in a way that cracks open her stereotypically glamorous woman-as-writer character and from it emerges a person beyond the original, fuckable artist; Allison is a brilliant monster, unlikeable, complicated. An ingenius force. Like a siren in a river, she coaxes people into her world and then reframes them with new narratives and motivations. We don’t know where her life ends and her ideas begin – and Black Bear is one of those rare films with a film-within-a-film format that is actually interesting.
It made me question what it means to write things with other people, and write things about other people too. Question the manipulation of writing. The way life wriggles its way onto the page, whether we like it or not. The inseparable nature of the two things, and how we make our own realities as well as our own stories. How those are basically the same thing, anyway.
In Black Bear, the manipulative-female-writer trope is twisted so many times it’s hard to know where manipulation ends and creation begins. Whose the villain? Is it the writer? The actor? The director? Grizzly, angry, slippery – the film is like a thrashing front crawl in a lido full of slowly bobbing swimmers – it disturbs the peace. Black Bear reminded me of writing and it’s resistance to boundaries. How it overflows, bleeds into life and back again. That it’s unfenceable. Liquid.
Set in a lake house where the characters swim, dive and walk wet footprints across wooden floorboards, the film is a warning and an invitation to make ripples.