DEEP ENDERS

SPOILER ALERT

If the dark end of the 1960s was preempted through cinematic conjuring, then Roman Polanski got the ball rolling in 1965 with Repulsion, followed by Cul-de-Sac in 1966, and most famously with Rosemary’s Baby in 1968—until Charles Manson and his "Family" brought the overt surrealism and horror of the Polish director’s films closer to home (literally) and to a shockingly violent close. That is, at least until The Tenant in 1976, where Polanski returned to some of his earlier themes.

Life had imitated art—and in this instance, even surpassed its horror—a reflection of Polanski’s twisted imagination echoed back at him. “Be careful what you wish for” is a common adage, but for artists, it might be more accurate to say: be careful what you put out into the universe.

Perhaps picking up the mantle of the late-’60s zeitgeist where Polanski left off with his early features, his fellow countryman Jerzy Skolimowski directed his debut film Deep End (1970)—one of the strangest works to emerge from the tail end of the ’60s counterculture. Though the story—about a young man working at a suburban bathhouse and swimming pool—begins as a kind of day-in-the-life narrative, it subtextually explores themes far deeper than its superficial surface initially suggests.

In many ways, Deep End serves as a bridge into the new decade of pessimism and melancholy that followed the fever-dream era that preceded it, with Jane Asher’s sexually liberated Susan cast as a symbolic siren—a Persephone figure—walking the thin line between the ’60s wonderland and the ’70s underworld (in the Greek mythological sense).

During the film's climax, Susan’s surreal death in a slowly filling swimming pool feels like a nightmare twist that marks the end of an era. Throughout the story, she has already come to symbolise the transition from the alluring sexual freedom of the late ’60s to the cold emotional indifference of the ’70s. There is a hollowness in the way she talks about sex to Mike (John Moulder-Brown), the teenage protagonist—whom she even goes so far as to practically pimp out to one of the older, regular female bathers, played by Diana Dors, at the bathhouse where they both work.

Mike sees Susan as a romantic ideal (one that forms his growing obsession), but the reality is that she is far more morally ambivalent than his youth can comprehend—cynical, self-absorbed, and willing to abandon with ease those she flirts with and manipulates. One could suggest she is a countercultural femme fatale, a symbol of a society transitioning from psychedelic liberation to post-hippie disillusionment—one who eventually guides Mike down into his emotional and psychological underworld, where her presence in the pool becomes a baptism not into adulthood, but into madness and death.

Susan is the embodiment of a culture already beginning to decay, even as it continues to seduce.