80
Popular Culture Review
Ju l i e :
N o , but I just can imagine.
Mo r t o n :
Well, stop imagining. Get yourself to bed.
We have work to do tomorrow.
When we learn that Julie exists (John has a daughter named Julie) but
that the Julie of the film is an imaginary person, we understand how much more
immediate and real a fictional character can be than the actual, public one. We
also hear in Morton's words (Well, stop imagining) the authority of the writer as
she takes back the story from her formidable character. That authority is
reinforced when Julie tells Morton, I’ve come to say goodbye, and Morton
replies. It’s possibly for the best. In the final scene with Julie, we watch part of
the action through a mirror. Julie gives Morton her mother’s novel, saying,
Perhaps if I give you these pages today you will bring her back to life. So if they
inspire you, take them—steal them—they're yours.
When Bosload reads and rejects Morton’s manuscript (Where’s the
action? Where are the plot twists?), Morton tells him, I think this is the finest
piece of work I’ve done in a bloody long time. She then shows him the
manuscript in book form, revealing that she secretly published the narrative he
rejected. He asks. Why couldn’t you have told me? She responds by saying,
There were a few things you couldn’t tell me. She tells him to give the signed
copy to his daughter, whom she sees for the first time as she leaves his office.
The film ends with Morton watching Julie swim. As she comes out of
the pool, Morton waves. The Julie of her novel (and her very real interior life) is
replaced momentarily by the newly available image of Bosload’s real daughter,
then superseded by the fictional one. Morton’s expression suggests a genuine
affection for her creation, her child.
The role of narrative as a shaper of meaning is reinforced in all three
films. As Ruth looks at the empty hallway of her house and remembers the
stories of her largely absent family—associating those stories with photographs
that no longer hang on the walls—the role of storytelling and memory as frames
of human experience become clear. In Secret Window, Mort Rainey is driven
mad by the secrets that lie beneath his own door in the floor. He loses his mind
(and his wife) at the same time that he loses his ability to write and to coherently
frame his experience; although he considers the end of the story John Shooter
wrote perfect, it is instead an indicator of madness, not genius. Staring at the
screen of his laptop and eating the com that grew in the garden where his wife is
buried, Rainey can no longer write the short stories that gave him a reason for
being. There is no superintending narrative, no frame, no order.
It is Sarah Morton of Swimming Pool who endures and prevails,
rediscovering her muse and creating a novel that gains her more recognition than
the formulaic mysteries for which she had become known. Morton lives her
story, inventing characters to whom she becomes attached. In doing so, she
connects fiction and real life, making sense of the latter. Ozon is masterful in
reminding the viewer that Morton’s dreaming and writing are the connecting
threads linking the imaginary with the real; in one particularly effective scene,