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The Edge Of Seventeen uses a playful pool scene to create a new sense of intimacy between Nadine and Erwin. It allows Nadine to figuratively let her problems float away in the water, to let herself relax and let her guard down.

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Water is, unsurprisingly, a recurrent visual in Submarine. Depressed after a breakup with his girlfriend Jordana, Oliver walks briskly from the shallow to the deep end of the pool and jumps in, fully clothed. With his hands by his sides, it seems as though he will sink instead of swim. This swimming pool seems claustrophobic compared to the open sea that Oliver and Jordana visited together in earlier scenes.

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Water is used heavily as a visual symbol in Call Me by Your Name. In this brief scene we see Elio at the open lake with friends but swimming by himself. He is distracted and we see him looking around, only focused on seeing if Oliver is there. This directly contrasts earlier scenes from the film, where Elio and Oliver swim together themselves in an enclosed pool. Later in the film we see them visit a waterfall together, where the water crashes and overflows freely. The depiction of water changes throughout the film, depending on their relationship at the time.

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This pool party sequence perfectly captures Kayla's social anxiety. She stares at the pool from the window, watching her peers as if they are an exhibit. When she finally overcomes her panic attack, she sits alone by the edge of the pool. The tension is broken by the appearance of Aiden, who is equally alone and socially awkward. The two share a stilted conversation, allowing us to see that Kayla is not the odd one out as she believes.

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In this pivotal party scene, we see Amy enter the pool after her crush, Ryan. This sequence is dreamlike, the calm water representing Amy's new sense of freedom and liberation. However, as she sees Ryan kissing someone else in the pool, it quickly becomes vast and sinister. The tone shifts dramatically - Amy climbs out and quickly puts her clothes back on, feeling that her moment of vulnerability was a mistake.

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Perfume Genius - Slip Away (from the Booksmart Movie)

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In this short scene, Lady Bird visits the luxurious house of Jenna, who she shares a superficial friendship with. As they swim, they discuss their plans for the end of high school. Lady Bird expresses confusion hearing that Jenna wants to stay in Sacramento and become a mother. Lady Bird desperately wants to leave, describing her hometown as "soul-killing." This scene allows us to see the bigger divide in social class between the two girls: Lady Bird, who grew up poor and wants more, versus Jenna, who is wealthy and already has it all.

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Adele dives into the water at the beach. As she lays on her back we are able to see her floating quietly on her own, away from the noise and buzz of the sands. This bittersweet scene mirrors her mental state as she realises she is truly alone for the first time in years after her tumultuous breakup with Emma. It seems as though she may be crying but her tears are hidden, washed away by the water.

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We see Lily holding her breath underwater until she begins to choke, before Amanda lifts her out of the water, saving her life. This scene is significant as it shows Amanda is not fully psychopathic and capable of forming attachments to people - she does in fact care about Lily.

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The swimming pool is among the most alluring symbols of summer, and Hollywood has both reflected and shaped its mystique. The pool is a shimmering mirage of wealth, sex and fun that beckons the viewer toward dark undercurrents of loss, sin and death. The pool’s very architecture suggests hidden depths. The waterline is the boundary between the stated and implied, our consciousness and our dreams.

The pool represents a lot of things, but it has also served as a straightforward tool for satisfying the male gaze on film. It is a pretense for babes to appear. But recently female creators have reframed the pool as something new: a place where a woman can be the complicated subject, with her own issues and her own fantasies.

Men are allowed to float through pop culture, their half-naked time drifting atop a pool doubling as a signal of emotional profundity. But for women, the pool is often filmed as a flat, uncomplicated pleasure. These women are typically beautiful, young, thin and white. They are filmed in water as if it is their natural habitat, and the bikini their everyday uniform. They are all Elle Woods, floating into Harvard Law.

Lately the swimming pool scene has received an infusion of new perspectives from female storytellers and stars. In the coming-of-age films “Booksmart,” “Lady Bird” and “Eighth Grade,” in the shows “Shrill” and HBO’s “Insecure,” in the videos of Beyoncé and the internet presence of Lizzo, the pool is more than a set-piece for the male gaze. Through them, the pool’s overwrought metaphors are stripped away to reveal more grounded tensions and revelatory fantasies. The visceral reality of a woman’s relationship to the water is interesting enough.

The pool is a pressure cooker of social expectations for women: to diet, shop, shave, tweeze, sculpt and tone. It lays bare discriminations of race, gender performance and size. It’s a miserable objectification zone of ourselves and others, the feeling “Shrill” writer Samantha Irby has called “how do my legs look compared to their legs.” The expectation that women exhibit an easy confidence in this scenario is its own kind of prison. But the pool is still a site of opportunity: for freedom, pleasure, sex, friendship and rebirth. In the funhouse-mirror refractions of the pool, a woman’s body may be viewed in a new light.

n “Lady Bird” and “Eighth Grade,” the pool is the domain of the rich, popular kids, an access point to an elevated social circle — and a place for harshly exposing one’s incompatibility in that world. Kayla (Elsie Fisher), the painfully shy loner of “Eighth Grade,” is unexpectedly invited to a popular girl’s pool party, and spends the afternoon lurking at the pool’s edge, watching as her classmates’ slick bodies fit effortlessly into social arrangements. Kayla is enchanted by the image of one boy — she watches, slack-jawed, as he emerges from the pool — but she herself is invisible. Her only escape is to dip under the water, where she must hold her breath, which is really what she feels like she is doing all the time.

In “Booksmart,” the typical male conquest of the teen movie is subverted when Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), the film’s studious heroine, pursues her skater-girl crush in the pool at a graduation party. Amy has never had sex, but she wants to, and as she slips underwater, she enters her own kind of fantasy state, gliding toward self-actualization, only to come up for air and discover her dream date kissing a boy. While “Eighth Grade” and “Shrill” succeed by recasting the female body — as a site of stress, and of opportunity — “Booksmart” keeps its eyes underwater, eliding the bodily focus of the teen sex romp to hang on emotion instead.

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Thematic traits and genres may vary, but the on-screen swimming pool holds a great deal of representational power. From The Graduate straight through to A Bigger Splash, it rarely serves a simply decorative function. Under that visually pleasing, serene blue surface, there’s dejection, boredom, sex and roiling passion.

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The glamour of that Hockney-esque setting – the unsettled, fluid movement of water, its penetrating blue, the way it refracts and glitters in the sun – all make it an appealing subject for the camera.

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"The way characters behave in and around swimming pools can tell us a lot about them, and how they interact with the world in general. After all, in Jungian psychology, water is a potent symbol for the unconscious, so having a character plunge into a pool is kind of like dropping them into an external representation of their own minds."

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"As a traditional and elemental force, water itself is often associated with the archaically feminine. Traits once thought of as womanly – changeability, intuition and a tendency toward emotion – tend to find their symbolic link with water play out on screen."

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In one of the most indelible images of The Graduate (1967), home-from-college Benjamin ( Dustin Hoffman) drifts aimlessly across the sparkling water of his parents' pool, sunglasses glued to his face. Against the glimmering blue, the shot perfectly encapsulates the mood of ennui and the trappings of suburban luxury that threaten to engulf him.

Benjamin's own life seems to be drifting. Facing a walled-in, unappealing future - as sterile as the chlorine in the water - his affair with his alluring neighbour, Mrs Robinson ( Anne Bancroft), is his own method of social disruption. But genuine escape is elusive. For Benjamin, life - much like his folks' pool - may be boring, but it sure is comfortable.

Swimming pools serve as a repository of symbolic meaning in the movie world. A glamorous but attainable status symbol, their popularity at home soared in the second half of the 20th century. So too did their appearance on cinema screens. A year after The Graduate forever connected the swimming pool to the malaise of the well-off, Frank Perry's The Swimmer, a deeply eccentric adaptation of John Cheever's short story, was released. In it, a spry Burt Lancaster (always brilliant at corn-fed American masculinity gone slightly to seed) challenges himself to swim across a series of his neighbours' backyard pools. He thinks they form their own sort of 'river' on his way to his house.

The series of backyard pool parties and ex-lovers Lancaster encounters on his way home speak of a suburban discontent and personal decay. The pool signifies a return to clarity, renewal and all the picturesque bourgeois ideals that Lancaster's character seems to have lost in his own life. So his obsession with continually diving into the pool is really about returning to his own former sexual and social prowess.

The bored sensuality of The Swimmer recalls The Graduate and encapsulates the hedonism that has since been closely related to swimming pools in the cinema. Warm weather, California glamour and beautiful people in a state of undress all have their obvious parts to play.

The aptly-named French thriller La Piscine came out in 1969, making for a third successive cinema release that's fascinated by the swimming pool. Set on the sun-dappled French Riviera, it features a foursome of fantastically attractive actors - Romy Schneider, Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin - growing increasingly fraught by sexual jealousy as they spend a languid poolside holiday together. Luca Guadagnino's 2015 reworking of the film was titled A Bigger Splash, with a nod to David Hockney's famous poolside painting of the same name. Guadagnino's version also amps up the sexual decadence, seeing Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton fight a slow, dangerous battle of seduction.

Love scenes in pools are relatively common, but few are more memorable than the tryst between Nomi ( Elizabeth Berkley) and powerful playboy Zack ( Kyle MacLachlan) in Showgirls (1995). The consummation - and turning point - of their attraction for one another happens in a luxe Las Vegas swimming pool, where Nomi energetically thrashes around.

The glamour of that Hockney-esque setting - the unsettled, fluid movement of water, its penetrating blue, the way it refracts and glitters in the sun - all make it an appealing subject for the camera. But as the denouement of La Piscine reveals, vacuous eroticism is not the only facet of the cinema swimming pool. Mystery and danger are also associated with water, linking back to the sea as an elemental source of drowning, shipwreck and ruin. Take the sinister infinity pool of The Limey (1999) or the one in Sexy Beast (2000), where the poolside protagonists are far from relaxed. Violence breaks out easily in hot weather, and even more easily when there's an inground pool to toss someone into.

As a traditional and elemental force, water itself is often associated with the archaically feminine. Traits once thought of as womanly - changeability, intuition and a tendency toward emotion - tend to find their symbolic link with water play out on screen.

An iconic film about womanhood, desire and male fear, Jacques Tourneur's 1942 horror story Cat People has one of its crucial moments in a public swimming pool. When a woman goes for a midnight swim, she finds herself trapped by the cat-monster. A switch of the light reveals a human Simone Simon, whose husband has been flirting with the swimming woman. The meaning of the setting seems apparent: in the shimmery, diffuse light cast by the swimming pool, female power can transfer and overflow.

Relationships between women, often buoyed by sexual jealousy or attraction, seem to find their locus in the cool blue waters of cinema's swimming pools. This is the case in Céline Sciamma's coming-of-age drama Water Lilies (2007), where three teenage girls struggle with their hormones. They're as attracted to boys as they are to each other. Their public swimming pool and the changing rooms therein prove to be a shivery, experimental inner sanctum where the girls, changing from their wet swimsuits, can confide in each other and revel in their bodies.

Similarly, Swimming Pool (2003) focuses on the attractions and rivalries between women. In François Ozon's psychological thriller, a middle-aged writer ( Charlotte Rampling) is holed up in a holiday cottage and forced to spend time with a beautiful, promiscuous twentysomething ( Ludivine Sagnier) who shares the space with her. Again, the watering hole outside is a locus for lust and even murder. According to these movies, you just can't trust two women near a swimming pool.

Thematic traits and genres may vary, but the on-screen swimming pool holds a great deal of representational power. From The Graduate straight through to A Bigger Splash, it rarely serves a simply decorative function. Under that visually pleasing, serene blue surface, there's dejection, boredom, sex and roiling passion.

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A bigger splash: diving into the dark depths of swimming pools on film

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In one of the most indelible images of The Graduate (1967), home-from-college Benjamin ( Dustin Hoffman) drifts aimlessly across the sparkling water of his parents' pool, sunglasses glued to his face. Against the glimmering blue, the shot perfectly encapsulates the mood of ennui and the trappings of suburban luxury that threaten to engulf him.

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Director Olivia Wilde Breaks Down the Pool Scene in BOOKSMART

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https://teenagebedroomsonscreen.com/post/617493309534912512/the-mystery-of-natalie-wood-peter-bogdanovich

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My Bedroom, My Choice: The Private Worlds of Teenage Girls in Booksmart — Girls on Tops

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Marina Vuotto takes a trip to the teenage bedrooms of heroines Molly and Amy in Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut  Booksmart . 

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nadine in her room

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“I always found kids’ bedrooms in movies to be very fake to me,” he said when I interviewed him earlier this year. “It always felt like you had a blank room and then you decorated this room to perfectly reflect the character, and that, to me is not what a kid’s bedroom is. A 13-year-old’s bedroom is an eight-year-old’s bedroom meets a nine-year-old’s bedroom, meets a ten-year-old’s bedroom. You’re constantly just stacking shit on top of each other… by the time you’re 13, your room is just a mess of random things from your past, and the glow-in-the-dark stars you put up five years ago, and tried to tear off and didn’t.” - Bo Burnham, director of Eighth Grade

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complexities of female friendships are always at the core of most coming of age movies

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"Relationships between women, often buoyed by sexual jealousy or attraction, seem to find their locus in the cool blue waters of cinema’s swimming pools. This is the case in Céline Sciamma’s coming-of-age drama Water Lilies (2007), where three teenage girls struggle with their hormones. They’re as attracted to boys as they are to each other. Their public swimming pool and the changing rooms therein prove to be a shivery, experimental inner sanctum where the girls, changing from their wet swimsuits, can confide in each other and revel in their bodies."