Un- by Laurel Blossom
2022; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2022.0072
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoReviewed by: Un- by Laurel Blossom Fred Muratori (bio) un- Laurel Blossom Finishing Line Press https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/un-by-laurel-blossom/ 29 pages; Print, $14.99 “My son-in-law doesn’t know who Esther Williams was,” sighs the narrator of Laurel Blossom’s prose poem Hollywood mystery, Un-. To be sure, one might safely bet that most people born within the last three or four decades—unless they’re avid fans of Turner Classic Movies—would not recognize the name Esther Williams, either. A popular box-office draw in the 1940s and 1950s, Williams, aka “America’s Mermaid,” was an Olympics-grade freestyle swimmer who found celebrity as a film icon after World War II forced cancellation of the 1940 games and derailed her athletic aspirations. The star of aquatic-themed MGM musicals like Dangerous When Wet and Skirts Ahoy!, Williams was often billed above her male co-stars (Peter Lawford, Van Johnson, Howard Keel), but her swimming skills proved to be more popular with audiences than her acting, and after a short run of dramatic roles she made her last film in 1963. She continued her professional involvement with the sport, contributing to the establishment of synchronized swimming as an Olympic event and even designing a line of swimwear. Which brings us, circuitously, to the subject of Un-: Williams’s mysterious, uncredited understudy, introduced to readers as “Mrs. Godfrey,” past owner [End Page 160] of the Los Angeles guesthouse and pool that our narrator, a swimming enthusiast very much like the author herself, has rented. Blossom edited the anthology Splash! Great Writing about Swimming, and her personal, even intimate, fascination with water seeps through nearly every page of Un-. It serves as the metaphorical medium connecting past and present, mind and spirit, dream and reality, a transcendent means of transport (“Every pool . . . is a flying carpet”) as well as a primal, common point of origin for human consciousness (“The first word Helen Keller ever spoke was water”). But the guesthouse pool also embodies a practical, old-fashioned mystery: who is this Mrs. Godfrey who once swam here, who must have been as accomplished an aquanaut as Esther Williams and yet remains unknown and unacknowledged? The question spurs both action and meditation as the narrator searches for clues to the understudy’s identity (“What if Mrs. Godfrey was the stand-in who sank to the bottom of the pool trying to hold up the equipment that checked the color balance of the film?”) while at the same discovering an empathic connection with her subjects via the sensory (not to mention extra-sensory) experience of water that informs her own sense of self: “you dive into the wave you then become. That feeling. No matter what happens the rest of your whole, anonymous, uncredited life.” The acute consciousness of water occasions—figuratively speaking—a case of water on the brain. Soon the imagery of water seizes the narrator’s imagination everywhere, even in the most mundane circumstances. Ironing can “make a sheet as smooth as still water.” Sleeping in the guesthouse bed is “Like living in Mrs. Godfrey’s swimming pool, same dimensions, blue and white, but dry.” The fluid timelessness of water makes it a perfect medium for time traveling, as our narrator recalls teaching a granddaughter how to swim and attending pool parties in South Carolina, and yet we’re never sure whether these snippets of a past are genuinely retrieved from personal memory or being invented, whether the speaker inhabits her own identity or assumes one assembled from the imagined lives of Esther Williams, her stand-in, and others in the movie mermaid’s social and professional orbit. This being Hollywood, celebrities and un-celebrities of the past flicker briefly throughout the book in cameo roles. Marion Davies, Mickey Rooney, Billy Rose, Cary Grant (who suggested Williams try LSD), and the also uncredited actress [End Page 161] Dorothy Abbott—like the “waxworks” bridge players in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard—are ghostly presences reminding the reader of the film capital’s vibrant yet scandalous midcentury past. (Given Un-’s implied flirtation with Hollywood’s noirish side, it’s odd that Sunset Boulevard’s opening...
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