(The Tragedy of) Kate Can’t Swim.
Warning: contains spoilers.
Kate Can’t Swim is, in many ways, an impressive debut for director Josh Hellman and co-director Evan Jonigkeit. Filmed in just twelve short days, the feature-length project is beautifully shot and well-edited, moving seamlessly from Brooklyn to upstate New York in a kind of mesmerizing swirl.
But timing is not always everything, for the script and story left something wanting, particularly in relation to one vital factor: the protagonist, which in this case is Kate, a struggling writer in her late 20’s living with her boyfriend, Pete, in Brooklyn.
The plot is set into motion when Kate’s college best friend, Em, returns from traveling throughout Europe and tells Kate that she (a lesbian) has found love with a man by the name of Nick, whom she wants Kate to meet. As the film moves forward, the two best friends and their boyfriends travel out of the city to upstate New York, where they all stay together in Nick’s oddly idyllic log cabin. The group weekend getaway takes a turn for the worse when Kate, who has been feeling and acting increasingly cold towards her boyfriend throughout the film, attempts to seduce Em when they are both alone together in the house.
This seduction is not (it seems) because Kate has genuine romantic or sexual feelings for her female friend, but instead seems to be an expression of the frustration and confusion she feels about her current life and the direction in which it’s moving. The attempt to seduce her much more free-spirited friend acts as a mechanism of escape for Kate. Or, if I were to put it more bluntly: the straight girl wants to experiment with her sexuality before it’s too late.
However, a lack of clarity in Kate’s motives and characterization throughout the film mean that when this seduction is discovered by Nick, and later revealed to Pete, as audience members it is difficult to feel sorry for Kate as she cries and screams she was just acting that way because she ‘doesn’t know what she wants from her life’. The intention of the film may be to present Kate as a sympathetic character whom the older millennial can readily relate to, but the lack of real justification for her actions (she is not really in love with Em, it is Kate’s fault that she never told her boyfriend she doesn’t want to move to Portland) leads the audience to dislike her instead.
As such, I would make the following argument: Kate is only effective as a character if we view her as tragic hero and Kate Can’t Swim is only effective as a film if we view it as a tragedy.
Let’s play with the idea that Kate is a tragic hero by taking a look at the classical definition as originally outlined by Aristotle, using the simplified definition from Dictionary.com:
A literary character who makes an error of judgment or has a fatal flaw that, combined with fate and external forces, brings on a tragedy.
When adhering to the stricter Artistotlian definition of tragic heroism, Kate would not be definable as a hero because she is not someone of high standing, virtue or greatness. She is not successful in her pursuits as a writer, nor does she demonstrate the virtue of character necessary for her definition as such. However, more contemporary notions of heroism have allowed less virtuous people to be called heroes too, so calling Kate a tragic hero is possible.
Moving forward on this basis, Kate’s identifiable fatal flaw is that she is ‘selfish’ (as her friend Em calls her). This selfishness manifests itself in self-destructive behavior which results in tragedy, i.e. Kate loses both her boyfriend and her best friend while wreaking havoc in the lives of those around her. The tragic arc of the tale culminates when Kate’s continued self-destructive behavior leads her to get drunk by herself and jump head-first into a rocky part of the lake that sits by the cabin, where she is found drowned face-down in the water by Em.
The effectiveness of Kate as a tragic hero, however, is undercut by her survival of her drowning. This is because Kate’s survival allows for the reversal of her fortune; her best friend forgives her, and at the end of the movie when we witness a car pulling up the driveway, it’s implied that old reliable Pete the boyfriend is back to win Kate over. With all relationships repaired and all four characters returned to the cabin where the main action of the film took place, the status quo is restored and the tragedy fails to complete itself. Kate has learned nothing, for she has suffered no consequences for her selfish behavior. The watching audience is denied the very thing that makes tragedy effective- the very thing that would have made the film effective: there is no catharsis.
Now, the argument exists that the movie itself was not intended to be a tragedy, therefore an ending where Kate dies would not have fit within the intention of its creators.
But if their intention was to cause the audience to empathize with Kate’s situation and sympathize with her self-invented crisis, the character is too poorly developed to inspire this kind of sympathy. Instead we see a girl who is dishonest with her boyfriend and who uses her best friend to the detriment of both relationships.
In that case, my counter to the counter argument is that the movie is effective only when Kate is considered a tragic hero, for selfish behavior should have consequences. Due to the fact Kate suffers no permanent consequences for her selfishness, this means that the film can be viewed as a failed tragedy.
Saying this, if the filmmakers’ intentions were to make a commentary on the state of the millennial generation, then perhaps viewing Kate Can’t Swim as a failed tragedy is a more effective commentary on the millennial generation than if the film was simply a commentary on the so-called difficulty of ‘growing up’ in the twenty-first century. Perhaps it is necessary for Kate Can’t Swim to exist as a failed tragedy, for the movie’s failure to fulfill its own tragic destiny is akin to Kate’s own failure to be fulfilled as an artist and as a person. This in turn reflects the unfulfilled state of the millennial generation, yearning for greatness, inhibited by selfish intention.
This blog was originally published at www.carolinemcevoy.wordpress.com.
