Heartbreak and horror: eight of the best subversive beach scenes

The soft, sandy beaches that receive star billing in Baywatch, the songs of the Beach Boys and Harry Styless incandescently smug Watermelon Sugar video are as misleading as they are idyllic. Since Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr had their iconic beach-side bunk-up in 1953s From Here to Eternity, one of the most familiar themes in pop culture is that of a sexy seaside paradise populated by the young, good-looking and impervious to sunburn. Lordes lavish Solar Power is the latest to sell that same dream, as the returning pop star prances over sand dunes in yellow silk (without a single sweat stain!) flanked by toned pals freshly out of a Timotei ad.
Yet, as M Night Shyamalans new horror film Old with its tale of a rapidly ageing family trapped in paradise shows, the most indelible depictions of the beach are often far from the romanticised cliches, offering something weirder and deeper instead: take Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Minds stark seaside locations, or Massimo Vitalis washed-out photos of European sun-traps. Here are some of the most beguiling cultural examples. Dive in. LC
Wildwood, NJ
Dirs: Carol Weaks Cassidy, Ruth LeitmanLong before the brash reality show Jersey Shore there was Wildwood, NJ, an hour-long 1994 documentary that looked at a summer spent on the blue-collar east coast of the US. Focusing on a cross-generational sweep of women and girls in the early 1990s and made with an all-female crew this is not some macho Bruce Springsteen song, but rather a look at the rarely documented lives of working-class American women.
In a warmly rendered riot of funfairs, flings and the occasional flick knife, its the giddy, gum-snapping teenagers who own the film, with their tightly scraped ponytails, crop tops, giant hoop earrings and springy Noo Joisey accents. There is snogging on the boardwalk, slow dancing by the arcades, much reclining on sun loungers and awkward retellings of early sexual experiences at the seaside resort, as well as frank discussions of abortion and violence.
We need to pray for them, sighs an elderly woman as her gaggle of Golden Girls pals shake their heads. But as joyful as the film often is, Wildwood, NJ is tinged with sadness, because rather than a summer and a youth spent on the beach that never ends, this is one that everyone involved knows will soon be over. LC
Wild Swimming
Marek Horn
Sea here … Wild Swimming.
In Marek Horns play Wild Swimming, we are the sea. Sometimes the two actors cross the boundary and leap around into us. At other times, they keep their toes tucked in, away from the waters edge.
This disarmingly charming two-hander follows Oscar (Annabel Baldwin) and Nell (Alice Lamb) over four centuries, from the late 16th century onwards. Returning again and again to the same wind-whipped beach in Dorset, the two friends argue and flirt their way through 400 years. Their costumes and interests and dreams change with the times, while they age at an infinitesimal pace compared with their surroundings.
Hurtling through time, Horn uses the beach as a space to toy with privilege and power, with Nell increasingly furious at Oscars freedoms as a young man, while she isnt even able to swim in public.
Presented by the company FullRogue, Wild Swimming sold out at the Edinburgh fringe in 2019 and returns to Bristol this summer. It is a joyful, audacious show, and Oscar and Nells friendship is addictive. Even after 400 years, we want them to keep coming back to us on the shore. KW
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Dir: Michel Gondry
Wave goodbye … Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
It is Valentines Day 2004. Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) skives from work to go and wallow on a snowy, hostile beach in Montauk, New York. Sand is overrated, he thinks. Its just tiny little rocks. Clearly, Barish hasnt read much William Blake recently. When he spots a woman wearing an orange sweater, standing alone by the ocean, the films focus on the granular yet monumental nature of memory becomes apparent.
Barish and Clementine (Kate Winslet) meet as if for the first time, but they have been here before. As it transpires that each elected to have the other erased from their memory after a failed relationship, they try to outwit the scientists wiping their slate clean, racing through Barishs psyche in search of a place to hide. It is futile: characters and details vanish from their every refuge. The beach house they broke into on their first meeting crumbles away, leaving only the pair lying in bed on the beach a beautiful, hopeless shot.
Strikingly, their romantic memories are full of banalities and bickering no love for the ages. But these disparate specks add up to something that neither is ready to relinquish. Clementines reappearance emotional flotsam on the shore suggests no one ever really lets go. LS
Southern Comforts Whatevers Comfortable advert
Pop culture always gets beaches wrong because it represents them as a place where you can be fun and happy and energetic and eat good food. I have never in my life been to a beach like that. This is because of what the beach does to you: the pure, unfiltered, pummel of sunshine; fine sand, everywhere; sweat mixed with sweat mixed with suntan lotion. At the beach, you do not frolic in the waves, or strum a guitar round a fire pit, or play volleyball; you wallow like a whale in soup, then get up, with a headache, and realise its still somehow only 4pm.
This is why the 2012 advert where a man with a proto-mullet, a small pair of swimming trunks, a deep, mahogany tan and some 70s porn baron sunglasses ambles across a beach in search of Southern Comfort is the closest thing to showing what a beach really is: walking thickly over thin sand, nodding sleepily to anyone who notices you, heading in the direction of a cold drink. We go to the beach to see a little glimpse of what awaits us between limbo and hell. The only accurate representation of the beach in human history is a slightly-too-long advert for a bourbon-flavoured liqueur. No One Direction video even comes close. JG
The Last of Us Part II
Naughty Dog (PS4/5)
On the edge … The Last of Us Part II. Photograph: Naughty Dog/Sony
With its post-apocalyptic adventure game series The Last of Us, developer Naughty Dog showed an unnerving talent for subverting idyllic landscapes for horrific impact. Zoos, country houses, theme parks: all are transformed into twisted hellscapes, populated by savage infected killers. Perhaps the greatest example of this talent is the developers use of a beach for the climactic fight between SPOILER ALERT Ellie and Abby at the close of The Last of Us Part II. Shrouded in fog, the sea black and uninviting, its like your worst ever seaside holiday, except here you are also expected to murder your arch-enemy.
Abbys aim is to clamber onboard a nearby boat and row away to safety a pitch-dark take on the image of the coast as a place of escape but there is no way Ellie, our surviving protagonist from the first game, is going to let her leave without a fight. So many video games, from Super Mario Sunshine to Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, have given us stereotypical beach scenes. The Last of Us II, on the other hand, makes the beach feel like not just the end of land but the end of the world itself. KS
Pure Shores
All Saints
There is something deeply 2021 relatable about the video for All Saints majestic dream-pop classic Pure Shores, taken from Leonardo DiCaprios 2000 vehicle The Beach. In the equivalent of a big, saved-up-for-years family holiday being downgraded to a caravan in Rhyl, All Saints are shunted from the films scenic Thailand locale to Holkham beach in Norfolk. In January. They trudge around like moody teens in heavy duty winter wear, two of them trying to inject some excitement by running in sand, AKA the hardest, most pointless form of exercise.
At times they are filmed in terrifying nightvision, a technique one reviewer said made them look like hopelessly dazed raccoons. In the context of the aborted holiday narrative, it feels like that moment you hit peak boredom beaches, in winter, are tedious and you start scrolling through your phone for arty social media filters with which to endlessly annoy everyone.
The sandy scenes are intercut with sections filmed in Norfolk beach huts, supposedly to replicate Leo et als sweat-drenched digs in Ko Phi Phi Le, but each band member just looks relieved to be out of the wind. Basically, the beach backdrop here feels taunting, a constant reminder of what happens when plans are ruined. MC
John from Cincinnati
(Now TV)
Total wipeout … John from Cincinnati. Photograph: HBO/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
Watch your feet, mutters seasoned surfer Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood) as he schleps a board back to his car with a starstruck female fan, I stepped on a syringe here yesterday. Its fair to say that John from Cincinnati which notoriously debuted on HBO immediately after the final episode of The Sopranos in 2007 did not overly romanticise its setting: Imperial Beach, a hardscrabble Californian city within yomping distance of the Mexican border.
Created by Deadwoods David Milch and surf-noir author Kem Nunn, this one-season curio rejected the glossy, turquoise-blue screensaver aesthetic of much beach-related TV to present something grittier and more confounding. The titular dude is a miracle-inducing stranger who upends the surfers, scum-bums and various orbiting eccentrics. But is the naive John Monad (Austin Nichols) an angel, an alien or just a kook?
Viewers and critics may have struggled to connect with the dramas wilfully cryptic vibe. But whenever the action reverts to catching waves made easier by casting actual surfers such as teen champ Greyson Fletcher the show finds a more blissful, spiritual groove. For the sweetest hit, just dip into the sublime credits sequence, a scratchy montage of breakers soundtracked by Joe Strummer. GV
Massimo Vitali
Massimo Vitali photographs Italian summer beaches with a sensual yet uneasy eye. From Sicily to Liguria, all his epic shots seem to find the same empty sunlight shining on a panorama of human detail that is both comic and flat. Crowded shores pack people big and small, cool and uncool on white sand and water-kissed rocks. These scenes should be idyllic but something is wrong. Its all too perfect. Here are Italians blissing out in the infinite light, seeking a summer paradise. On every beach its the same fantasy, the same crowd for we all behave in a ritual, preset way in this rush for a modern dream.
Perhaps Vitali, from a Catholic culture, is mocking the cult of beauty in a post-religious Europe. Perhaps he sees images of corporatism and corruption in these bleached-out gatherings. His photos echo some of the ironic beach scenes of Italian cinema from Fellinis seedy Rimini to Viscontis panorama of the Venice Lido as Dirk Bogarde dies in voyeuristic ecstasy. The beach is a place where modern, secular dreams die in the glint of sun on water, suggests this heir to the neo-realists. Still, I wouldnt mind being on one of those beaches right now. JJread more