• Every generation says it won't happen to
them. "I'm not going to be like my parents. I'm
not going to sell out my dreams." Breaking
away from your parents, establishing your
own identity, holding on to what you know to
be true - these issues are timeless ones - and
ones that came blazing into the open in the
Sixties. No film captured this better than the
The Graduate. In a world of crushed dreams,
Benjamin Braddock finds the meaning of
having true love: Life itself.
The theme of an innocent
and confused youth who is
exploited, mis-directed,
seduced (literally and
figuratively) and betrayed
by a corrupt, decadent,and
discredited older
generation …captured the
spirit of the times.
This is Benjamin. He's a
little worried about his
future.
• The Graduate is one of the most important
films of the late 1960's. Through it, Hollywood
discovered that the "misunderstood youth" of
years past, from the Holden Caulfields to the
James Deans, were no longer teenagers.
Alienation had gone to college, and for much
of the next decade, those who made films
about youth in America concerned
themselves with the problems and priorities of
men and women between the ages of twenty
and thirty.
• Benjamin Braddock is an upper-middle-class
young man from Southern California who has
just graduated from an Eastern college, and
is not yet ready to face adult life, which he
regards as a game with rules that do not
make much sense. The film opens with a
close-up of Benjamin's impassive face
(Nichols uses these close-ups continually
throughout the first part of the film); his blank
expression mirrors his feeling of emptiness
while Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's "The
Sounds of Silence" plays on the soundtrack,
reinforcing the impression of Benjamin's
alienation from his surroundings.
...And in the naked light I saw, ten
thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking, people
hearing without listening.
People writing songs that voices never
shared, no one dared disturb the sound
of silence...
• Ben’s alienation:
• I've had this feeling ever since I graduated.
This kind of compulsion that I have to be
rude all the time...It's like I was playing
some kind of game, but the rules don't
make any sense to me. They're being
made up by all the wrong people. I mean
no one makes them up. They seem to
make themselves up.
Ben is alienated from the present and uncertain
about the future
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Ben: I'm just...
Mr. Braddock: ...worried?
Ben: Well...
Mr. Braddock: About what?
Ben: I guess about my future.
Mr. Braddock: What about it?
Ben: I don't know. I want it to be...
Mr. Braddock: ...to be what?
Ben: ...Different.
• Guests: We're all so proud of you, proud,
proud, proud, proud, proud, proud, proud.
What are you going to do now?
• Ben: I was going to go upstairs for a minute.
• Guest: I meant with your future, your life.
• Ben: Well, that's a little hard to say.
• Mr. Braddock: Ben, what are you doing?
• Ben: Well, I would say that I'm just drifting
here in the pool.
• Mr. Braddock: Why?
• Ben: Well, it's very comfortable just to drift
here.
• Mr. Braddock: Have you thought about
graduate school?
• Ben: No.
• Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me
then what those four years of college were
for? What was the point of all that hard work?
• Ben: You got me.
The coventional options don’t look good:
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you
- just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: 'Plastics.'
Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics.
Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.
Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That's a deal.
• Ben is an older version of Jim Stark.
“You’ve got to do something” but Ben hasn’t a
clue what it is.
• But it isn’t plastics.
• Plastics would become a favorite sixties
metaphor for what is not natural which=what is
not good
& a metaphor for the artificiality of the dominant
culture & of people who follow scripts instead of
their hearts
The people bowed and prayed
to the neon God they made.
• Ben can’t hear the positive side of his
intuition--he knows he wants his life to be
“different” but he doesn’t know in what way.
• Emerson wrote in his journal when he was
20, accusing himself:
“You will sleep out life in this desperate reverie-the purposes for which you live unsought,
unfound”
• Because he is aimless and drifting, he finds
himself involved in an affair with Mrs.
Robinson
• A metaphor for the kind of meaninglessness
that can happen to someone who has no
inner compass, who has lost touch with his
intuition.
Ben can faintly hear his intutition--that’s
why he’s alienated.
But he can only hear the negative side: what is
wrong for him
Not the positive side: what is right for him
From Mike Nichols’ romantic point of view, the
problem with Ben’s affair isn’t that it’s immoral.
It’s that it’s superficial, meaningless, it has no
genuine emotion involved.
They don’t connect at a human level--witness
Benjamin’s painful attempts to have a
conversation.
They just use each other for sex.
He doesn’t even call her by her first name..
• I think it was the story of a not
particularly bright, not particularly
remarkable but worthy kid drowning
among objects and things, committing
moral suicide by allowing himself to be
used finally like an object or a thing by
Mrs. Robinson, because he doesn't
have the moral or intellectual resources
to do what a large percentage of other
kids like him do - to rebel, to march, to
demonstrate, to turn on. Just drowning.
– --director Mike Nichols
Mrs. Robinson is the Ghost of Christmas Future: she is
what Ben will become if he doesn’t find some meaningful
path for his life.
She’s a cynic: an erstwhile romantic who never achieved
her dreams.
An art major who got pregnant and had to marry her boyfriend,
she got trapped in the Wife script.
She is bitter and as she tells Ben when he tries to strike
up a conversation, not interested in art.
She’s burnt out, empty, living a bitter meaningless life
married to a man she doesn’t love. She has nothing, so
the best she can do is amuse herself with a meaningless
affair with Ben.
"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Joltin' Joe has left and gone away.”
DiMaggio is a hero and a lonely alienated nation
needs heroes, needs something to believe in. . .
But according to Mrs. Robinson’s cynical view,
there’s nothing to believe in, no heroes, Joltin’ Joe
has left and gone away.
• In a New York Times editorial in March 1999,
shortly after DiMaggio's death, Paul Simon
explained that the line was meant as a
sincere tribute to DiMaggio's unpretentious
heroic stature, in a time when popular culture
magnifies and distorts how we perceive our
heroes. He further reflected: "In these days of
Presidential transgressions and apologies
and prime-time interviews about private
sexual matters, we grieve for Joe DiMaggio
and mourn the loss of his grace and dignity,
his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the
memory of his wife and the power of his
silence."
• Purportedly, not everyone sees Mrs.
Robinson in such a negative light. According
to Wikipedia:
• “The term Mrs. Robinson has recently been
used by a certain sect of urban progressive
married females to describe themselves and
their declaration of indifference to traditional
marriage values and other conventional
romantic institutions. Known as the Mrs.
Robinson Society (MRS) mrsrobinsonsf.com,
the group's manifesto is loosely based on a
revival of interest in Bancroft's portrayal of
Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, and
celebrates her character as a symbol of
female independence and empowerment for
a new generation of married women.”
Then Ben meets Elaine and she
makes all the difference
She is innocent, idealistic,
full of hopes and dreams
She is not cynical or jaded.
She is perhaps what her mother
once was before she let life
defeat her.
Elaine makes the difference. Once Ben
chooses her for himself instead of seeing
her as foisted upon him by his
parents, he becomes different.
•Considerate instead of rude
•Decisive instead of indecisive
He’s finally heard his heart and now he can act,
now he can live. Now there’s meaning to life.
Other lyrics from The Sounds of Silence
suggest that there is hope for Ben-that he
can fully hear his intuition.
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
Benjamin: Elaine, I like
you. I like you so much.
Do you believe that? (She
nods silently) Do you?
Elaine: Yes.
Ben: (He sighs deeply)
You're the first thing for so long that I like,
the first person I could stand to be with.
My whole life is such a waste. There's
just nothing. I'm sorry. I'll take you home
now. (He starts his car)
• Having heard his heart, Ben now has a
dream to follow and he does so.
• He follows Elaine to Berkeley and
intrudes himself into her life
• (this didn’t seem quite so creepy back
then; now it looks a bit like stalking.)
• He doesn’t seem to have much of a
plan, but at least he’s not just drifting;
he has a goal.
• When Ben finds that Elaine is going to
marry someone who appears to be
everything Ben detests, he acts to save
his dream and to rescue Elaine from the
fate of her mother: a meaningless,
loveless conventional marriage.
• In the memorable climactic rescue scene at
the film's conclusion, Benjamin makes a mad
rush to interrupt and stop Elaine's wedding with one enormous and uncharacteristic burst
of initiative. He decides to try to halt the
marriage from the church balcony, looking
down through a pane of plate-glass (in a
crucifixion image) as the ceremony
concludes. He pounds on the glass,
hopelessly calling out: "Elaine! Elaine! Elaine!
Elaine!" as they exchange wedding vows.
The bride finally looks up - startled - torn
between Benjamin, her parents and her new,
safe husband.
•
The very end of the movie is
apparently the result of an anticliche
improvisation. In the book Ben interrupts
Elaine’s wedding (to another) before the
troths have been plighted or the plights have
been trothed or what have you. In the movie
the bride kisses the groom before Ben can
disrupt the proceeding, but the bride runs off
just the same. And this little change makes all
the difference in dramatizing the triumph of
people over proceedings.
An entire genre of Hollywood movies had been
constructed upon the suspenseful chase-tothe-altar proposition that what God hath
joined together no studio scriptwriter could
put asunder. The minister could turn out to be
an imposter, the bridegroom a bigamist, but
once the vows were taken, that was the old
ball game. The Graduate not only shatters
this monogamous mythology; it does so in the
name of a truer love.--Andrew Sarris
• It is love & truth & authenticity that count, not
the formalities-Ben & Elaine’s being together is
right despite their not being married while the
Robinsons’ being together is wrong even
though they are.
• the rejection of upper-middle-class values
had a special appeal for upper-middle-class
college students. The inarticulate Benjamin
became a romantic hero for the audience to
project onto. The movie functioned as a
psychodrama: the graduate stood for truth;
the older people stood for sham and for
corrupt sexuality. And this "generation-gap"
view of youth and age entered the national
bloodstream; many moviegoers went to see
the picture over and over again.
» --Pauline Kael
• Mrs. Robinson: It's too late.
• Elaine: Not for me.
It’s never too late to follow
your heart. The young have
something to teach their
elders in this respect. Perhaps
it’s not too late even for Mrs.
Robinson if she could shed
her cynicism and listen to her
heart.
"And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will
know
God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson”
There is a metaphorical blessing
available to Mrs.Robinson still if she
would unharden her heart and listen to
her own intuition.
Recall the final image.
• The young, glowing, alive, in love
Benjamin & Elaine sitting in the back of
the bus &
• This sea of dead almost zombie-like
• Older faces turns to stare at them
• They can’t cope with people who are
alive; all they can do is stare.
• Then finding himself to some extent, finding
part of himself that he hadn't found, through
connection with a girl. Finding passion
because of impossibility.Impossibility always
leads to passion and vice versa. Going from
passion to a kind of insanity. Saving himself
temporarily from being an object, through the
passion and insanity. Getting what he thinks
he wanted and beginning to subside back into
the same world in which he has to live, with
not enough changed. I think that's the
story…director Mike Nichols
Nichols puts ambiguity at the end. Are love &
idealism enough to sustain a meaningful life
when nothing has changed except one’s
heart?