The Graduate (1967)
Few films have benefitted from a more felicitous conjunction of talent, truth-telling, and timing than The Graduate, the cinematic adaptation of a tepidly reviewed and largely ignored 1963 first novel by Charles Webb. The story of a precocious recent college graduate with a bright future he doesn’t want resonated with an emerging audience of Baby-Boom college students to create a cultural phenomenon. In its time, the film was a box-office blockbuster of nearly unprecedented proportions, running in theaters from late 1967 (in order to qualify for the 1968 Academy Awards) through the entire calendar year of 1968 and well into 1969, “eventually [becoming in its time] the third-most successful movie in history, surpassed only by The Sound of Music and Gone with the Wind.”1 The estimable Stanley Kauffmann called it “‘a milestone in American film history.’”2 Its mega-success surprised everyone including its producers (functioning in semi-independent status in rented space at Paramount, where the film was largely shot on custom-built sets); Lawrence Turman, the man who bought the rights to Webb’s novel because he responded to the story’s cultural alienation but also because the little-known source text was just within his tiny price range, knew that even modest success would recoup the investment and get his foot in the door of Hollywood (he had rejected the steady work his father’s garment business offered). Turman’s luckiest stroke was that Mike Nichols, hottest stage director in New York, also responded to Webb’s book in a deeply personal way. With Nichols on board, Turman was eventually able to secure financing, albeit beyond the big studios, through Joseph E. Levine’s independent production house that imported racy European art films and made B-movie exploitation films.
What no one could anticipate was the cultural wave cresting just as post-production was wrapping in the fall of 1967. The concerns of a generation increasingly estranged from the post–World War II sense of earned entitlement to material accumulation and the mounting tensions of the Cold War and America’s entanglement in Asian conflicts first in Korea and then in Vietnam reinforced fears that, as Benjamin Braddock, protagonist of The Graduate, puts it, “It’s like I’ve been 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. No, I mean no one makes them up; they seem to’ve made themselves up.” Despite minimal publicity and largely respectful but far from unanimously rapturous reviews,3 the popular embrace of The Graduate was immediate, decisive, and clamorous. Originally released in only two movie theaters in the country, both of them in midtown Manhattan, lines began forming daily around the block; the film received seven Oscar nominations (winning for its sophomore director), and eventually it seemed the entire country was humming Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” Hoffman went from unknown character actor to cultural symbol overnight: “‘I was an object,’” he recalled, ironically describing himself exactly as his character Benjamin has been treated by his parents. “‘No one knew my name. I wasn’t a human being to them. I was the Graduate.’”4
Nichols, no stranger to the love of an audience, was utterly unprepared for this extremity of mass devotion. The Broadway world is comparatively hermetic and a mere fraction of the audience that Hollywood commands. To have a run of hit plays, as Nichols had during the first half of the 1960s, made him the toast of the town, but in the rest of the country, a vague shadow of the east-coast entertainment scene. His earlier run of success with Elaine May as a comic was similarly spectacular in a relatively limited way: the triumph of the Arthur Penn-directed two-person Broadway show and companion, Grammy-winning recording. Nichols was a New York cultural celebrity, not a national celebrity. In directing Burton and Taylor in what became his first film, the extraordinary 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Nichols stepped into a broader, more intense spotlight, but the luminosity of his two stars and chamber-cinema methodology of the production reinforced Nichols’ reputation, where it was known at all beyond the greater New York cultural zone, as a man of the theater. Virginia Woolf has far too much cinematic vivacity and ingenuity to be dismissed as a filmed play, yet its Albee pedigree and unities of time, place, and action permit a lazy assumption of Nichols as having brought Broadway to Hollywood rather than having succeeded in Hollywood’s distinct medium. With The Graduate, Nichols’ expressive, formalist embrace of the deliberate and idiosyncratic language of European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s announces the star behind the camera. While Dustin Hoffman, a struggling character actor already a trifle old (at 30) to start a career, was transformed by his performance as Benjamin Braddock, the true star of The Graduate was its auteur. Nichols discovered the expressive possibilities of the medium during the long production and post-production phases of The Graduate: “A movie, although it’s very technical in the shooting stage, really puts you much more in touch with your own unconscious and the unconscious of the audience,” he has commented, adding, “Which is, I think, the great hold that it gets on us all.”5 As Richard T. Jameson writes, Nichols’ education in cinematic language was also an education for his mass audience: “[N]o other film in going-on-seven-decades had so decisively or deliciously made so many people notice the kinds of selection and design that go into making the movie experience.”6 In the delirious aftermath of the film’s reception by a young audience hungrily poised to embrace a cinematic analog of its own social alienation, Nichols also became aware of the irrational power of cinema, as he watched in profound helplessness as the audience saw what it wanted to see, remaking the film in its own self-congratulatory image. The roots of Nichols’ eventual withdrawal from avant-garde style to a more conventional, traditional style of cinematic communication (demonstrated particularly after the box-office debacle of 1970’s Catch-22 and its heavily accented formalism) may be traced in part, ironically, to box-office success: the alarm and dismay he encountered in having his carefully orchestrated film appropriated and misinterpreted by an audience hundreds, even thousands of times larger than he had ever encountered in his greatest earlier successes.
The Graduate is relatively faithful to Charles Webb’s 1963 novel. Richard Corliss denounced Buck Henry’s adaptation as “retyping,”7 though Henry was rightfully acknowledging the cinematic qualities already latent in Webb’s story. The film opens with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) having graduated from a phenomenal collegiate career. In the novel and in earlier drafts of the screenplay, we also learn that Benjamin has served as valedictorian of his class, despite the fact that he has yet to turn 21 years old. He is the recipient of the Frank Halpingham Award, which we learn in Webb’s novel is specifically given to a student who displays promise as a future teacher. While we do not glimpse that promise for ourselves—Benjamin seems extraordinarily non-verbal for much of the film—the larger implications of the award are clear: Benjamin has been identified by the system of education as a promising agent to perpetuate the goals of the educational system that produced him. He can serve as a molder of young men and women precisely because he has so cooperatively yielded to his own molding. Similarly, at home in Los Angeles, where his parents meet him at the airport (oddly eschewing attending their only child’s graduation—was their social calendar too full? Too much planning to do for his graduation party?), Mr. and Mrs. Braddock (William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson) anticipate a life of conformist inheritance for Ben: their big Beverly Hills house and pool become the battleground for several scenes depicting the 1960s “generation gap” between the parents who collectively won World War II, reaping its spoils, and their children, who came to question a nation of gender and racial inequality, nationalist incursion, and “soulless wealth” (as Lyndon B. Johnson characterized it in his 1964 Great Society speech).8
Andrew Sarris writes that, “whereas Nichols merely transferred Virginia Woolf, he transcended The Graduate.”9 Nichols’ second film was, in many ways, an absolute departure from his first. The most obvious visual differences are that the solemnity of Haskell Wexler’s neo-noir black-and-white photography, capturing largely nighttime interiors, gives way to the polychromatic vibrancy of sun-splashed Beverly Hills and the San Francisco Bay area. Steven Spielberg calls The Graduate “‘a visual watershed’” in Hollywood.10 Virginia Woolf cast two of the most famous celebrities of Hollywood and put one or the other (and usually both) in virtually every frame of the film; The Graduate casts an unknown (about whose undeniably ethnic features and maladroit early screen tests everyone had grave doubts) as its center of gravity, its only potential “star” (Anne Bancroft, who’d won the Tony and subsequent Oscar as the saintly Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker) dimmed by her role as the film’s great antagonist, Mrs. Robinson. The milieu of Virginia Woolf is distinctly east-coast, cerebral, verbal, set outside the “real world” in the halls of academe (and a decidedly small-time, low-power academe at that); in The Graduate, we are on the west coast, among largely non-verbal or inarticulate members of the commercial world, in which physicality assumes prominence. Most significantly (for the audience reception of the two films), the protagonists of Virginia Woolf are firmly entrenched in middle age, with its attendant crises and regret over lost opportunities, while The Graduate, despite giving us long glimpses of middle-aged ennui, offers protagonists who could be enrolled in George’s classes, and whose crises are formational rather than foundational. George and Martha know who they are and spend the majority of their narrative in trying to decide whether to confront or continue to ignore this knowledge; Benjamin and Elaine have no idea who they are but suspect that they need to become something other than what their parents’ generation—George and Martha’s generation—has bequeathed to them.
And yet the constancy of Mike Nichols’ vision as a filmmaker emerges, in these first two films of his long career, in the fact that, despite all these differences, Virginia Woolf and The Graduate share a horror of the distortions and desecrations of human personality wrought by status and the pursuit of power. George and Martha’s all-night, all-marriage sparring match for manipulative control of each other and illusionary spin on the sorry, unfulfilled realities of their shared life ultimately ends in the only way that points to a positive dawn: with their shared defeat. No one wins their final game, and as losers, they are free to lose their illusions and get on with the business of being fully, interdependently human. Ben and Elaine are far younger and far less wise than George and Martha. They don’t understand as clearly how deep the ruts of reification run. Each of Nichols’ first two films shows two generations held fast in the grip of cultural conformity regardless of profession, age, or privilege. Higher learning in both narratives reveals itself to be one of the most insidious agents of reified stasis: neither George, tenured but tenuous in his “authority,” nor Benjamin, the “award-winning scholar” nauseated by whatever he has “learned back there in the east,” is able to think his way out of his cultural box. George, however, has Martha, who provides him a “worthy adversary” and who, by accident, initiates the game (telling somebody about their “son”) that leads them eventually to the light of the day. All Benjamin has is Elaine (Katharine Ross), and vice versa. Elaine can share in Benjamin’s confusion about the future (her understanding of his situation is not a negligible thing; in fact, it’s a source of his obsessive attraction to her), and she can commission him to imagine a “definite plan” for his future. Yet however bright they are purported to be by their culture (whose interests lie in securing their conformity), they are largely inert and malleable; “clean-cut and stupid.”11 Having rejected the problematic lives they’ve been told to lead, Benjamin and Elaine are nonetheless of little aid to each other in imagining an alternative to the future offered with such anxious insistence by their parents. “‘We very consciously thought of the movie as a dream,’” Nichols says, “‘and just beginning to wake up from it at the very end.’”12
What shocked and alienated Nichols about the unreflective enthusiasm with which the mass audience promoted Benjamin and Elaine as iconic counter-culture couple was Nichols’ own understanding of his protagonist as having “drown[ed] 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.”13 Nichols told Peter Bart while making the film, “‘Benjamin has been surfeited with objects. Even his girls are regarded as objects. Benjamin himself has become an object to his family.’”14 Lee Hill concludes that The Graduate remains a powerful fable about the difficulties in rebellion in a consumer culture where choice is rampant and yet illusory.”15 The Graduate is “a focus on individual freedom versus collective repression,”16 an ironic warning to a more insidious level of conformity than the mass audience was aware of—Benjamin runs, but as a track star, he runs on a circular track. Without any alternative finish line in his head, he is bound to return to what he knows, as Nichols predicts, to “become his parents.”17
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In the years since its initial blockbuster run in theaters, the reputation of The Graduate has grown in inverse proportion to the fulfillment of its prophetic pronouncement upon the counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Many of those individuals who announced their intentions to “drop out” of conformist culture eventually became their parents, returning to the culture and its values either in resignation of an experiment they could not sustain or happily reacquainting themselves with the material comforts they had missed. The argument of The Graduate’s narrative is that counter-motion is, in itself, unsustainable: movement purely away from the undesirable will result in inertia unless the movement can be reignited by a positive goal worth moving towards. In The Graduate, Ben may be a superbly performing student, but his professors must not have required him to do much genuinely original thinking—he is alarmingly inarticulate about his objections to the prevailing culture and purely mute on viable alternatives.
Why, for instance, has he even boarded the plane that returns him to Los Angeles from the east? The film’s opening shot, a close-up of Hoffman, reveals an unhappy young man, grim-faced; the zoom-out reveals that his isolation is in a cabin-full of people, being instructed by a disembodied voice from the cockpit. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” makes its first of three commentaries on the film’s action as the next shot is introduced, a long take of Benjamin passively conveyed along a moving walkway at LAX. A cut to a shot of his suitcase conveyed along a similar belt suggests an analogy between man and luggage: each is an object carried towards its pick-up point. Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, the Braddocks throw two parties for their son, both of which are naked grasps at status enhancement for the Braddocks at Ben’s expense. As bad as the graduation party is, it pales before the hyper-anxious performances of father and son in front of the assembled guests at the birthday party. Mr. Braddock, with his statuesque trophy wife, trophy house, and trophy pool, has pinpointed Benjamin as his status difference-maker: anyone with money can buy a big house and attract a suitably glamorous partner who projects his conspicuous values, but a son who tore up the racing tracks and the classrooms at a prestigious east-coast school is an item that money alone can’t buy.
To his credit, Benjamin objects to this bankruptcy of values, not least because it commodifies him. In the film’s very first dialogue, before his parents misbehave at the first of the parties in his honor, he hides in his childhood room from his parents’ friends, and his father demands to know what’s the matter so that they can get him downstairs and start showing him off. Nichols blocks and frames the stationary camera’s shot so Benjamin can remain static, establishing Benjamin’s pervasive psychological point of view: “It’s a highly subjective film with everything filtered through the eyes of its protagonist.”18 His father (and later his mother) moves in and out of the shot, obstructing the sight line from Ben to camera. “What’s wrong,” his father says, impatiently. Benjamin haltingly admits only that he wants his future to be “different.” We assume that this is the habitual reticence of the emotionally bullied child, who fears the consequences of uttering a discouraging word. Yet distance from his dictators later in the narrative does not promote greater eloquence. His longest speech, about who makes the rules in society, is to Elaine on their first (and only) formal date, when he concludes that the rules “seem to’ve made themselves up.” This is a long way from an articulate, reasoned social critique, though it does suggest inklings of reified reality. We begin to understand why he boarded the plane and returned to a place that clearly makes him miserable: he can’t think of any better place to go.
The mise-en-scène of his childhood room, to which he retreats from his parents and their parties (as well as after his estrangement from the Robinson women), encapsulates his malaise: it is, visibly, still a child’s room, with its tiny bed, arrayed toys and decorations, and comfortingly burbling aquarium. The tank, lit a soft underwater green, features a tiny plastic diver, a foreshadowing of his own transformation into a diver, posed by his parents in the backyard aquarium, an exotic prized fish on display. Shooting Benjamin in close-up framed by the tank in this early dialogue with his father, Nichols invites us to see the aquarium and larger room as a metaphorical womb-space of a young man his father keeps calling a “boy” (in his barker’s patter at the birthday demonstration of the diving suit). Ben has retreated to this safe womb-space from the graduation party after a few breathless, claustrophobic moments lost in a crowd of adults demanding to know his plans for the future or, in the case of Mr. McGuire of the “Plastics” speech, predicting his future, like a balmy, avuncular oracle.
Mrs. Robinson’s invasion of the womb-space, which Murray Pomerance refers to as Benjamin’s “horrifying, self-contained cyst,”19 is thus an especially queasy transgression, given what we know to be her ulterior motive. Benjamin is made anxious and aroused by this quasi-maternal figure (the camera’s gaze—Ben’s psychological point of view, which eventually is literalized by subjective camera—has already rested briefly upon her, sitting alone at the party). She barges in with an unlikely excuse, since she has probably visited this house enough times to know where its bathrooms are, then maliciously tosses his car keys into the aquarium, upsetting the diver, when Ben has offered to loan her his new car. At her house, the parent-child dynamic continues with Mrs. Robinson alternating flirtation and scolding until locking herself naked in her daughter’s room with her prey. Both this night and the night they meet for the first time at the Taft Hotel, Ben’s objections to what she proposes center on appearances: what his parents and Mr. Robinson would say. His sense of impropriety is inherited from his parents, and it is based not in a moral code but in social performance (literally, imagining a disappointed audience).
This received value is tenuous because not his own, and because there is so much in his parents’ world to which he objects. At the birthday party, what residual or habitual allegiance Benjamin feels to their will is irreparable. Mr. Robinson has advised Ben to “have a good time while you can”—it’s a vague and ominous reference, later fleshed out during Ben’s “conversation” with Mrs. Robinson, to the unhappy circumstances in which the Robinsons happened to marry, victimized by incautious physical desire and consequential social proscription. In a matched set of voice overlaps between successive scenes, Nichols and his editor, Sam O’Steen, stitch together a causal connection between three events: Mrs. Robinson’s offer, the Braddocks’ humiliating birthday performance, and Benjamin’s acceptance of the offer. As Benjamin walks away from the Robinsons to his car, Mrs. Robinson calls, “I’ll see you soon I hope.” The next voice we hear, as Benjamin is still clambering into the Alfa Romeo, is his father’s: “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, for this afternoon’s feature attraction.” The entire birthday scene is played as an analogy to the reticent performer whose stage fright only increases the anxiety of his exposed partner. It is the scene that most clearly announces the thematic intentions of the film.
Daniels and Hoffman, who respectively play Braddock father and son, are small men; Wilson, who plays Mrs. Braddock, is statuesque by comparison. Centered on the lawn and surrounded by his smaller family is a brawny man in a bathing suit. Nichols uses the diminutive size of his two main performers in the scene to underscore psychological imbalances or inadequacies they feel. Mrs. Braddock as played by Wilson is big and brassy (recall her near-hysterical bray of joy when Ben announces his intention, later in the film, to marry Elaine); Mrs. Braddock is given to grand, attention-grabbing gestures, like the thrown-back head (as in the engagement “announcement”) signaling, in a publicly demonstrative way, her delight or pleasure. To Mr. Braddock’s weak jokes to warm up the crowd before the “feature attraction,” she laughs to the sky, performing her role as the model audience. Not a moment feels natural until Benjamin, behind the patio door, breaks from script and improvises his dismay about what’s expected of him. Nichols and Robert Surtees, the veteran cinematographer, shoot up from a low angle on Daniels; as in the earlier scene in which Mr. Braddock breaks in on his son’s privacy and breaks down Ben’s resistance in the aquarium-lit bedroom, father upstages son, mugging to the crowd, which begins to heckle the host when the “show” threatens to fall flat.
In fact, the more carefully examined psychology of this scene suggests that, when Benjamin balks, the show becomes more, not less, interesting to the invited guests: if they thought they were socially bound to witness the Braddocks’ brinksmanship in flaunting the status of an award-winning scholar in the family, the unannounced developments that lead to the humiliation of two generations of Braddocks offer them an unexpected windfall of status-capital. One may in fact assume that the new party, thrown so soon after the old one, may itself have been a status reassertion by the Braddocks, after the embarrassment of Benjamin’s disappearance from his own graduation festivities. Again a lucrative gift is at the center of the party’s attention, a scuba suit whose cost is with pointed casualness identified: “And it better work,” jokes Mr. Braddock, still warming the crowd, “or I’m out over two hundred bucks.” Unspoken is the reality that, if it doesn’t work, he could also be out a son … but in the world of status maintenance, his son’s personhood is of small concern. “Dad, can you listen?” comes from a voice with no corporeal reality for the master of ceremonies—which is why Mr. Braddock can’t listen.
And so Benjamin is finally brought on stage, infantilized to the extreme of taking a toddler’s steps in the ridiculously inappropriate flippers. All the psychological assertions of Benjamin’s point of view—his parents’ domineering upstaging of his interests, Mrs. Robinson grotesquely commingling the maternal and seductive, Mr. Robinson’s noir scariness in giving Ben advice about sowing some wild oats—is finally summarized in the shift to Ben’s literal, subjective-camera perspective inside the mask. The Braddocks’ stagy gestures of encouragement mimic the condescending cheers of young parents coaxing their baby to walk, but, a few moments later, their firm hands pressing the subjective-camera mask back under the pool’s surface have a more sinister tone. Nichols has characterized Benjamin as “drowning in things, and [confronting] the danger of becoming a thing, the danger of treating yourself or other people as things”20; this chilling shot suggests that the “drowning” was not accidental: Benjamin is too weak to resist the material burdens thrust upon him, which laden him down to the bottom. As his father’s desperate pleas for Ben to perform have suggested, Mr. Braddock has himself sunk long ago under the weight of accumulation, and his misguided sense of love for his son endangers the next generation.
The voice overlap that extends this sequence, in which Ben calls Mrs. Robinson from the Taft Hotel to begin their affair, creates a causal link in which the birthday party is the final status-inflicted humiliation Ben allows his parents to perpetrate upon him. (Ironically, once he has arrived at the Taft Hotel, he will be commissioning all the humiliations under his own power.) If the film were truly a counter-cultural film with alternatives to propose, these first 25 minutes would have been well spent in a comic, hyperbolic (Benjamin’s distorting point of view) skewering of a world of consumerist conformity, status anxiety, and disingenuous performance. Having argued decisively against that world, it could then use its last 80 minutes to dramatize the difficult rewards of taking a road less traveled, arguing for a genuine alternative to the social proscription to which so many fall victim.21 But this is not the narrative route chosen in The Graduate, which remains throughout its entire length a negative satire of reified conformity. In his rave review, Roger Ebert praised The Graduate “because it has a point of view. That is to say, it is against something.”22 However, Benjamin’s point of view, steeped in critical insights about his culture that might have portended the beginning of wisdom, ultimately ignores the redemptive qualities of self-knowledge and inherent self-correction because of a failure of imagination. Unlike the reified heroes who transform themselves and their circumstances by whatever limited means are available to them (as for instance, George and Martha do at the end of Virginia Woolf, or Meryl Streep’s title character does in Silkwood, or as several characters do in Angels in America), Benjamin understands his reified dilemma but literally can’t imagine an alternative. From the bottom of the pool, Ben could decide to think about somebody else for a change: join the Peace Corps, teach in a disadvantaged urban or rural school district, coach a juvenile-offender track squad. He could explore philosophical alternatives, or join a religion or a political party. Instead, the only alternative that occurs to him is to try “to be suave” with Mrs. Robinson, a choice that redoubles his humiliation. It’s the only choice that matters, because it curses all future choices he attempts. In the logic of The Graduate’s narrative, his choice to become a deceptive adult just like all the adults he knows, with their secrets and betrayals and power struggling, transfers the blame for the ruin of his life from his parents, who want to imagine his future for him, to his own shoulders. Nichols describes Hoffman’s “expressionless” portrayal of Benjamin during the famous “Sounds of Silence”/”April Come She Will” montage as his self-conscious desperation “trying not to become an object,” but which devolves into the increased “despair of an affair that is just below the waist and he has no real connection to it, so the montage is how it goes on once conversation fails.”23 Having been so uniformly objectified, Benjamin’s instinctive response to the two Robinson women is to objectify them both. Søren Birkvad argues, “sex is a battlefield of power play and projections” in which Mrs. Robinson is the “whore” objectified as isolated body parts (most often legs, but also breasts and belly) and Elaine the “Madonna” objectified as her enormous, mega-lashed eyes24 and flustered, chaste embarrassment when “not dressed” in her own room or contemplating her mother’s sexuality in Benjamin’s Berkeley room. Benjamin is ultimately no better (or even different) at imagining his future than his parents were. They want him to call up Elaine Robinson the next time she’s down from Berkeley and begin the dynastic succession; when he rejects the world of his parents and their values, Benjamin winds up in Berkeley, bird-dogging Elaine.
The central insight of The Graduate is that Benjamin doesn’t come any closer to establishing a viable alternative to performing the reified roles ascribed to him when he is with Elaine than when he is with her mother. (This was the failure of audience response when the film was initially embraced as an iconic utterance of the counter-culture: during what Nichols calls the “fantasy prettiness”25 of the film’s second half, many have missed the ironized treatment of Benjamin’s desire for marriage and happily ever after as a Machiavellian means to get the upper hand on the Robinsons; at this moment, Benjamin behaves as cynically as the Robinsons in Santa Barbara.) When Benjamin calls Mrs. Robinson from the hotel, we watch in resigned horror the comic nightmare of his performance anxiety, from the frying pan of his parents’ home to the fire of Mrs. Robinson’s bed. He bumbles against the cocktail table, failing to get a waiter’s attention, failing to get a room, failing even in the simple task of conveying the room number. “Shall I just stand here?” he asks Mrs. Robinson as she begins to undress. “I mean, I don’t know what you want me to do.” He isn’t even good at watching. Ultimately, she must cruelly goad him at the root of masculine vanity and insecurity: “inadequate” performance. The affair’s consummation comes, predictably, in anger, where love is never even an afterthought. But is the relationship with Elaine any less bound up in pretense and received expectation? Certainly a second potential turning point looms during Ben’s date with Elaine, calculated to end all the calculating of the Braddocks and Mr. Robinson. He dons the adult’s mask of sunglasses, even in the nighttime environments of the Strip and the strip club, and performs the misanthrope’s role learned from Mrs. Robinson until, sunglasses removed, he recognizes this is who he has become, but not the person he understands he should be. It’s a moment that returns him to desiring something “different” for his future, and yet the “drowned” choice he has made in the pool continues to doom subsequent choices. When he has the opportunity to confess fully the particulars of his affair, he withholds the most salient detail, knowing Elaine will be lost to him forever if he reveals the truth. He assumes another role: the individual in command of the agency of his personhood, wiser for his mistakes. Ironically, his sober mien only seems to inspire admiration in Elaine; she has no idea it’s a fantasy he’s performing for her. Later, when Elaine’s own alienation from her parents’ expectations (as embodied in Carl Smith, demographic dream-boy of the older generation) pushes her back into Benjamin’s arms, his monomania for marriage as a solution to problems of social status is a cynical default to what the Robinsons attempt to do to their daughter in Santa Barbara with Carl. The audience too facilely absorbed (as Benjamin is) in the genre conventions of romantic narrative may thus fail (as Benjamin does) to see this irony for what it is: a skewering of the culture’s master narrative of conformity, of course, but also a critique of the individual who, equipped with reified awareness and thus knowing better, allows himself nonetheless to be consumed. Benjamin and Elaine will become their parents precisely because they don’t have a single other choice in their heads.
If the “birthday party” is when Benjamin “drowns,” forced by his parents into a choice he flubs, the other key moment of the film comes not in the incomplete anagnorisis at the strip club but earlier, in the failed anagnorisis during the “conversation.” This crucial scene, one of the most important of Nichols’ film career, marks the most obvious appearance of the hand of Nichols the stage director: for much of the scene’s nearly 10-minute length, the camera is stationary, set at eyeline on the Taft Hotel bed where Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin have met for their latest assignation. More audaciously, whole minutes go by with the screen dark. The object of the scene is Benjamin’s determination to prove to himself that the affair is something other than the soul-killing dead end he knows it to be. The previous scene, between Benjamin and his mother and assembled with yet another voice overlap implying further causation, is the closest anyone comes to staging a meaningful intervention in Benjamin’s life. Yet even in this confrontation with her son, Mrs. Braddock is revealed as invasive and performative. Sexy in her peignoir, she invades the steamy bathroom where her half-naked son shaves for his night out. Contextually, each is in the final stages of preparing for a bedroom performance. The atmosphere is murky, unwholesome. Mrs. Braddock, by her own description, proceeds to “pry” into Benjamin’s “affairs,” causing her son’s visible recoil (he slices into his thumb with the safety razor) but verbal resistance. She exits with a mother’s cliché: “I’d rather you didn’t say anything at all than be dishonest.” Benjamin’s empty imploring for her to “Wait a minute” provides the overlap to the “conversation,” in which the unmistakable rustling of bed linens in a dark room as he asks again, “Will you wait a minute, please?” implies a conjunction between his mother and Mrs. Robinson. (Actually, the Braddocks have completed a psychological foursome in the affair throughout the summer, if only in Benjamin’s paranoid imagination: in the voice overlap that ends the famous “drifting” montage of Benjamin in the pool, in his parents’ house, and at the Taft Hotel room with Mrs. Robinson, the shot of Ben thrusting onto a raft that becomes Mrs. Robinson ends with his father asking, “Ben? What are you doing?” as if having burst in on them in their illicit love nest. His parents’ voices ring constantly in Benjamin’s guilty ears.)
His mother’s preference of silence to dishonesty meets her son’s default to the sounds of silence by the end of the “conversation” with Mrs. Robinson. There is no other scene in the film (which arrives at nearly the narrative’s midpoint and spiritually serves as its fulcrum) that so sustains a dialogue between two people; Elaine and Ben certainly never have such a conversation: on their “date,” dishonest performance by Benjamin negates the value of their sharing; in his Berkeley boarding house, her scream cuts short his opportunity to tell the whole truth; in subsequent conversations, he has set marriage as the single and perpetual topic. With Mrs. Robinson, however, this one time only, they begin to peel away the layers of performative artifice (the middle-aged siren in command of younger flesh; the more-than-“adequate” young stud) toward the truth. The voice overlap from the inconclusive conversation with his mother suggests that Ben begins the “conversation” scene as a performance for his mother in absentia; he wants to prove to her (via convincing himself) that she is wrong about his empty nights.
The provocative confusion of the voice overlap (“Wait a minute”) receives a clarifying illumination when Benjamin coldly reaches across Mrs. Robinson, switches on the night table lamp, and addresses her as usual, with her formal name: “Mrs. Robinson, do you think we could say a few words to each other first this time?” The light will remain an ongoing motif in this iconic scene. It is most obviously a rhetorical assault, intended first by Benjamin (when he snaps on the light here at the beginning of the scene, as if to spotlight his desire to make their affair something that can be scrutinized and found worthy of meaning) and then by Mrs. Robinson (who summarily dismisses his suggestion that they talk when she says, “I don’t think we have much to say to each other,” and snaps the light off again). In a searching but ultimately failed critique of the film, Farber and Changas argue that her claim “proves to be quite accurate, but it doesn’t expose her shallowness, as Nichols seems to have intended, it exposes Ben’s.”26 Actually, it’s pretty clear that Nichols intends her dismissal to expose them both—one for his naivety, the other for her cynicism. The entire scene, with its stage properties of the lamp switch, bed sheets, and underwear, is a relentless staging and re-staging of exposure.
In particular, Nichols uses the lamp’s light to comment critically on his characters—both of them, not just Mrs. Robinson (whom Benjamin’s prevailing point of view will increasingly demonize in the traditional iconography of melodramatic villainy: an ogress, a witch). When Mrs. Robinson snaps the room back into darkness, she commands this directorial control of the scene Benjamin has attempted to improvise. He will not turn the light on or off after this point; she is master of illumination or concealment. She needs to light a cigarette. Rather than fumbling in the dark, she turns on the light to locate lighter and package; she happens to do so just as she has suggested, with deadpan irony, that he might begin this conversation he has proposed by talking about his “college experiences,” thus illuminating the temporal and cultural gulf between them. The light displays him in abject position, on his knees, head buried. She extinguishes the light, but he continues to insist, and a false start results: an abortive dialogue about art. What they have in common, it turns out, is merely whom they know: they talk about Mr. Robinson and then, as the light comes on again when Mrs. Robinson has admitted to her pregnancy and hasty marriage, about her daughter Elaine. Clearly Mrs. Robinson has switched on the light, but why? Given the clear establishment of the light as an expression of control, we would expect to see Mrs. Robinson swiftly move to master this situation, but she doesn’t. She has, in a moment of unaccustomed vulnerability, revealed a truth kept even from Elaine: that the Robinsons’ marriage was a proscribed duty to appease the gods of appearance. The subsequent two decades of loveless marriage (which throws a retrospective spotlight on Mr. Robinson’s advice to Ben to have “a good time while you can”) have been one terribly long and trying performance.
But now, with the light on, she pleads for Benjamin not to “tell Elaine,” although he seems barely to know the Robinsons’ daughter. Propped on an elbow, Benjamin looms above her, provided an unexpected jackpot of ascendant power. This is a dynamic moment for them both: in their sudden intimacy (after months of carnal embrace without emotional depth), she has confessed her most carefully guarded secret of social propriety. For Ben, the revelation leads to further curiosity about her personhood, contemplating her as a bright young college student: “What was your major?” he asks. Her evasion, turning away from him, suggests a crossroads where two people meet—one a master manipulator whose entire adult life has been an endless role-play of maintained appearance, the other an apt pupil who unfortunately is incapable of imagining any life for himself other than what his culture has already projected for him. The pupil appears accidentally to have unlocked the master’s weakness. To his genuinely innocent question, the kind he might have been expected to ask a campus acquaintance, she answers, in resignation, “Art.” Reified convention required that, two decades ago, Mrs. Robinson’s just-beginning life as a student ended and another, her life as a wife and expectant mother, began. But her major subject has a deeper resonance in the etymological associations with “artifice” that subsequently have become her command performance.
Remembering her earlier avowal that she doesn’t “know anything about it,” he pauses, hovering above her in the room’s illuminated space, the award-winning scholar solving a puzzle. In the silence, her enormous wedding ring diamond catching the light, the history of Mrs. Robinson’s commodification (and, by analogy, his own) unfolds behind his furrowed brow. What he says next will be as momentous as the choice he made at the bottom of his parents’ swimming pool. Available to him is the opportunity to open up in a similar way to Mrs. Robinson, to communicate his exasperations with a life seemingly as predetermined as her own, in which parents and their values decide their children’s lives. It is hard to imagine what Mrs. Robinson might do with such confessional vulnerability (maternal solicitude would be awkward, for instance). He offers a carefully modulated sympathy in his polite response, “I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years,” and again she offers vulnerability: “Kind of.” For Nichols, this is “the very heart of Mrs. Robinson, and therefore of the movie: namely, her self-hatred and the extent of her sadness about where the exigencies of her life had taken her, as opposed to where she had originally wanted to go.”27 The Graduate is poised to be a different kind of film altogether if Benjamin sympathetically and meaningfully connects to Mrs. Robinson’s reification before he ever even meets and connects with her daughter’s reification. But Benjamin backs away from the intimacy into a calculated, childish prurience, cajoling her to offer copulative particulars including the make and model of their make-out car (a “Ford”). Her scolding “That’s enough” rights their relationship in the familiar power dynamic of her superiority, and she confirms that reassertion of control via the switch that plunges them back into darkness. When she switches on the light one last time a moment later, she has a fistful of his scalp and is back to giving autocratic commands: “Don’t you ever take that girl out.”
What are we to make of the one aberrant exception to the rhetorical rule of light in this scene? When Mrs. Robinson switches on the lamp, having been found out for her complicity in the Robinsons’ two-decade social performance, she is behaving out of character. This would have been a predictable moment to take another diversionary poke at his codified sense of masculine potency, to issue a command, to threaten to cut off his supply of no-attachments eroticism. Instead she sheds a light on her own vulnerability, as if in delayed capitulation to his having turned the light on when he initiated the call for a conversation. While it might be within reason to say that, in the moment, she has been caught off-guard by the unanticipated turn the conversation has taken, recognizing in Benjamin a deeper simpatico than the lost and alienated victim-in-waiting she sensed at his graduation party, there is another explanation for the light coming on during this crucial part of the conversation: beyond Mrs. Robinson’s direction of the relationship stands Mike Nichols’ direction of the scene and the film. We must be made to see what Benjamin sees in The Graduate—his sometimes literal, always psychological point of view—and in this moment, particularly as he pauses upon learning her major subject in college, what Benjamin sees is how both of them have been processed and packaged as objects. Beyond what Benjamin sees and understands, however, is the ironic subtext Nichols invites the audience to grasp: that Benjamin, out of socially conditioned politeness and a failure of nerve, rejects responsibility for what he has glimpsed, ultimately refusing (by the end of the scene) to pursue any of the instincts he knows to be right. He continues the affair and foregoes any further pursuit of meaningful conversation. He’s had enough of the truth. As if to remind us of the motif of illumination and failed action, Nichols ends the scene with the two fighters nearly naked, static in their opposite corners of the frame, and this time it is clearly the director’s prerogative to return the scene, via fade-out, to darkness, the “old friend.”
All action after this midpoint of the film is mere sound and fury, the illusion of direction, as Benjamin’s sprinting across campus and neighborhood, up and down the California coast, and even to the church on time is doomed by his incapability or unwillingness ever to take that full, potentially redemptive glimpse into the reified void that he beholds, briefly, propped on an elbow over Mrs. Robinson, and then to act appropriately on what he has seen. The fantasy of happy ever after with Elaine that caused the proto-feminists of 1968 to argue that the films’ misogynistic point of view demonizes the mother and denatures the daughter is Benjamin’s (not Nichols’) fantasy. In the conversation scene, the film allows sympathy for Mrs. Robinson; it is Benjamin who refuses to be informed in future action by the reified wisdom available during the conversation. Benjamin’s point of view plays with genre at the end (he has a lot of time on his hands, driving the roughly 1,100 miles between Berkeley and Beverly Hills, round-trip, then back down as far as Santa Barbara again): perhaps with the echo in his head of Mr. Robinson’s jocular “Standing guard over the ol’ castle?” quip the night Mrs. Robinson first tried to seduce him, as well as with the feudal pressures to solidify partnership alliance by arranging a relationship between Braddock boy and Robinson girl, the climactic confrontation at the church vibrates with the timbre of the chivalric romance. As he storms the (nearly) fortified castle and penetrates towards its improvised keep, he becomes, in the psychology of the film’s complicated, multi-layered point of view, both the knight determined to rescue the virginal damsel and the silly young man with a chivalric fantasy in his head, chasing after a woman he can’t possibly expect will be able to transcend the baggage of his having slept for an entire summer with her mother.
An examination of the location site Nichols and his filmmaking team selected for filming this climactic confrontation underscores Nichols’ intentionality in projecting Benjamin’s romanticized self-image as chivalric interventionist. The church structure, the United Methodist Church of La Verne, half an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, is a high-modernist, post–Saarinen fortress with only a single public conduit of ingress and egress. When Benjamin’s final sprint up the sidewalks of “Santa Barbara” reaches the church, Nichols and O’Steen add in a strummed, Latinate guitar chord by Paul Simon, an evocation of the soundtrack trope of the climactic Hollywood Western showdown. In this inflected moment, Nichols conflates medieval knighthood with its modern Hollywood avatar, the old–West cowboy-hero. Yet the design of the existing church structure in La Verne offered only one way in, through the double glass doors (which we see Benjamin barring with the cross at the end of the confrontation with the Robinsons and the wedding party). Audaciously, Nichols and company negotiated with the church to build a second door—the one the Robinsons neglect to lock—on the second-story street-side of the building, complete with a set of stairs to this auxiliary portal. After Benjamin runs to the main doors and finds them locked—a sure sign of an appropriation of a house of God for some unholy rite—he runs to these stairs built by Nichols’ crew, throws open the door cut by Nichols’ crew, and disappears inside to find himself in the cry room high above the sanctuary, still the boy in the bubble, held at bay by his elders, but no longer willing simply to acquiesce in his social consignment. Despite his lack of a “definite plan” (which Elaine has asked him to formulate in Berkeley before she submits to her parents’ definitive plan), Benjamin raises holy hell against the Robinsons’ unholy manipulation of marriage. After the shoot in La Verne wrapped, all the work done to create this auxiliary access to the building was immediately undone, the door removed and the wall seamlessly restored, the stairs disassembled. To visit the church now is to find no evidence of this side entrance Benjamin used to enact his rescue, as if he (and we) imagined it, as in a sense we do in the fantasy momentum of his chivalric action.
The United Methodist Church of La Verne, half an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, became the more convenient stand-in location for the climactic, romanticized rescue of Elaine by Benjamin from her coerced marriage to Carl Smith in Santa Barbara. Prior to filming The Graduate, Nichols and his crew actually built a stairway and cut a door in the second-story side of the building (the first bay on the left) to underscore the sense that Benjamin has breached the castle-like defenses of the Robinsons. However, the conclusion of the film ironically deflates the sense of principled valor, in hollow, directionless victory (photograph by the author).
That there is a wedding at all is more evidence of willful ignorance of the insight available in reification. The Robinsons, having endured two decades of enforced matrimony, might be expected to want something more for their own daughter than her similarly objectified sacrifice upon the altar of social manipulation and appearance. No one—not the Robinsons, not Carl Smith, not Benjamin—pursues marriage for its sacramental intention: the union of two souls. Marriage for all concerned has a far less exalted end: the manipulation of status. Marriage in both generations is merely a power move. Elaine, easily Benjamin’s equal in passivity, allows herself to be shuffled along the squares of the marriage chessboard over the film’s final half-hour. Nichols masterfully inflects the minute in which Benjamin, trapped behind glass above the wedding, taps and bellows for Elaine’s attention. Nichols has Hoffman call Elaine’s name no less than 20 times, a suspense-building projection of romantic longing as old as Romeo and Juliet, Paolo and Francesca, Jacob and Rachel. During this din, Nichols cuts between close-ups of the Robinsons, Elaine, and Benjamin; we hear Carl Smith only as an off-screen voice, asking, “Who is that guy? What’s he doing?” At the end of the sequence is when we get our first and only close-up of Carl in the film. Significantly, it announces that the camera has adopted a second subjective point of view: Elaine’s. She looks at her mother, lips twisted in obscene invective directed up at Benjamin. After a cut back to Elaine, shifting perspective to find her father, the camera offers her vantage of Mr. Robinson, similarly engaged in mute obscenity towards the glassed cry room. Again the film returns to Elaine, and she turns to look in the opposite direction; the cut to Carl staring directly into the camera, face contorted as he directs his abuse directly at her, ends the sequence. When Nichols cuts back to Elaine, she is ready to call for his help. The self-fashioned knight descends into the fray as Errol Flynn might have, leaping a balustrade and subduing the feudal lord and company, cross held high. Birkvad writes, “Although, in the end, he apparently acts like a crusader for free love […] Ben is still a child of the instant-gratification mentality of southern California.”28 What an audience may extrapolate is the happy ending to the fantasy conjured in Ben and Elaine’s ingenuous heads: “a heteronormative love triumphing over every obstacle to achieve blissful harmony and nothing more.’”29 The “rescue” scene rarely fails to provoke in its audiences a laugh of delight, mingled, Nichols must have hoped, with a sense of incredulity for the ridiculous pomposity of the symbolism.
The Graduate became an icon of the New Hollywood in the brief period between the old Studio System era and the rise of the new corporate business model in the 1980s. The ambiguous final moment on the Santa Barbara bus, an improvised surprise Nichols sprung on Katharine Ross as Elaine Robinson and Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock by keeping the camera rolling after the script ran out, yields the brief, non-synchronized smiles on the two escapees from the conformity factory—smiles that settle into the resigned expressions of two people still trapped in “sounds of silence” without a “definite plan.”
But he has largely hoped in vain. As a culture, we love our genre formulas uncompromised by reminders of our more meager reality. The avant-garde techniques Nichols and his team integrated from the variety of their cinematic influences “gave The Graduate an exceptionally ‘contemporary’ look, even though, in the end, the movie’s story could be regarded as an updated example of one of the most worn of Hollywood clichés—‘love conquers all.’”30 Jacob Brackman reported in a long, mostly negative 1968 essay in The New Yorker about The Graduate phenomenon that, when he saw the film in a packed theater, the audience instinctively knew the film was over when the boy won back the girl, and they noisily began to debrief, putting on their coats, as the Santa Barbara bus pulled back into the flow of traffic.31 The extraordinary 40-second shot of Hoffman and Ross, playing young people numbed by the enormity of their directionless future, was a product of the improvisatory instinct of its director: “Mike told the camera operator to run the reel out and just let them sit,” recalls Henry. “Being good actors and nice people they just sat there, waiting for an instruction. Their look of discomfort was partly out of lines with nothing more to do and the camera was still on. All that fit perfectly into a film about lives in stress with an uncertain future.”32 The profound ambiguity of the ending was largely lost in the initial-run audience’s enthusiasm for its own counter-cultural fantasy. The reality of the film’s formal design introduces a circular structure that Nichols returns to as a formal means to imply transformative opportunities squandered: after all the peripatetic movement in the second half of the film, Benjamin surrenders to passivity, carried by mechanized forces at film’s end (the bus) just as he was at the beginning (the plane, the moving walkway), with the return of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” magnifying our sense of his stasis. Nichols disenchanted college audiences by concluding, “‘At the end he is just as lost as he was in the beginning,’” a prelude to his notorious pronouncement that Benjamin and Elaine will revert to the default inheritance of their parents’ commodified world.33“The enchanted fairytale conclusion to The Graduate is moving precisely because of the ambiguity within Benjamin,” writes John Lindsay Brown.34 The brief, dolorous coda on the bus is what comes after the happy ever after. Murray Pomerance poses the rhetorical question, “Was it really this and only this, we must wonder, that Ben’s important education was preparing him for?”35 Henry recalls, “I think [Hoffman and Ross] thought the camera was going to run out a few seconds after they smiled: a happy ending. […] No dialog, however classic and witty that I could have written, could have conveyed that feeling in quite the same dramatic way.”36 Hoffman and Ross had run out of script; so have Benjamin and Elaine, passively conveyed thus far in their lives and, despite their prominent educational experience, at a loss for next steps. Education remains one of the most prominent motifs of Nichols’ subsequent films; formal education typically only seems to prepare characters to take their objectified places in the world, while the reified education in possibility is available to all, regardless of limiting distinctions of, for instance, class or gender. By the time the box-office (gold) dust had settled on The Graduate, the film had become a sacred object of its generation,37 in which its own avatars, Benjamin and Elaine, were largely immune from the merciless satiric glare directed at all members of the older generation in the film; even critics who objected (like Pauline Kael, most comically vehement of the backlash reactionaries to Nichols; Farber and Changas; and Brackman) failed to see the film’s ironic scrutiny of Benjamin and Elaine’s failure. But in ignoring the imaginative failures of the film’s protagonists, the audience fails not only to see Benjamin’s surrender, but perhaps its own.