The Graduate Revisited
By Coeli Carr
Any day now the first contingent of baby boomers turning 60 will experience an extra twinge of nostalgia as they’re thrown back to 1967, the year when most of them picked up their college diplomas.
Not only do all demographic blocs have their “coming of age” music (for the first boomers it was Motown and the British Invasion) but they also have films they hold dear to their hearts. Yes, 1967 saw the release of classic flicks like Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and Cool Hand Luke. But the film these 60-year-olds – who were college seniors back then – arguably hold most dear is The Graduate, the coming-of-age story of Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, whom the audience meets when he returns, college diploma in hand, to his parents’ home in Los Angeles.
The Graduate shook up its audience’s sensibilities and beliefs in pretty much every frame. Now, 39 years later, what seemed so scandalous then has become downright mainstream.
“Back in 1967, The Graduate hurled a grenade into the Hollywood status quo,” says Beverly Gray, a film historian and author based in Santa Monica, California. “Though this small film featuring largely unknown actors might have seemed, at first glance, a modest romantic comedy, its hilariously jaundiced view of sex, sin, suburbia, and career aspirations held sway over young audiences in a way that was nothing short of revolutionary.”
The most outrageous aspect of the film was undeniably Benjamin’s affair with his sexually voracious and cunning neighbor, Mrs. Robinson – the wife of Benjamin’s father’s business partner – played by Anne Bancroft. But even more scandalous was the age discrepancy. Mrs. Robinson – whose daughter, Elaine, played by Katharine Ross, was an age-appropriate romantic choice for Ben – was old enough to be Ben’s, well, mother. (The film, Bancroft, Hoffman, and Ross all received Academy Award nominations, and director Mike Nichols won the Oscar for Best Director.)
Until The Graduate came along, says Gray, who wrote Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches and Driller Killers and Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon …and Beyond – on-screen sex with an older woman was unthinkable except in foreign films. European filmmakers, taking their cues from ancient stories, were quite comfortable presenting young men being sexually initiated by worldly women.
Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962), which borrowed directly from the Euripides tragedy, dared to depict an affair between a ripe middle-aged woman and her youthful stepson. “Because of America’s well-entrenched sexual prudery, Hollywood consistently frowned on the suggestion that a mature woman could tutor a younger man in the ways of the flesh,” Gray says. “But then there was Mrs. Robinson, and now we have movies like American Pie, which deliberately spoofs Ben Braddock’s bedroom balletics with an older female partner.”
In 1967, the younger man/older woman coupling was unseemly for another reason. In that era, most men chose stay-at-home wives whom they could support, protect from the world, and sometimes viciously dominate. In The Graduate, however, Mrs. Robinson clearly wears the proverbial pants, at least until daughter Elaine – whom the lady has forbidden Benjamin to date – appears on screen.
The mother-daughter relationship in the film was prophetic. Mrs. Robinson clearly envied her daughter’s burgeoning sexuality, and the tension between wilting mother and flourishing daughter is memorable. Now those few female boomers who take desperate anti-aging measures to hold back the ravages of time and wear embarrassingly youthful fashions can point to Mrs. Robinson as their teacher.
Benjamin, uncomfortably sandwiched between these two women at a moment when the feminist movement was just gearing up, ends by rejecting a powerful woman who knows what she wants, choosing instead a sweet young thing who needs to be rescued. “In other words,” says Gray, “having himself been manipulated by a tough-minded female, he ultimately chooses someone much younger and more helpless, who looks to him as a savior.”
The Graduate’s cinematic tradition of trans-generational bedding has continued. In a neat twist, Rob Reiner’s Rumor Has It (2005) is a deliberate attempt to follow up on these characters. The film presents a multi-generational family in which some of the women have slept with the same man.
Marriage, once the preeminent life goal of women, clearly provided neither a balm nor a happy ending in The Graduate. On the contrary, says Gray, the film reflected society’s changing attitudes toward marriage as an institution. Mrs. Robinson, pregnant with Elaine, had married her husband because she had to. She similarly sees her daughter’s marriage – not to Benjamin – as a way to terminate that daughter’s interest in this young man. The family will hastily marry off Elaine to an upscale medical student. After the ceremony Benjamin and Elaine elope. Riding away by bus into the proverbial sunset, both exude “what have we gotten ourselves into” expressions.
“Ben wants to marry Elaine, but the idea of simply living together never presents itself until the end, after she has married someone else,” says Gray. “The unique aspect of The Graduate was that Ben doesn’t save Elaine from the altar in the nick of time, as happens in the novel on which the film is based. Instead, he arrives after the couple has been pronounced man and wife. Even Nichols was reportedly a bit nervous about violating society’s mores, although today’s real-life single mothers and unwed couples are as familiar on the screen as they are in real life.”
The Graduate didn’t shy away from exposing the frequent hypocrisy of institutional religion, either. “It’s hard to appreciate how revolutionary Ben’s actions seemed back in 1967,” Gray says – notably including his jamming a crucifix through the door-handles of the church sanctuary as a stopgap means of sealing himself and Elaine off from the family that’s in hot pursuit.
Apart from being boxed in between these two women and finding himself in the middle of a crumbling social order, Benjamin does try to play the game. He attempts to fulfill the manly aspirations others project onto him – future professional career and a luxurious suburban lifestyle.
His most famous welcome-to-the-workforce moment occurs in a poolside scene where the newly minted honors graduate becomes the captive audience of one of his father’s party guests. The older man utters the memorable one-word career advisory: “Plastics.”
“Witness the natty jackets and ties Benjamin wears in most of the film’s early scenes,” says Gray. “He consistently dresses the part of a young corporate executive. That’s the America of the just-ended Kennedy era, when everything seemed possible for a clean-cut young man with a good pedigree. The film brilliantly uses cinematography and art direction to reveal the underside of the American dream, and its later scenes are of a vastly different tone, showing Ben in his open rebellion against his parents and the Robinsons, deliberately stepping off the corporate ladder. In fact, Ben’s post-college inability to make choices about his future hints at the emergence of an archetypal slacker who drifts listlessly through a world he didn’t create.”
As boomers turn 60 – many of them now with college-graduate children of their own – they might well be fantasizing about what became of Benjamin Braddock after the bus ride ended. How could they resist wondering? Benjamin has become a stand-in for the first batch of post-war babies. He points back to confused youth and forward to a future of even greater twilight. So people of Benjamin’s generation re-watching The Graduate will have the strange privilege of seeing themselves on screen – Benjamin both as a young adult and also as an imagined person decades later – and revaluating the viewer’s own life in the process.
Beverly Gray’s characterization of The Graduate as evoking “cynicism with a romantic hope for the future” clearly describes the attitude of many 60-year-olds themselves. Unlike generations before them, the first tier of boomers is indeed cynical about the onslaught of physical and mental aging, yet romantically hopeful about second careers, projects, and new anti-aging technologies. With no intention of throwing in the towel, these boomers will undoubtedly choose active retirements involving travel, fitness, and recreation.
Benjamin would consider himself lucky to have fared as well.
