The Graduate Based upon the novel by Charles Webb. Written by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry. Directed by Mike Nichols. “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... No. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.” “One word, Ben… Are you listening?… Plastics!”
The next shot is Ben framed by a fish tank: He’s a fish out of water, but painfully and emotionally tied to their imprisonment and the artificiality of their world. And the symbolism literally overtakes him in another signature scene... at the bottom of his parents’ pool in full scuba gear. Visual reference to literally caged animals run throughout the film. DAD: “What is it Ben.”Spokesman for a generation... and a perfect example of the old adage, “Be careful what you pray for.” Light and darkness battle and reverberate throughout the film. The homes of Ben’s parents’ and the Robinson’s seem to be decorated in black and white. Sterile, and rigid environments of absolutes. Ben is often the only color in the room. For a film whose most famous line is “plastics”, glass, reflections and invisible barriers are a recurring visual and story theme. Visual puns abound. Some as humorous comments, others as visual subtext, and some intentionally far more communicative than the dialogue. Cinema at its best!
Nichols (in his second stint in the director’s chair; the first was Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf) collaborates with dean of classic studio cinematographers Robert Surtees (Oklahoma, Ben Hur, Mutiny on the Bounty), flawlessly innovating and expanding the cinematic lexicon without abandoning his theater training and experience as a sketch artist.
The film makes brilliant use of montage, blurring and obscuring time and emotion, visually aurally and orally, until we feel lost with Ben. Ben is told by everyone that he should have a plan. It was a generation raised to have a plan. The irony (foreshadowed at the end of this film) is that in rejecting the plans proffered by their parents, chaos reined. There are clear spiritual reverberations in that premise. The film is very much about individual will and control. Every time Ben gives up control, things begin to happen. But it’s too much for him. At the first sign of hope, Ben habitually reasserts his will and things run amuck. Ben is labeled an “agitator” by Normal Fell (later Mr. Roper) a term with all kinds of political/generational baggage for the film’s contemporaries. In the late 1950's and 60's, the segregated South was flooded with (often youthful) activists intent on a cultural revolution for racial equality. To the locals, anyone who questioned the status quo was an “outside agitator.” Later, the term was adapted to include organizers who opposed the war in Viet Nam on college campuses. Anyone from “outside” the local residents, or dominant generation, or the ruling party. That verbal separation somehow made the status quo proponents feel righteous. But Ben came from inside: a child of privilege, well educated, with all kinds of opportunity to “do well” as that might be judged by those who had judged him all his life. Much more threatening. Much more revolutionary. Ben’s journey has two transforming moments. When he connects with Elaine, explaining his compulsion to be rude. And when he announces to his parents his intention to marry Elaine. It’s a plan! Of course, she doesn’t know it yet… Elaine comes to embody a path, hope, future. Ben’s transcendence occurs as he steps outside the grasp of the world he must escape. Having visited the frat house milieu of Elaine’s fiancé and seen the truth of the marriage she’s entering, his panic is now not just about him. Rather than trying to find a way to fit in, Ben now is on a mission to “save” Elaine. By the end, Ben, who has floated morally and spiritually through the film, has finally found something to motivate him. In the beginning he rode passively on the “people mover” (at the time, a futuristic luxury in a tomorrowland by Disney). At the end, even as technology abandons him (the phone, his car), he runs the rest of the way to the church… as though his life depended on it. And, of course, it does. At the church, Ben is outside the “tank” pounding on the glass (once again separated by an invisible barrier) as Elaine is inducted into her ritualized entrapment. When she “gets it” (symbolized by a sensory shift: she no longer hears the angry ramblings around her) and runs from the church to join Ben, her own mother slaps her and screams “It’s too late!” For what? Happiness? Fulfillment? Freedom? Elaine screams back from the most obvious soap box in the film, “Not for me!!” So Ben and Elaine escape the cage of their parents’ generation, but to what? As Ben and Elaine board the bus, filled with the boldness and seeming success of their escape, the final prophetic moment, with a bus full of onlookers, and our heroes smiles fading ever so slightly, you can almost hear the music cue… Maybe we are all bozos on this bus. (Ask someone over 40.) Even at the moment of celebration, Ben and Elaine (and their generation) are uncertain of the outcome of their choices. One last irony: When The Graduate was first released, Ben was the focal point of the story. Today in the myriad regional revivals spawned by the Broadway resurrection, the star role is Mrs. Robinson. The generation who first identified with Ben’s confusion and rebellion now see the suffering of her midlife crisis as the focal point. essay ©2003 Jerry
L. Jackson
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From
the famous opening montage of Dustin Hoffman’s character Ben on the sterile,
automated walkway (“Please hold the handrails and stand to the right.
If you wish to pass, please do so on the left.”) in LAX, being delivered
into his future like a product on a conveyor belt, Director Mike Nichols
litters the screen with thematic visual cues: with cuts to the literal
“baggage” on another conveyor belt and the prophetic sign “Do they match?”
Ben emerges from baggage claim to the metallic, monotonously intoned and
arbitrary rules of life’s pace (“Attention please. Parking in this
area is limited to three minutes only. Please do not leave your car
unattended.”) through glass doors both labeled “Use other door.”
Early
in the film, as the erotic charge settles into habit, there’s a classic
set piece with Ben, Mrs. Robinson, a light switch and a locked down camera
that runs nearly six minutes without a perspective change, neatly mapping
the entire thematic and emotional terrain of the film, exploring the sexual
politics of the era (and in the room), bending sexual and generational
roles and seeding themes like the balance between physical and emotional
intimacy that would still be culturally unresolved targets in Nichols’
Carnal
Knowledge (1971) and Hoffman’s later work in Tootsie (1982).
It’s also the scene where we understand Mrs. Robinson’s vulnerability for
the first time. She’s not just a predator. The film is about
HER loss as well. Loss of passion, youth, innocence, hope.
And her awkward efforts to regain it by stealing Ben’s. The scene
ends with the two characters distanced, backs turned on one another, and
the subtle theatrical reference to Peter Pan in Mrs. Robinson’s
shadow looming between them... Lost youth.