The Graduate: 40 Years Later

By Jim Shoemaker

How do we view our parents, our adult acquaintances, our authority
figures?What do we really think of the expectations that people place on
us? How do we survive pressure? Are we as smart as we think we are,
or are we just setting ourselves up to catch the good opportunities before they
sift through to the “lesser mortals”? These are the questions that I
forced out of my head while I was watching The Graduate, watching the
austere, solemn Benjamin Braddock move to “The Sound of Silence” for the
umpteenth time as the words “Dustin Hoffman” and “Mike Nichols” flashed on the
screen.

“I guess I’m just worried about my future”
”“ The Graduate’s cultural implications haven’t changed much since 1967:
parents still live vicariously
through their children, mental achievers are still secularly isolated, and we are still assured of our assumptions about adulthood.
Dustin Hoffman, who was 29 when he acted in this movie, portrays the person who
we are all going to become in one, two, or three years: fresh out of undergrad,
parental expectations abounding, but an overwhelming feeling of confusion that
leads to rash decisions. Hopefully, none of us will have the temptation
of a Mrs. Robinson, but who knows? It may do us some good to “get
wild”. (We can’t determine that through The Graduate because of
the obvious lack of “chemistry” between Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin
Braddock.)

“You’re trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson”
”“ The frontier of sexuality is as estranged to us “post-pubescents” as it was
to Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson, the daughter of the infamous Mrs.
Robinson. On top of the pressures placed on Benjamin by his father’s
success, he is also expected to “court” young girls from Los Angeles in order
to “get his life straightened out”; when his respectful nature turns
disagreeable (i.e. when he and Mrs. Robinson begin sleeping together) he gets
reprieved by the same adults who essentially told him to get laid! Like
most of us who mistake sex for love, Benjamin finds himself at the mercy of
Mrs. Robinson’s will, who tells him to stay away from her daughter
Elaine. In a clever cinematic twist, Ben’s tastes change, and the
forbidden Elaine becomes the only thing in life that Ben wants, the exact
implement that will straighten him out.

“A kind of compulsion to be rude all the time”¦you
know?” ”“ We all know exactly how Ben Braddock felt making this
confession to Elaine: slave to the mundane, the façade of contentment, and the
irrepressible desire to make a change. My impression of this movie has
always been that the script-writing is wonderful, but I had never felt closer
to Ben Braddock and what he was going through; Buck Henry’s script ingeniously
captures how we all feel about our parents and people’s sometimes asinine good
word expectations of us. Seasoned
with the haunting melodies of Simon and Garfunkel, the lines spoken in The
Graduate remain as wonderfully resonant as they were forty years ago.

Ironically enough (because we couldn’t imagine The Graduate without
Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross), the casting for the movie was entirely
different before it began production. Mike Nichol’s and crew were
originally interested in (I swear I do not jest) Marlon Brando as Benjamin
Braddock and Sissy Spacek as Elaine Robinson, two actors who had already
established themselves as “separate” from the pack (though with Brando, I think
that that’s a matter of opinion). Thankfully, Hoffman, who was primarily
in theater in Los Angeles, was convinced by co-star/friend Ross to audition for
the movie; his role was obviously not experientially based, because theater
stars are hardly as timid as Ben Braddock needed to be, but Hoffman seemed to
have pulled it off for Mike Nichol’s. After the movie’s release, he was
even nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Actor in a Leading Role”.

After Ben Braddock and Mrs. Robinson’s affair is blow wide open, we see the
true mastery of the film, like the second half of Romeo and Juliet, drama vs. comedy, fanatical love vs. lust.
Mrs. Robinson employs the honest emotion that we wish to see in everyone, and
it turns out that she and her half-aged lover are not so different: they have
both dehumanized each other, and now, Mike Nichol’s makes them pay the
consequences. The direction of the film from this point onwards is
terrifyingly uncomfortable. Ben follows Elaine to Berkeley, stalks her
(to put it bluntly), and confronts her with his heartfelt decision to someday
marry her.

“ELAINE!!! ELAINE!!! ELAINE!!!”
”“ The ending of this movie, in the church, is a complex array of emotions for
everyone, the audience, the characters, and the actors. Ben follows
Elaine to Santa Barbara in an attempt to stop her from getting married to a
college-sweetheart; he finds the church where the ceremony is taking place and
begins to repeatedly beat on the glass of the clerestory, hurdling out
unashamed, gut-wrenching screams: “ELAINE!!! ELAINE!!!” In an
instant, Katharine Ross’ acting brilliance shines, and we actually
see Elaine Robinson saying, with only a
gaze, “I love you, Ben! I love you!” The church is in chaos, but
the couple eventually escapes on a bus. “The Sound of Silence” comes
on. Ben and Elaine are not smiling, not looking at each other. The
movie is over.

To use an overused phrase, a series of unfortunate events befall Benjamin
Braddock in The Graduate, leading to an eventual, though painful,
evolution from adolescence to”¦unhappiness? What are we to take from the
ending of this movie? Watching it again, I have heard Mike Nichol’s
message more strongly than ever: The Graduate does not merely
refer to the noun supplanting Benjamin Braddock, nor does it refer to the
setting that affects one who has just “graduated”. The Graduate
refers to stages of life that most of us experience in some way or another; the
consequences that appear are simply unique to all of us.