Camera And Action, page 10
Charles Webb argued that the ending did not vindicate anything. Rather, "as such, there is little difference between [Ben's] relationship to Mrs. Robinson and his relationship to Elaine, both of them being essentially immoral." The book's traditional ending has Ben interrupt the marriage ceremony before the couple has said their vows. In a letter to The New Republic, the author complained about the film's changed ending. He questioned whether the story had retained any moral stance at all. Webb argued that Benjamin, in his book, "does not disrespect the institution of marriage" but focuses on his moral development. "Reach[ing] the girl before she becomes the wife of somebody else" characterizes his "moral attitudes." The ending was Charles Webb's way of giving the story and character moral depth. Nichols reverses the emphasis and creates an ending that makes moral attitudes irrelevant. "If it were not for the ending," Hollis Alpert remarked, "I doubt that `The Graduate' would have aroused as much enthusiastic favor as it has among the somewhat inchoately rebellious young."70
Nichols' ending determines the film's success and marks a moment not of moral bankruptcy, when Hollywood had forsaken public need for moral lessons, but a new sense of goodness. In Hollis Alpert's words, "Mike Nichols ... has lined up old Hollywood with avantgarde Hollywood." The "positive" ending favors "honesty" as that which refuses sex without love and delivers one from "ancient taboos" that paraded as moral safeguards but operated as "hollow formality." An attraction to the ideals of the earlier sixties - to change society and make it more honest - continued in this film and merged with the trend in the later 1960s toward "dropping out." Though 1968 would bring forms of protest and demonstrations with more serious acts of rebellion than climbing on board a bus, Nichols saw his film's connection. As he told one Columbia University audience, those expressions of defiance were about a younger generation's "nerve" and "necessity, to break the rules .1171
Not all were convinced that "making the bus" raised any questions at all about generational honesty. Nor did the final image make the least attempt to clarify the meaning of Ben's liberation and purpose. Paul Seydor complained about the couple's fleeing to never-neverland. It did not solve any of the pressing social issues of the time.72 Even Mike Nichols joked that the couple would "end up just like their parents in five or ten years," not changing much of anything at all.73The ending's ambiguity-do they stay on the bus or become like their parents?- is the picture's strength and most telling moment. Ben and Elaine indeed carve out a road, a path to action for more than just the two of them. Climbing on board the bus is a defiant act, a symbolic act, and a representation of the younger generation's agency. It is a reassuring conclusion to Ben's pursuit of a life of difference. As one fan wrote, "He was chasing an ideal in spite of all the obstacles that society put in his path in the attempt to co-opt or eliminate him."74 Elaine and Benjamin's jump on the bus signifies the final challenge to authority and tradition. Ben dumps his fancy red car, the graduation present, for his own two feet and redefines himself as a representative of the younger generation, not as a victim of an older one.
Moreover, the script in many ways seems to belong to the pre-antiwar demonstration period in the 1960s, when generational conflict rested largely on parent-child differences. The young publicity team at Embassy, for example, questioned the relevance of a script that did not even mention the word Vietnam, let alone a film with 103 minutes of running time that portrayed the younger generation without campus or street protest. Young staff members wondered, "What ... The Graduate ha[d] to do with them?"75
Edgar Z. Friedenberg of The New York Review of Books called the film a "pseudo-documentary." "The social commentary," he pointed out, "is expressed as it would be in a nightclub sketch, almost entirely through exaggerated characterization." Friedenberg scorned what was absent -"nobody in the picture mentions the draft or the war; dissent in Berkeley is symbolized only by a hippie-looking couple leaving a jewelry store and by the landlord's hostility." The Graduate may have been an "`in' movie," Friedenberg continued, "but the realism doesn't extend to burning draft cards or smoldering police." With the absences of these daily occurrences, Friedenberg saw "no issues, only scenes" and certainly none of the "wilder, angrier, more uncertain," mood of California. Friedenberg was impatient with the everyman portrayal of Benjamin, whom he called a "muttering inarticulate."76
Reviewers noted that the shift from a critique of society to a love story was a betrayal of its own expertise."77 Some denounced the anti-hero Ben as a fake and indicted the Nichols team for "gang banging" Mrs. Robinson by ignoring her victimization, thus making Ben's rescue of Elaine from her mother's fate a fraud. "She's their real masterwork, a character to rank right up there with the best of Lillian Hellman. Stewing in her own misery, symbolic of a parasitic society anxious to suck the vital red blood of youth," claimed Paul Seydor.78 Others found the romantic hero suspect, completely unlike "the present-day graduate [who] is much more complicated, sophisticated and involved."79
On paper, in the political climate of 1967, it may have seemed out of touch with the radical behavior of thousands of young people, but on screen the film's success suggests it both transcended its context and was immersed in it. Lawrence Thurman explained the story as completely "pertinen[t] to the present scene." Director Mike Nichols agreed that Benjamin provided a way to inquire about the behavior of the prosperous young. Similar to other baby boomers at that time, "Benjamin has been surfeited with objects," finds them confining, and seeks "something to arouse his passion." The element of affluence lent the story an attractive "pungency."80 The script highlighted the dilemmas and points of rebellion in middle- and upper-middle-class kids who also wondered about the point of all that education.
The Graduate let go of the earlier California beach movies that had already popularized swimming pools, rambler houses, casual clothing, spider convertibles, sunglasses, and freeways as icons, for as the sons and daughters of the "lounge culture," the "plastic fantastics,"81 the "barbeque-pit society."82 At the same time, the film certainly circulates the same desire for the products argued on the surface as the older generation's materialism. Ben throughout the film floats on the plastic raft, wears stylish plastic sunglasses, listens to plastic records, and eats at hamburger stands that uses plastic-ware. "The plastic," Friedenburg chided, "is a lot tougher than the movie admits; but there is real blood under it."83 In that respect, the film self-consciously derides affluence as an older generation's affliction while unselfconsciously reinforcing a culture of "cool," favoring sunglasses not frogmen suits.
The lounge-culture teens would have to give way to new identities on screen, however, that were claiming American individualism by tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. The Graduate's satirical representation of southern California engaged a New York intellectual crowd that could fully accept western affluence as intellectually vacuous and see Benjamin as a yokel. "Benjamin, as an individual, is a pathetic figure who would be tragic if he had any hubris at all," Friedenburg of the New York Review of Books disparaged. "Benjamin's lack of pride and selfhood on which to mount his feelings is just the point; middle-class life in America - and Southern California is America, is it not?- makes us all like those loveless people and their pathetic victims, surely," the reviewer continued .14
Friedenberg's argument that The Graduate seemed "basically a copout," despite its power to capture "the look and sound of much of the contemporary California scene so skillfully," also reveals the developing forms of rebellion of the time.85 The Graduate was released just before widespread antiwar strife, before the Chicago Convention of 1968, Woodstock, and the height of campus bombings, but after the widely publicized Summer of Love. With its December release, it makes sense that the film's currency would be measured against social challenges coming out of counterculture behavior and more radical activity than rebelling against American materialism. Yet, if the film lacked historical and political insight by not asking what was really happening in the streets and by condescending to the hippie counterculture, it was by no means backpedaling. The film engaged in the conversation about social changes and cultural values already alive and well in the public arenas.86
Ben and Elaine ultimately challenged attitudes about the older generation's upper-middle-class lifestyle and conventional social relationships. At the same time, the two runaways, as film critic Simon sneered, did not exactly set up a paradise or offer "perciptible [sic] resources or qualifications" for a new society. No doubt, Simon argued, "it is an exigous Eden they can look forward to."87 Thus, are the red sports car, Ben's sunglasses, and the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel ultimately what define the characters' appeal or does the film resonate as a honest critique of traditional society? To drift in the swimming pool of the parent generation, albeit on plastics, symbolized the ironic result of material satisfaction. Through Hoffman's persona and Ben's appeal as passively resisting his parents' objective for him while floating in the symbol of success, the film establishes its critical perspective and derisive tone.
Hoffman's inarticulate manner should have seemed idiotic to those who made up the largest population of college students in the country's history. Seydor doubted that if Benjamin were indeed a star graduate from a prestigious college, "he would be smart and brash and cynical; he would be astonishingly well-oriented and incredibly well-informed" and instead of muttering his way through the film, "he would be very articulate."88 Ben also challenges the role of the enlightened adult teaching the young college student. The film's focus on Ben's "decent" rebellion helped articulate an acquired sense of generation, not defined solely as a coming of age but as a preoccupation, a sensibility, a style, and a rhetoric.
The Graduate favors the couple's successful defiance of the older generation and leaves it at that. In this sense, the film measures the limitation of the affluent middle-class rebels. Certainly, like Ben and Elaine, revolutionaries could board the bus but they would not stay there. Nor would they engender social change for those whose faces stared blankly back at them, for to do so would be to take them to the place the young people had just fled. Rejection of materialism as a means of generational legitimacy was thus contingent on literally being able to afford to rebel. Their revolt occurs after the fact, after Beverly Hills affluence and university education have given them the choice to do so. Establishment values of success and conventional beliefs in work as productive adversely affected Benjamin because they were incompatible with his wish to be different, not because of his physical discomfort or literal disenfranchisement. The desire for a different future became an honorable cause only because of its legitimate association with the rejection of materialism and the belief in the liberating powers of youth. Between the publicity, the response from the younger generation, Pauline Kael's charge that The Graduate was highly inflated trash as it utterly pandered to youth, and David Brinkley's objection to the adult put-down, social authority was argued. Kael, Brinkley, Simon, and others' discontent over this film likely exposed the growing impatience with the rising adversity toward American affluence, not because consumerism did not deserve critique but because the criticism released the privileged young from full responsibility and exposed the rebellion's contradictions.
The ending answered the question raised at the beginning of the film when Ben delivered the graduation-day speech: "And today it is right that we should ask ourselves the most important question: What is the purpose for all this demanding work.... The purpose my fellow graduates - the purpose is -... there is a reason, my friends, and the reason is -." Searching for the final page of his speech, he flounders at the podium when the pages blow away in a whirlwind and prevent him from answering the question. The camera then cuts to Ben for the opening sequence at the Los Angeles airport. In the house full of guests at his parents' graduation party for him, Ben listens to an older generation define who he is. "Hey-there's our award winning scholar." Yet, Ben does not engage. He has left the purpose, education, and future behind, in the East, where he could not even find the link between the diploma and a good job. To the contrary, Ben's triumph in rescuing Elaine from a fated marriage defines his purpose as a graduate. Love and rescue liberate him from boredom, objectification, and the pressures of a fake future.
It would be tempting to discount the plastic fantastics in favor of the intellectual authority of reviewers and college honors students. Yet, it was not difficult for thousands of fans to identify with the film's vision through Benjamin's eyes with Hoffman's convincing performance, not as a star or a celebrity, but as an ordinary and confused college graduate, stumbling around in a useless frogman suit. As one fan admitted at the time, "`The Graduate' affected me more deeply than any other movie I've ever seen.... Most of the young people I've talked to who've seen it have also responded deeply to it, though maybe not in exactly the way I did."89 The Graduate gained its social authority from Hoffman's inarticulate character - a romantic but irreverent upper-middle-class rebel who definitively established the dividing lines among teenager, young adult, and the establishment. As music also took on a more clearly antiestablishment stance and as serious campus activism among college-aged students became ever more associated with unruly appearance in the larger society, what Ben came mean in generational appeal measured the kind of change that mattered to young people in rebellion.90
The youthful eye of Benjamin Braddock from the beginning devalued an older generation's established systems. They were simply expendable. He qualitatively defined the meaning of the generation gap in terms different from demonstrators and counterculturalists. How viewers who identified with the narrative and character in the midst of rising social strife into 1968 explains the film's significance. Most telling is the film's visualization of the break between generations. The two young people, whose lives shone with the same sort of middle- to uppermiddle-class home culture as was featured in popular periodicals, sorted out their own identities and places within a changing culture by defying conventional expectations not in bizarre dress and behavior but with "an underlying decency." If the picture short-circuited the critique of the consumerist society by not making victims out of the characters, it also gave the narrative a logical connecting point between young and old. If The Graduate failed to highlight the political setting many critics expected of a popular and artistic feature film, it also resonated more clearly on a level that enhanced the human drama in social relationships.
The Graduate received industry kudos with five Golden Globes for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress in a musical or comedy and, for both Ross and Hoffman, most promising male and female newcomer. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded Nichols' showpiece with two more citations than the 1967 Academy Award winner, In the Heat of the Night. The Graduate was nominated for seven awards and received Best Director for Nichols' innate sense and shrewd eye for "visual comment."91 Hoffman did not gain Academy patronage, but did become a phenomenon. On the street, he was the man of the moment, suddenly known as the graduate. People "thought I was an innocent," he recalled, "who walked around with `The Sounds of Silence' always playing in the background wherever I went."92 In Joseph E. Levine's eyes, The Graduate was "the most successful film I ever made." No one could have predicted the success of the film since the novel already "had been to every film company in Hollywood." Indeed, author and director were lucky they found each other in the midst of a generation's rebellion with a cause.93
The film, as a sixties emblem, made Dustin Hoffman a star and carried "formative influence" on the generation that was to leave their mark on American society by the end of the decade.94 "I remember exactly where I was sitting in the movie theater, and with whom, all three times," recalled L.A. Weekly reviewer Ella Taylor. Nichols' film was the "movie that my generation clasped to its bosom as the prophecy of our coming revolution," she continued.95 Susan Lydon of Rolling Stone recognized Mike Nichols' "unerring comic sense, light touch, cleverness, and perception." All of these added up to "an excellent, highly entertaining, and hilarious movie."96 The Graduate's social and intertextual life has far out-run the film's aesthetic value. References to the film have popped up as late as the 1990s in The Player and Used People. The Lemmonheads revived Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" for MTV and there has been talk of The Graduate: Part II.
Clearly endorsing the "under thirty" discourse, The Graduate, despite Hoffman's real age of thirty-one, made a charming argument for the entrance of the "now movie," to which Saturday Review devoted an entire issue by the end of the year. The Nichols' team proved to exhibitors that good filmmakers did not have to start with the bankable star. The release of The Graduate indelibly marked "newness" as a blending of youthful discontent with antimaterialist posturing, sexual frankness, and a director's phenomenal style.97 Mrs. Robinson had a lasting impact on representations of sexuality in the bedroom. "For," as Hollis Alpert noted, The Graduate "has taken aim, satirically, at the very establishment that produces most of our movies, mocked the morals and values it has long lived by. It is a final irony that it has thereby gained the large young audience it has been seeking and has been rewarded by a shower of gold."98
The most contemporary of arts, the seventh art, by the end of 1968, found a new expression outside of the adult narrative, the "safe" teenage rebellion story, and the wholesome family entertainment picture. The protest was not an intentional overthrow of convention, just an alteration in thinking. "Rebellion ending in conformity," Gary Dauphin called it in his Village Voice review thirty years later.99 Whatever its revolutionary strength, the film made available to filmmakers "hard-hitting cultural themes that were more risque"- and ultimately more adversarial than in previous decades.'°°
Whether one objected to or praised the film, The Graduate opened the range of social and political discussion by projecting a sixties generation as college-aged, antiestablishment, and materially secure enough to risk rejecting tradition. Audiences responding to Nichols' Graduate helped speed up a renaissance of sorts for Hollywood. As the New York Times reported halfway through the film's first year, "Mike Nichols and Jean-Luc Godard have become the heroes of many college campuses. The American Director [sic] and the French moviemaker are the pied pipers of a movement" for the 60,000-plus students enrolled in college film courses across campuses.101
