Camera And Action, page 8
Similarly, Robert Kennedy gained trust as a popular spokesman for the younger generation. He concurred, "The bridge across the generations is essential to the nation ... it is the bridge to our own future." He promised "that our young people ... will be heard." Above all, "They must feel that there is a sense of possibility. 1117 The bridge was vital to shift what mattered from age to beliefs. Kennedy optimism found opportunity on many college campuses where students across the political spectrum commonly accused time-honored institutions of being discriminatory, bureaucratic, exploitative, and corrupt. Senators, professors, commentators, child psychologists, and others who wished to reform American society or create marketable goods engaged in the reality of the generation dilemma.
Many distrusted youthful discontent, however. Look writer Russell Lynes suspected, "The generation gap [had] never been more publicized ... or ... enjoyed for purposes of self ... on both sides. Everybody seems to ... wallow in being misunderstood - the young by the middle-aged, the middle-aged by the young." The usual baits with which the young seemed to shock the older generation did not particularly dismay Lynes. Mini-skirts, long hair, rock music, and other superficial extravagances were only youthful indulgences. The rub for Lynes went deeper, since lifestyle and manners always change. The insult lay in the permanence of the young's disapproval of anyone over thirty and the sacrilege that disapproval seemed to imply. Lynes wanted at least recognition of the contradiction in calling for personalized status within one institution while demeaning those over thirty.18
Nonetheless, youth oppression, though a bit perplexing in reality, became a vital means of transforming age into a discourse that confused it with the condition of alienation and disenfranchisement." Using thirty as the separating mark enabled the most affluent generation to date to adopt a sense of powerlessness. Thinking of a younger generation as "unique" meant claiming psychological oppression and correlating it to the effects of materialism. This discourse allowed young adults to understand themselves as revolutionaries whose role was to re-fashion society. Demanding accommodation from adults by creating new ideals and making new promises out of the "under thirty" dividing line also re-defined how one understood American values and beliefs. The under-thirties discourse masked generational diversity and created new lifestyle possibilities for both youth and adult. Film aided in the process and marked its role as an agent in that change.
Benjamin Braddock came along at a time when many of the young, as Hollis Alpert put it, were "suspicious of all this bourgeois opulence."20 In this milieu, to one young viewer who was "more than a little worried about [her] future," Benjamin presented the truth, "with all its crudeness, shock and beauty."21 Representing the young as the potential truth-bearers functioned as a popularized form of indictment against American politics and the older generation. As critic Pauline Kael sharply complained, "The graduate stood for truth. The older people stood for sham and corrupt sexuality."22
Yet, to popular commentator David Brinkley, the film's unforgivable transgression was its dishonesty. "One night at our house," he wrote in his feature column "David Brinkley's Journal" for Ladies Home journal, "my son and several of his college-age friends found themselves in heated agreement. They thought The Graduate was absolutely the best movie they ever saw." Brinkley countered by declaring The Graduate, "except for a few minutes at the beginning ... pretty bad." Most distasteful in his opinion was the film's representation of the parent generation as "self-centered and materialistic ... licentious and deeply hypocritical ... walking advertisements for ... affluence." What seemed to be "the enduring conflicts between parent and child have now, suddenly, been phrasemongered into something called The Generation Gap." In Brinkley's eye, "All that is new about The Generation Gap is the phrase itself."23 Like Lynes, a little justice was all Brinkley wanted. Others agreed. One viewer walked out on what she saw as "a protracted, dull dirty joke, concerning a namby-pamby, self-pitying mama's boy, an idle, stone-laced drunk, and her apparently easily manipulated daughter, none of whom possessed an ounce of self-respect, wit, or talent."24
The simplistic division between the "ludicrous, corrupt" parents and the "honest, idealistic, pure, loveable" young people made The Graduate "a piece of calculated pseudo-innocence" from filmmakers "with a shrewd eye on the box office," critic John Simon suspected. He had no patience with a world reduced to an aged and outdated Holden Caulfield who was nothing more than "an idealistic, sensitive, confused innocent."25 Like Brinkley and Simon, Pauline Kael accused Nichols of pandering and explained the picture's appeal as clever publicity that brainwashed viewers through new distribution tactics and market research on demographics. Kael discounted the film's relevance and meaning by arguing that when the "worst inflated pompous trash ... is the most talked about ... we want to see the movies because so many people fall for whatever is talked about that they make the advertisers' lies true." Kael charged the filmmakers with "demagoguery in the arts."26
Distributors certainly promoted The Graduate based on generational conflict. Reaching the public through newspapers, radio and television ads, magazine features and panel discussions of considerable interest, marketers exploited the film as a news event. Even the political sector saw potential. Senator Jacob Javits argued that "honesty and integrity are what the young are demanding from their Senators and teachers," and when young people see The Graduate, "they bring ... a desire to believe" in "broadening ... values ... of honesty and understanding others' view points." The senator believed that Mike Nichols "inspired the young to believe they care," and he encouraged adults "in public and private life ... to emulate them."27
Media hype and critical review created a "must-see" aura around the film. After all, critics and advertisers have long delighted in their authority as movie messengers and taste managers, but good marketing cannot carry a bad movie. As Joseph E. Levine pointed out, "You can only do so much with advertising. After a while, they don't believe all the lies we tell them. You have to have a film to back it up."28 The Graduate did just that. What appeared as trivial trash to some critics transformed youth into something that mattered. A college student recalled at the time that Hoffman's character tapped into "my world so well. I remember thinking my problems were also his."29 A Stony Brook New York University student claimed that "if any of the films of the past year was truly a young people's film, it was `The Graduate.' `Bonnie and Clyde,' too, but especially `The Graduate."' Ben's gentle nature contrasted to the more "callous and violent" portrayal of the Barrows and offered many young viewers a reasonable point of connection. Certainly, as the writer continued, "You don't have to be young to dig it, but it helps.... I identified with Ben.... I thought of him as a spiritual brother. He was confused about his future and about his place in the world, as I am.... It's a film one digs, rather than understands intellectually."30
In some of the coldest weather in Manhattan that winter, viewers waited in lines blocks long. This was not the Sound of Music family bunch but the teens and young adults who did not seem to mind the eight-degree temperature. As Hollis Alpert noticed, "They stomped their feet, they made cheerful chatter" because "they ... knew they were going to see something good, something made for them." Conversely, "no one waited outside in the cold" at other nearby theaters. A Dallas fan bragged in a letter to Joseph Levine "that he had seen The Graduate more than any of his friends, no less than fifteen times." A Columbia University graduate student remarked to Hollis Alpert that no one should assess the film until having seen it "at least three times." She argued, "You see, it has meaning and nuances you don't get on just one viewing." The "multiple attendance" by young audiences transformed the film from a success into a phenomenon.31 With such obvious interest, marketing strategy changed from a simple sketch of a graduate in cap and gown standing under an outline of a woman's leg to a picture of Dustin Hoffman entering a doorway with the tagline, "Now you can see `The Graduate' again or for the first time."32
Where most top films opened to large grosses and then thinned out, the reverse was true with this picture. The first week it brought in $21,000, and by the ninth it totaled $90,000. Moreover, the film topped the charts without mentioning Vietnam. Rather than a specific event, it was the effects of conventional society that most stirred the hearts and minds of viewers. The Graduate became the film to see because it was the first effective cinematic manifestation of young adults' open resistance to middle-class ideals, embedded in the famed generation gap debates of the 1960s. By placing the advent of dysfunction in the previous generation's need to build a world of material security, The Graduate sparked debate, generated commentary, and incited enthusiasm for film as a means of action. The Graduate's screen version of generational discourse made alienation a condition of age and generational solidarity an instrument of change. Together these components helped it earn some $104,000,000.
The film created an identifying process that personalized the screen and offered a new way of being in tune with changing attitudes and taste. It did this by reconstructing the meaning of The Graduate in its immediate context and in relation to the specific ways of understanding and feeling the predominant generational questions in the mid-to late sixties, which begins with the personal appeal of Ben's characterization and Hoffman's persona. Ben's growing awareness that something in his life is not quite right is sidetracked when he discovers the possibility of sex with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the attractive wife of his father's business partner. At first startled by her sexual aggression, Benjamin later invites her to a local hotel where they engage in one of American cinema's most memorable affairs. In the meantime, Ben falls in love with Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross), his mistress's daughter, who came home from college for the summer. When she discovers his sordid behavior, Elaine hastens back to Berkeley to her boyfriend Carl (Brian Avery), known as the "makeout king," and Ben pursues her. The film ends with Ben proving his sincere love for Elaine; the two of them escape on a bus, departing from their parents' material world.
The camera follows Ben from the airport to his bedroom and zooms to Ben's face through a fish tank. Images of entrapment, repeated throughout the film, invite viewers into Ben's alienation. Later in the film, a much loved shot comically shows the older generation's outdated notion of what makes young people content. Benjamin's parents have thrown a birthday party for him with their adult friends who applaud when he steps outside the house and jumps into the pool in his birthday present, a new frogman suit. Ben peers out of the goggles and sees an older generation as outdated and immaterial as the diving gear.
The real appeal of this birthday scene, however, cannot be explained without contextualizing Dustin Hoffman. Nichols and Turman delayed production for months looking for just the right young man to portray the main character and key to the film's success was that decision. It was well known that Nichols held out for a new look, but most assumed that meant a handsome young face from television.33 Instead, the picture debuted a short, dark-haired, large-nosed Dustin Hoffman who, in the words of reviewer Joseph Morgenstern, "wears the world like a new pair of shoes."34 When Hoffman walked into Mike Nichols' office on a rainy day, he did not turn heads. Embassy's chief mistook him for the plumber.35 Likewise, Katharine Ross, who played Elaine, was surprised when she first saw Hoffman on the set. She remarked, "He looks about three feet tall, so dead serious, so humorless, so unkempt." Dismayed, she worried that the screen test was "going to be a disaster."36 This "homely non-hero," as Life's David Zeitlin described the 5-foot-6 Hoffman, with a schnoz that looks like a directional signal, skittish black-beady eyes and a raggedy hair-cap ... slouches like a puppet dangling from a string."37
An unpretentious Hoffman even frightened Embassy's publicity personnel who asked what "that ugly guy [was] doing as lead of the picture." The company's advertisers doubted the possibility for recovery of the highly leveraged $3,100,000 and wondered if Embassy's chief had "lost his touch" with this one. Needless to say, many remained skeptical following the casting of Hoffman and believed they were helping to prepare for a big flop.38 Yet, to Mike Nichols' discriminating eye, Hoffman added a touch of the offbeat and brought a psychological tension to the story.
Benjamin Braddock was originally cast for a California surfboard-type - tall, blond, blue-eyed, and athletic. The western blond in the book and screenplay had not only gone to an eastern college but had come away with scholarships to Harvard and Columbia graduate schools. Mike Nichols initially took that route. He had Robert Redford and Candice Bergen in mind. To complete the California family, he offered the role of Mrs. Robinson to Doris Day who turned it down because it offended her sense of values. As for Redford, at that point in his film career, he just "could not ... play a loser like Benjamin, 'cause nobody would ever buy it," Nichols recalled.39 Instead of an idol merely reproducing just "another portrait by the well-loved so-and-so," this inarticulate manner would allow room for improv- isation.40 "It's the hardest thing I ever tried to cast," noted Nichols. "These people are so far removed from stock characters. 1141 Even Hoffman fought Nichols' reinterpretation. "Benjamin Braddock is just not Jewish," he complained.42 Yet Nichols sought what Hoffman's look offered on screen - a young man "simply living his life without pretending."43 Nichols' guess proved brilliant. Hoffman began the film as an off-Broadway actor and ended as a star.
The Graduate turned Hoffman into a symbol of the here and now. New Hollywood changed its face from the pre-war generation look of "vanilla features" to an ethnicity that engendered a new kind of realism.44 The timing was right. As Stanley Kaufman pointed out in 1967, "It would be hard to imagine [Hoffman] in leading roles a decade ago."45 His offhanded and unassuming acting manner, as head of Embassy's publicity remarked, was "absolutely new to the screen." From a young person's point of view, Hoffman's demeanor of "insecurity" simultaneously exuded an "inner core" of strength. Embassy's representative described it as "the way that you and your friends act but that you've never seen on screen before."46 Alongside the western surfer now sat the eastern, European, dark-haired youth. Hoffman himself observed that "suddenly, our tastes have become so anti-American image - anti-Saturday Evening Post [sic] Norman Rockwell."47 When the slouchy Hoffman dons the frogman suit, he takes viewers with him and projects the popular sentiment against parents. Floating and drifting mock the value of work, so vital for the parent generation, and symbolize the disillusionment of the rebellious younger generation whose worry was not economic security.
Charles Webb's 1963 novel touches on common elements of the classic father/son debate that would pique both generations' attention. Ben challenges patriarchal authority by trading his home for the road. He values people, "simple people," he tells his dad. "I want simple honest people that can't even read or write their own name. I want to spend the rest of my life with these people ... farmers ... truck drivers. Ordinary people who don't have big houses. Who don't have swimming pools." Yet, his father is not a simpleton. "Ben," he accuses, "you have a romantic idea of this," and the classic conflict of father and son continues.48
Four years later, the son's discontent shifts in emphasis. Nichols downplays the parent's role as teacher and supports the younger generation's romantic notions about human nature and American ideals. "It's very comfortable -just to drift here," Ben explains to his father. "Have you thought about graduate school?" asks Mr. Braddock, to which Ben replies, "No." When his father asks him to explain the point of those "four years of college" and "all that hard work," Ben impudently replies, "You got me."49 Ben's plastic swimming pool raft helps remedy his summer melancholy.
The Ben/Hoffman combination, therefore, personifies what Stanley Kauffman speculated was a new "being ... not otherwise" possible in an earlier time.50 It was not a rite of passage that the film highlighted nor an on-the-road rebellion but a specific generational identity transmitted through familiar icons of rejection. Hoffman exuded the tweed-sports-coat ambiance throughout the film. His "eastern" formality and ethnic appearance competed with the "all-American," seductive, masculine composite, commonly known as the "walking surfboards," born in California and popularized during the Beach Boys era and surfer films."
The fresh impact of Hoffman mixed well with the witty script and brilliant musical score.52 Whether Benjamin Braddock drives the red convertible sports car on the freeway while listening to Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon's "Scarborough Fair" or floats on a plastic raft in the swimming pool to "Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend," the combination is striking. Lyrics that tell about Ben talking to his friend Darkness help distinguish his torment as both typical and universal by identifying Ben's privacy as a safe environment in contrast to public spaces. These beloved songs were not just a backdrop for the rhythm of the film but an assertion of Ben's identity and a validation of the irreducible core of Ben's good soul. He broods but is not neurotic. He is disappointed, not despondent.
