The Graduate is more than a classic film.
It is a piece of Americana that has
penetrated the nation’s collective consciousness through multiple forms of media
to the point that it is now essentially known and ubiquitous.
There is the image of Dustin Hoffman, for example, somewhat cocky and somewhat confused, with his hands thrust in pockets, staring at the outstretched and stocking-clad calve and foot of co-star Anne Bancroft. Surely, this is one of the cinema’s most enduring images of the last century?
And while adultery no longer
shocks America, that image retains the power – and the moral price of caving
into that power – of raw sexuality and naked titillation. There is also the
Simon and Garfunkle acoustic soundtrack that includes “Mrs. Robinson,” a folksy
pop tune whose exuberance masks the sadness documented in lyrics that pine for
a lost American age represented by famed baseball slugger Joe DiMaggio. And
there is, of course, the film itself. It has been parodied, held up as a siren
song for a generation, and even more recently, returned for reexamination as a
stage play for a whole new age-group and audience.
Timelessness? I think that is an
apt word, but a curious one nonetheless, to apply to a film that debuted in
1967 and was immediately embraced as a kind of zeitgeist for the disaffected American
youth who looking back saw nothing but the rather grim – but economically successful
– 1950s and looking ahead the growing shadow of Vietnam, fractured race
relations, urban upheaval and gradual restructuring of the United State’s
post-World War Two order. Or perhaps that is all too academic? The undeniable
power in this film, I believe, is the confusion that sits at its core. That is,
Dustin Hoffman is an educated, somewhat well-to-do young man, but he is
seemingly passionate about nothing and has no idea what to do with himself or
with his life, a set of ennui-ridden attributes that have afflicted American
youth from 1967 up until the present day.
If the Greatest Generation
vanquished fascism and put America at the top of the world economic heap, what,
if anything was left for their offspring to do? Enjoy the world as inheritors?
That world, as shown here, is one of afternoon booze and cocktails, peopled
with a seedy and curiously amoral set of characters who speak of investments in
plastics as if the welfare of the Republic depended on such mundane commerce. It
is a curiously hip and Left-wing view, in that it accepts Marx’s theories about
the estrangement of wage laborers as fact and correspondingly presents the most
successful of America’s capitalists – as surely Hoffman’s odd parents and their
ilk are meant to represent – as dreadfully dull, or, in the case of Mrs.
Robinson, mildly socio-pathic and disturbed by the lack of real substance in
their lives.
Ennui, of course, is nothing new.
And the chronicling of the “quiet, desperate lives” all Americans supposedly
live has been a standard trope of both novels and films for at least the past
100 years. What separates The Graduate from this pack is its focus on youth,
something that perhaps had not occurred in popular culture up until the 1960s.
Hoffman is in the prime of his life. There is, the film shows us, still time
for him to avoid becoming his parents. It is this possibility, this thematic
fork in the road, which I believe keeps the film fresh well into another
century: All youth wants to both emulate and reject their parents, regardless
of time period, and Hoffman’s character is no different.
Hoffman debases himself with Mrs.
Robinson in a kind of bizarre emulation, but at the same time, he uses his
defilement – and hers, one must say – as a catalyst to muster the courage to
try to break out of the world of easy living and fancy cars that she and his
parents wished to bequeath him and his generation. The ultimate irony is that
Hoffman eventually settles on the idea of marriage – or at least, some kind of “elopement”
– with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter as his ticket to independence. This is
interesting in that marriage is the ultimate conservative social institution, but
in the world of The Graduate marriage too is presented as shambolic in 1967
(and this well before the country’s divorce rate really skyrocketed).
The final scene of the film, which has been the source of
much debate and parody, is deeply moving.
In a matter of seconds, the Hoffman
and Elaine’s expression seems to shift from joy, to contentment to a sad sort
of resignation. I have never been able to pin down the source of the last
emotion, but I suspect it is something more than the adrenaline dying down in
their veins. I suspect what they realize is that they have made a choice by
fleeing together, and what is more, this is the first real adult choice they have ever made.
They are, in other words, not
children anymore, and for the first times in their lives, they have exercised
their free will and acted outside the wishes and inducements of their parents
and their school friends. They have decided to eschew the mistakes their
parents made and to run away to make some of their own. That is liberating,
hence their initial glee. But gradually, their expressions change, because they realize, almost immediately, that their first “mistake” is the
elopement itself.
Not because the elopement is morally wrong or against the wishes
of their parents or of society writ large, but because it is wrong for them, as free-thinking and independent
adults. Their rebellion, in other words, is torpedoed at almost the exact
moment it began by the very act that sets them free and on their way. What is
brilliantly left unknown is how or whether they can recover from this act in
time to stave off becoming their
parents...I leave it to you to decide, but if you need evidence of what these Baby Boomers became, there is plenty around you in contemporary America.
