[This past weekend, my younger son and co-favorite-Guest Poster Kyle Railton graduated from high school. As I wipe away proud Dad tears, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and contexts for this momentous occasion—leading up to a special weekend post on what’s next for the new grad!]
On one aspect
of the iconic
1967 film that hasn’t aged well, and two that still feel very relevant.
In a 1997 column
revisiting The Graduate for its 30th anniversary, Roger Ebert
apologizes for his initial 1967 review; more exactly, he apologizes to the character
Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) for having initially sided with “that
insufferable creep,” Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock, over her, whom he now
sees as “the most sympathetic and intelligent character in” the film. I first
saw the film around that same 1997 moment and very much agreed with Ebert’s
later take, and moreover saw Benjamin’s relationship with Mrs. Robinson’s
daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) as similarly creepy rather than romantic (he
essentially stalks her for much of the second half of the film, and I don’t
blame her for looking rather nonplussed as they pull away together on that
climactic bus). Elaine is also ridiculously quick to forgive Benjamin for
his extended affair with her mother, which he is still in the midst of when he
first goes out with Elaine. Basically, both romantic relationships and the
portrayals of the main female characters in this film are a mess, and at the
very least come out looking far different in the 21st century than
they apparently did in 1967.
On the
other hand, one aspect of Mrs. Robinson’s character has aged very well: the Simon & Garfunkel song
named after her that was written (or rather adapted)
for the film (Paul Simon had a slightly different, not-yet-recorded song-in-progress
called “Mrs. Roosevelt” that director Mike Nichols convinced him to revise). “Mrs.
Robinson” is a fascinating glimpse into American culture in the late 1960s, one
that certainly begins as an ode to a suburban married woman amidst a midlife
affair but that evolves into a far broader and deeper examination of a society
in the midst of deepening and destructive malaise. The final verse about Joe DiMaggio
and the disappearance of shared heroes gets the most attention, but I would highlight
a series of lines in the penultimate one: “Going to the candidates’
debate/Laugh about it, shout about it/When you’ve got to choose/Every way you
look at it, you lose.” While of course those lines could still be from the
perspective of the title character, I would argue they ring even truer for a
new graduate, someone emerging into a future where it feels that there are no
great choices (something about which, I’ll be honest, I worry a great deal when
it comes to both of my sons and their generation).
And
speaking of graduates and their choices, I would argue that the film’s single
most iconic line has also aged all-too-well into our present moment. At a
graduation party at his childhood home, Benjamin is cornered by family friend
Mr. McGuire, who says to him, “I want to say one word to you. Just one word…Plastics.”
When Benjamin asks for a bit more, McGuire simply adds, “There’s a great future
in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” It’s safe to say that
Benjamin does not, in fact, think about it, but it seems to me that we as an
audience are meant to—not because there’s any there there, but instead quite
specifically because there’s not. In a moment when young people, and especially
young men around the age of high school and college graduates alike, are
apparently devoting
a great deal of their time, energy, and resources to the mystical and to my
mind entirely fabricated world of crypto and bitcoin and the like, seeking to
find a great future in these largely unexplained and (again, to my mind)
unsubstantiated concepts, we would do well to collectively revisit this 1967
scene and consider just why it feels so silly.
Last
graduation connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Graduation texts or topics you’d share?
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