The Graduate (1967): A Picture-Perfect Portrait of Alienation
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F85213710-d83f-4249-b985-9cad7363f642_682x1023.jpeg)
In 1963, recent Williams College graduate Charles Webb published a slim novella, the cover of which declared it to be “A novel of today’s youth, unlike any you have read.” That novel, about a young man who has an affair with an older woman but then falls in love with her daughter, was entitled The Graduate. Its 1967 film adaptation was a sensational success and has become one of the most important cultural touchstones of American youth, being almost endlessly discussed, referenced, and parodied in the more than half a century since its release. Unlike many films made in or about the 1960’s, the film has also remained bracingly fresh, largely because its main theme is even more relevant to society today than when it debuted.
The Graduate was brought to the screen by Mike Nichols, who had directed only one other film up to that point, the 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee’s biting play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Before that, he had been a theatre director, one half of the comedy duo Nichols & May, and creator of the folk variety show The Midnight Special (which, at more than 70 years, is one of the longest-running radio programs still airing new episodes). Nichols and his filmmaking crew took the plot of the book as a jumping-off point, shaping the material through clever visuals, innovative use of music, crackling dialogue, and compelling central performances to create an incisive portrayal of alienation in modern society.
The theme of alienation emerges through setting and dialogue before the plot of the film even properly starts. It opens with a close-up of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), his expression completely vacant, followed by a zoom-out which reveals he is sitting on an airplane; the voice of the captain announces they are descending towards Los Angeles, and monotonously rattles off a formulaic pleasantry. In the next shot, Ben walks onto and stands on what we assume to be a moving sidewalk (the sidewalk itself is not shown) as the credits roll, passing in front of a white wall unadorned but for a rectangular tile pattern; other people pass him by in either direction, closer to the camera so that the audience can only catch fleeting, faceless glimpses of them. The very next shot is Ben’s suitcase, also on a conveyer belt, which deposits it on the floor. Already the film is indicating that Ben lives in a blank, bleak, dehumanizing world which treats him as an object, this point being emphasized by Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” which plays over this sequence. The repeated motif of Ben being underwater literally (as in the scene where he stands at the bottom of the pool in scuba gear) or figuratively (as when he sits with his back to the fish tank in his room, immediately after the credits) likewise indicates the alienation he feels.
The welcome-home party at which Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father’s business partner, first appears also drives home Ben’s alienation by showing that he seems to have no friends his own age; the only people in attendance are of his parents’ generation, and he actively flees from their presence. Ben is fundamentally out of step with everyone at the party, rejecting their shallow, object-oriented lifestyle, exemplified by the famous line “Plastics.” (I find it interesting that It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), produced more than twenty years previous, features a scene where George Bailey (James Stewart) vehemently rejects both a career in plastics and marriage). However, Ben apparently knows no alternative lifestyle, producing in him a state of anomie, a lack of clear morality and guidance caused by an absence or breakdown of the relationship between an individual and society, as described by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Through the first half of the film, Ben is unmoored and aimless, making no attempt to find a job or prepare for graduate school. He is occupied only with the affair which Mrs. Robinson initiates with him, and with literally drifting in his family’s pool on an inflatable mattress, a clever visual metaphor for his lack of direction. These two states are intercut in the film’s summer montage, which is also groundbreaking in its use of two pre-existing Simon & Garfunkel songs (popular music not written specifically for a film was not often used in montages in 1967).
Both Ben and Mrs. Robinson are motivated on some level by a desire to find an escape from their current situations. Ben is trying to escape the boring middle-class lifestyle that he is alienated from. Mrs. Robinson reveals in their conversation after the summer montage that she married Mr. Robinson because he impregnated her; she implicitly feels trapped in her marriage, an idea which recurs at the end when she tells her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) that it is “too late,” and Elaine responds, “Not for me!” implying that it is too late for Mrs. Robinson. Despite quelling, at least temporarily, the desire for escape in both participants, the affair is ultimately corrosive to them, as it is not based on any mutual love or even respect, but instead on desperation and a fair measure of contempt. This is shown as early as the end of Ben and Mrs. Robinson’s first conversation. Ben has given Mrs. Robinson the keys to his car so that she can drive herself home, but rather than handing them back to him when he agrees to drive her, she throws them into his fish tank, forcing him to plunge his hand into the tank to retrieve them—only the second of many symbolic drownings, foreshadowing that she does not actually like Ben, and that she will only worsen his alienation.
Throughout the affair, Ben and Mrs. Robinson maintain an odd veneer of middle-class manners; she always calls him “Benjamin,” never a shortened name like Ben or any term of endearment (dear, honey, darling, etc.), and he always calls her—with perfect 1950’s squareness—“Mrs. Robinson.” (Indeed, we never learn her first name). There is little passion between them except anger; Mrs. Robinson finally pushes Ben to go through with the affair when he is having second thoughts by piercing his ego, calling him “inadequate” due to his lack of sexual experience. Although Ben is manipulated fairly easily by Mrs. Robinson in the first half of the film, he also grows to resent her, to the point where he insults her after the summer montage, calling her a “broken-down alcoholic.” This extended scene also features Mrs. Robinson pulling Ben’s hair at his suggestion that he date her daughter, setting up the main conflict of the remainder of the movie; it is effectively the fulcrum of the film.
When Ben does go on a date with Elaine, he discovers that she is the only person he has found who seems capable of understanding his alienation, which he describes as being like playing a game with rules that don’t make any sense and that “seem to have made themselves up.” However, the affair quickly crushes their budding relationship—interestingly, the scene in which Elaine finds out who Ben’s affair was with does not feature either Ben or Mrs. Robinson explicitly stating the truth. Instead, Elaine is placed between them, just inside the door to her room (the same place Mrs. Robinson showed herself, naked, to Benjamin), and looks from one stricken face to another. This scene features an excellent example of rack focus as cinematographer Robert Surtees focuses first on Elaine, racks backwards to the drenched and stricken face of Mrs. Robinson, and then racks forward again as Elaine turns back to the camera, dawning horror on her face. (This is only one example of the inventive and expert camerawork by Surtees all through this picture).
The ending of the film seems to have been often misinterpreted, at least when it was released, as a cheer-worthy vindication of young people breaking free of adults. Although Ben rescues (more or less…) Elaine from marriage to a tall blond medical student, in an undoubtedly fun scene, the final extended penultimate shot of the pair’s faces on the bus belies or at least complicates their supposed triumph.
Mike Nichols described Ben as an “idiot rebel”; he desperately wants to escape the middle class, but not at the expense of a comfortable house with a pool, a nice car, and the other trappings of the “American Dream.” The film never specifies what Ben’s major in college was, perhaps allowing for easier identification with him by people in different fields, but also indicating that no prospective career interests him. He is quite literally a rebel without a cause, in stark contrast to the protests and social activism of the time of its release, which are only alluded to once in the film (Ben’s landlord at Berkeley (Norman Fell) mentions “outside agitators”).
This absence of political consciousness on Ben’s part is mostly an artifact of the original book debuting in October of 1963, more than a month before the Kennedy assassination and the turbulence of the 60’s that kicked into full swing afterwards. It was also before Beatlemania: on his date with Elaine, Ben asks the youths in the car next to them (which is painted with hippie-style flower patterns) to turn down their music. Only four years later, Benjamin Braddock already seems like a young man from a radically different time, which of course only contributes to his alienation. Despite their escape from middle-class society, and their apparent future estrangement from the Robinsons, there is no indication that Ben and Elaine will be able to come up with any other mode of life. The ultimate lack of a well-formulated ideology to clarify Ben’s thinking or some other calling (such as work, artistic pursuits, volunteering, or activism) to occupy his mind also indicates his and Elaine’s future life may become just as shallow and empty as the previous generation’s; they could easily end up with the same sort of loveless marriage and unenlightened social life as their parents. The Graduate vividly dramatizes the destructive effects of anomie on family life, but it offers few clues to an escape from the trap of mundanity.