“They become their parents.”


Greetings. Relax. You have not been drafted. I’m just welcoming you to the first open thread in our new newcritics series of open threads, Wednesday Night at the Movies. The thread officially opens at 10 PM, Eastern. But if you’re here a little early, don’t be chagrined. Step right in. The fondue pot’s over there on the sidetable. The Maxwell House is in the perculator. Grab a bite and a cup of coffee and dive right in. Post your comments and keep hitting the refresh button all night.

Just a few notes to get things started.

The ending of The Graduate is famously ambiguous.

Having fled the church where Elaine’s just gotten married to the pipe-smoking cipher her parents have chosen for her, Ben and Elaine hop on a bus going…nowhere as far as we know…and take a seat together at the far back. But instead of falling into each other’s arms as any pair of runaway lovers might be expected to do or talking excitedly about what they’ve just done and what they’re going to do now, they just sit there, side by side, silent, barely touching, without looking at each other - their timing is off, when Elaine turns to Ben, he’s not looking at her, when he looks at her, she’s turned away, and finally they give up trying to meet each other’s eyes and lose themselves in their separate thoughts. Eventually, Ben’s face goes completely blank. He wears the same empty, anesthetized expression he was wearing on the airplane in the opening shot of the film, and the credits roll.

This is a happy ending?

When asked what happens to Ben and Elaine now, director Mike Nichols is said to have replied, They become their parents.

This is a stunning and, if he meant it, heartless thing for him to say. Early in the movie Ben tells his father what he wants his life to be like. “Different.” Different from the life his father’s led, different from the life he seems destined for, middle-class, comfortable, and successful, sure, but also dull, uneventful, and safe. If Ben and Elaine just become their parents, what was the point of the movie? Were we watching Ben fail?

They become their parents? The question is, did Nichols mean it? The next question is, if he did mean it, what did he mean by it?

What do you think?

Here’s what I think. Clearly, Nichols didn’t mean that they turn into exact duplicates of their parents. Ben’s parents are rather nice people. Silly people. But nice. And well-meaning and loving. There’d be nothing terrible in Ben and Elaine’s turning out to be like them. It would just be something of a let down. But that’s life for most people. We set out intending to become heroes and heroines of our own great personal romances and end up as supporting characters, the nice but wacky neighbors, in somebody else’s situation comedy, if they’re lucky. But still, aren’t Ben and Elaine better than that.

And her parents…

The Robinsons are a horror show.

Mr Robinson is an obvious fraud. He plays the big, bluff man of the world, but he turns out to be a drunk and a coward. He has a wife who looks like Anne Bancroft but he doesn’t sleep with her and the implication is that it’s his choice and that he’s made that choice because he knows he can’t satisfy her sexually.

Mrs Robinson, of course, is a bitter and destructive, and self-destructive, alcoholic. Whatever redeeming qualities she has are deeply buried and if she was ever a nice or decent person that person exists only as a memory.

Surely, Ben and Elaine are too smart, too decent, too good to let themselves turn into the Robinsons. Certainly, it’s the prospect of becoming like either set of parents that they’re rebelling against.

But that assumes that Ben and Elaine are a couple of rebels.

It’s always struck me as odd that The Graduate has a reputation as one of the iconographic films of the 60s. The 60s, as we remember them, are barely in the movie. Nobody in the movie talks about politics. The Vietnam War doesn’t ever cross their minds. Ben must have had a very high lottery number because now that he’s out of college his deferment is up and any 21 year old in his situation in 1967 would have been watching the mail anxiously every day for the letter that begins “Greetings.” Berkeley, where Elaine goes to school, is as pure and calm a place of learning as the college Andy Hardy attended. Simon and Garfunkel dominate the soundtrack, but Ben and Elaine don’t seem to listen to any music so as far as we know their jazz fans or like the Ray Conniff Singers and they never heard any of the songs that help define the mood of their movie.

And the famous “One word. Plastics” exchange is actually somewhat anachronistic. In 1947, that advice would have been prescient. In 1957, it would have been banal. By 1967, it would have been just plain strange, which is actually how Ben reacts to it. The 60s equivalent of plastics would have been “silicon.”

Ben and Elaine aren’t representatives of their times. They are outside of time. Ben isn’t rebelling against his future or against his parents’ boring middle class existence. He’s just dithering. Elaine is almost zombie-like in her inability to resist her parents’ orders. These two aren’t rebels or budding revolutionaries. They are simply a little bit lost.

There is, though, one rebel in the movie. Mrs Robinson.

Mrs Robinson’s a subversive out to undo the entire social fabric…at least that part of it that contains herself and her life. By setting out to sleep with Ben, she’s threatening to destroy her marriage, her family’s friendship with the Braddocks, her husband’s business partnership with Ben’s father, her own place in society, which depends on her marriage, that friendship, and the money earned by that partnership. When Ben starts dating Elaine, Mrs Robinson sets out to destroy her own daughter’s future happiness, which is a way of saying she is subverting her own role as a mother.

What are you rebelling against, Mrs Robinson?

What have you got?

Think about this.

In every discussion of The Graduate, Anne Bancroft’s age at the time is invariably brought up.

Bancroft was only thirty-six and yet here she is playing a woman old enough to be Dustin Hoffman’s mother!

Dustin Hoffman’s age at the time, twenty-nine, will be mentioned, and some point about Hollywood’s double standards on the matter of actresses aging will be attempted.

To me this is like wondering that the actor playing Macbeth isn’t actually a Scottish thane teleported in from the 11th Century.

Actors routinely play characters who aren’t like themselves physically.

William Daniels, who plays Ben’s Dad, was only forty

Why did Mike Nichols cast a young woman like Anne Bancroft to play a middle-aged mother?

Because he wanted to work with Anne Bancroft.

But here’s the thing.

How much older is Bancroft actually playing?

Think about the story she tells Ben about why she married Mr Robinson.

They got married because they had to. Mrs Robinson was pregnant with Elaine.

When did it happen? When Mrs Robinson was still in school. She had to drop out of college.

Elaine is at most twenty-one. The possibility is that Mrs Robinson isn’t even forty.

Bancroft isn’t playing “older.” She’s playing haggard. She’s playing bitter. She’s playing angry.

Mrs Robinson is a still youngish woman trapped in the life of a much older woman. We don’t know how long Mrs Robinson has been the way she appears in the movie. Presumably not long enough that her bitterness and her spite and her self-destructiveness have come to define her in the minds of the people who have known her best. Her daughter might just be in denial. But the Braddocks clearly think of the Robinsons as fine people for their son to be associating with. It’s possible that Ben’s graduation from college—the child of people she regards as her contemporaries has become a man—has caused her to have a mid-life crisis and up until the night of Ben’s graduation party she had been adept at pretending, with the help of a few stiff drinks, that her life was just fine and she was just fine with its being fine.

But now that she realizes that the boy young enough to be her son is all grown-up, and the girl who is in fact her daughter is as well, she can’t pretend anymore. Her anger and her disappointment have gotten the better of her. She’s rebelling against everything that’s trapped her—her marriage, the society whose retrograde rules about these things forced her to marry a man she didn’t love and raise a child she didn’t want, her own foolishness at the time, her own continued cowardice in accepting and even enjoying the life that was forced upon her, her age—and she’s rebelling in the only way weak and powerless people can, by blowing everything up.

Or…

She’s not trying to rebel, she’s just found a different way to pretend her life’s ok. She’s made herself the girlfriend of a college hero. When she’s with Ben she’s pretending she’s still the girl she was before she got pregnant. Ben is the boy her husband should have been. This is why she insists that they don’t talk. She knows she can’t make Ben play along and every word he says to her breaks the illusion because every word he says isn’t to the girl she was and longs to be again but to the middle-aged woman she despises.

Or…

Or what?

That’s something to talk over tonight. Is Mrs Robinson an anti-heroine or is she a damsel in distress that Ben can’t rescue because he’s twenty years too late? Is she the villainess of the story or is she its chief victim?

Just food for thought. There are no assigned subjects tonight. No agenda for the discussion. This isn’t a class. We’re meeting at a virtual coffee shop after the movie. You don’t have to wait to be called on. Dive right in with whatever’s on your mind. Feel free to post directly to specific other commenters. Ask questions. Answer questions that haven’t been answered. Sing us the collected works of Simon and Garfunkel. I’ll do what I can to keep things focused and moving along, but really the thread’s in your hands. The only rules are to be civil and respectful and try to remember that there are children watching. Really. Tom Watson’s kids read this blog.

Ready?

Ok. Let’s get to it.

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June 12th, 2008
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