Last night's open thread on The Graduate is still open over at newcritics. That's the beauty of an open thread. Once you let it out of the bag, there's no stuffing it back in again. This post is a revision of the notes I posted at newcritics to kick start the discussion.
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. This is what we're rooting for them to escape. 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, he 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 we’re lucky. But still, aren’t Ben and Elaine better than that? Hipper, smarter, less materialistic, bolder?
Aren't they us?
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.
Every time I watch the movie I like something different about it. (It's problematic whether I've ever actually liked the whole movie.) This time, it was the scene where Ben goes to the frat house and all the brothers talk about Elaine’s fiance as if he was Hawkeye Pierce or Sam Malone. But we’ve seen the guy and we know that pompous-looking, gray-flanneled blond zero can’t possibly be the lothario
they’re describing. If he’s gotten past first base with any girl, it’s
because she met him on the base path and carried him down to second herself.
Among these guys, all it takes to be known as a hound is to actually
touched a live girl. And we realize that this is exactly how Mr Robinson's frat brothers talked about him after they found out he did it with the soon-to-be Mrs Robinson in the backseat of the Ford and got her pregnant. These guys are probably assuming that the reason Elaine's fiance is marrying her is that she's knocked up. Women as autonomous actors with sexual desires and ambitions of their own are not part of their experience and never will be because they're terrified of women and of sex. These are the future Mr Robinsons, a pack of self-gelded drunken phonies. One thing Mrs Robinson has made sure of is that Ben will never be like any of them.
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 intelligent, 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. Berkeley, where Elaine goes to school, is as pure and calm a seat
of higher 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 they're jazz fans or opera buffs or they like the Ray Conniff
Singers and they never heard any of the songs that help define the mood
of their movie. And nobody talks about politics. Vietnam 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 most other 21 year old men in his situation in 1967 would have been watching the mail anxiously every day for the letter that begins “Greetings,” but Ben drifts along as if his future is wide-open and totally in his own control and he has plenty of time to make up his mind about what to do with himself. That's part of his problem, in fact. Too many choices, not enough pressure to come to a decision. The possibility that the choice will be made for him by the Army might have served to concentrate his thinking. Having to worry about getting his applications to grad school or the Air National Guard in on time might have helped him forget the temptation of Mrs Robinson's offer.
Meanwhile, 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 father, 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.
Angry is a key. In Pictures at a Revolution, author Mark Harris describes a crucial moment in the early stages of filming The Graduate. Anne Bancroft was having trouble with a line-reading. She couldn't decide how to approach it. She asked Nichols what her motivation for the line was. "Anger," he said.
Bancroft seemed taken aback. Then she thought it over. "I can do that," she said finally, and somehow I heard her in my head saying that in a way that made me worry about the subtext of her marriage to Mel Brooks.
Whatever was the case with Bancroft's own feelings, she definitely found the anger in Mrs Robinson.
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?
What do you think?
Lots of excellent points were raised in last night's thread, not just about Mrs Robinson's role and what happens to Ben and Elaine after the credits roll. As I said, the thread's still open. Feel free to wander over and drop a comment or three. Or you can post your thoughts here and I'll fax them over. And remember, next Wednesday's (June 18) feature will be In The Heat of the Night. I'll save you a seat on the aisle.
that had been published early enough in the decade to be really a product of the 1950s and not the 1960s, certainly not The Sixties as they’ve come to be defined in the popular imagination. The targets of the satire were timeless, too. Hypocrisy, conformity, materialism. Whatever “revolutionary” edginess they might have intended was in the movie’s attitudes towards sex—in the non-judgmental, almost objective acceptance of Mrs Robinson’s aggressive sexual desire, in the frankness with which her affair with Ben is portrayed, in the flashes of nudity. If the movie has a message, it’s not rebellion but the importance of moral integrity.
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