The Graduate (1967)

One of the lasting successes of this film today is that despite Ben being male, bi-coastal, waspish, upper-middle-class and white, he still manages to be an avatar of the "drift of the boomer generation’s growing alienation from the status quo and captured a new zeitgeist that was in the air but had yet to fully take hold". The 1960s before "the sixties", indeed. But whether that success of representation is more of a question about who that drift was actually available to back in the late-1960s, is, of course, a more fundamental question that boomers have been dodging ever since. Indeed, watching this from the vantage point of 2024, it now seems to demand being read through the lens of generational politics, and here The Graduate acts as an implicit reminder that "Millennial" and "Zoomer" encodes a lot more about your class, educational, health, ethnic, racial background than simply the year of your birth.

Although parts of it have not aged perfectly, it seems almost—how to put it?—perfectly dated for its time. For instance, although Mrs Robinson is granted some 60s-style proto-cougar para-feminist empowerment through her frank and direct approaches to Ben, the film suggests the stark limits and dangers of that freedom by suggesting she gets way too far out over her skis. In the end, it is Ben, a man, who is the primary agent of change in this film. And whilst Mrs Robinson's lack of first name in the opening half reads as part of her broader freedom to be pseudo-anonymous, by the time Ben has fallen for Elaine it reads simultaneously as an erasure and a collapse of her identity to her marriage status.

Still, perhaps one of the more accessible masterpieces in cinema. The slow change of focus to Elaine's face to represent her dawning understanding of the situation, the "DO NOT TEASE" sign at the zoo, the toaster finishing its cycle with perfect comic timing (cleverly punned by Tarantino's submachine gun 'shot' in Pulp Fiction?), the exchange about "plastics", the Paul Simon soundtrack... all wonderful. And the final shot of Ben and Elaine after their escape from the wedding while their faces "go from elation to that uncertain feeling is not just brought on by the enormity of the future they now face" can now be seen as the potential uncertainty of American cinema in 1967 before it would it embark on nearly 15 years of constant masterpieces.

A woman of forty-five who leaves a husband of fifty for a lover of twenty-eight is the makings of a social and sexual scandal at a deep level of feeling. No one takes exception to a romantic couple in which the man is twenty years or more the woman’s senior. The movies pair Joanne Dru and John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten, Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni; as in actual life, these are perfectly plausible, appealing couples. When the age difference runs the other way, people are puzzled and embarrassed and simply shocked. [The] usual view of why a woman of forty and a boy of twenty, or a woman of fifty and a man of thirty, marry is that the man is seeking a mother, not a wife; no one believes the marriage will last. For a woman to respond erotically and romantically to a man who, in terms of his age, could be her father is considered normal. A man who falls in love with a woman who, however attractive she may be, is old enough to be his mother is thought to be extremely neurotic (victim of an “Oedipal fixation” is the fashionable tag), if not mildly contemptible.

— Susan Sontag: The Double Standard of Aging (1972)

Though The Graduate upholds some of the classic tropes of Hollywood romantic comedy dating back to the 1930s—especially in its climactic deployment of a runaway bride—Benjamin’s paralyzing emotional disconnect from the world around him is what makes his story both fresh and particular to its own time.

— Frank Rich (Criterion)

Ben’s famous line “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me!” is followed by the far less categorical “Aren’t you?” By insisting on that tentative second beat, The Graduate plays up its greatest strength, a lingering sense of disconnect and doubt. […] Nowadays, a steady barrage of soundtrack-friendly hits cue emotional response with overweening Pavlovian precision. Nichols gives the music room to speak for the characters, letting Simon and Garfunkel’s folksy songs play out in their entirety as they alter the atmosphere from the satiric brio of Mrs. Robinson to the lovelorn lament of Scarborough Fair.

— Budd Wilkins (Slant Magazine)

In a brief passage[.] philosopher and film scholar Stanley Cavell explains that “a failure of The Graduate is the failure of its supporting players to accept and fill and specify the types they project.” By this, Cavell refers specifically to Mrs. Robinson [whose] pursuit of Benjamin Braddock [is] prompted by a pain and suffering, both as a sexually unfulfilled wife and a recovering alcoholic, which the film neglects to take seriously. Moreover, Cavell adds, the primacy of Benjamin’s private life, “which wants to be the subject of the film, is also denied by the film, as firmly as by his parents.” Cavell’s comments—a serious and devastating critique—are rarely mentioned or acknowledged in discussions of The Graduate’s legacy, presumably because the film’s cultural impact and widespread appreciation by other filmmakers has led to a blind acceptance of its worth and wit. [The] question isn’t the film’s dramatic prowess, which is undeniably rigorous and considered, but to what end the filmmakers put Ben’s angst and, thus, situate his merit as a purportedly universal figure of social uncertainty. These demands may sound too grave for The Graduate, which pawns itself off as a comedy, especially in the sequences set inside the hotel where Ben and Mrs. Robinson ultimately consummate their affair. However, the film demands consideration of the abyss with its suggestion of American society as a system of unfeeling exchange […]. The Graduate completely fails its female characters since their esteem is always filtered through Ben’s perspective, but in a way that naturalizes, rather than draws attention to, that representational relationship.

— Clayton Dillard (Slant Magazine)

It’s worth pointing out that the film is absolutely shocked at the idea a lady—an older, dignified lady—would ever initiate sex. It actually treats the [initial seduction] scene almost like a horror movie might: We mostly get to see Ben’s dopey stare, cut with single, subliminal frames of Mrs. Robinson’s naked form.

[…]

The problem with the wide-eyed cluelessness of Ben, with his total lack of self-determination except when he’s committed to doing totally the wrong thing, is that it’s still how his generation acts. Is it fair to judge a film by the generation who laid claim to it? I don’t know. I also don’t know if it’s fair to blame said generation for floating in that same pool for the past 50 years, rousing itself to have the occasional torrid love affair, all while giving as much thought to it all as Ben and Elaine did.

— Kenneth Lowe (Paste Magazine)

The Graduate itself does not seem the same in 2017 as it did in 1967. Then the emphasis was on sophisticated black comedy with a hint of 60s radicalism and student discontent – mediated through the older generation of suburbanites. It was a guy’s fantasy: Ben gets the older woman and his own Alfa Romeo (the “little red wop car” as his father’s friend charmlessly puts it). Watched in the present day, the element of predatory abuse is inescapable. You cannot see it without wondering how it might look and feel if the sexual roles were reversed. But a modern audience might also, paradoxically, be much less content with the villainous role the film finally assigns to Mrs Robinson, be more sympathetic to her midlife crisis, and remember the pathos of her abandoned interest in art.

— Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)