Character Flaws as Defining Traits: ‘The Graduate’ and the Aging of Art
The Graduate is one of my favorite films. It’s about a young man named Benjamin Braddock who has no idea what to do with his life after college and has an affair with an older woman only to wind up falling in love with her much more age appropriate daughter. It’s become a very basic “film school” answer to call it a favorite movie, but it’s true nonetheless. The screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry is both deeply naturalistic and rhythmic at the same time. The performances are often understated, and yet deeply funny and devastating in almost equal doses. But I don’t just want to talk about how great of a film I think it is, I particularly want to talk about it in the context of the way it tends be talked about now.
In short, discourse is Hell.
Nuance is on life support, if we’re being optimistic. There are the bi-weekly arguments about whether sex scenes belong in movies, sometimes leading into whether sexuality should be depicted on screen at all. Then, the thing that truly pushed me over the edge, there were discussions about whether movies should have protagonists that aren’t good people, or if they have a moral responsibility to either show them getting their comeuppance or to simply not depict that kind of protagonist at all. Talking about movies on social media is wading into a mine field of bad faith takes. By and large, discussions of film, even at their most hopeful, center around how well something “holds up.” It’s rare to ever see an older movie brought up without an accompanying note on whether it did or didn’t age well.
It’s incredibly rare to be able to discuss an older movie or even see one mentioned without having its age compared to the movies of today, usually with a pat on the back about how much better things are now. It’s frustrating that it’s dominated the entire conversation, because there are absolutely merits to these points, without a doubt. That’s especially true in terms of representation, because a ton of ground has been gained by allowing more people a seat at the table that had historically been underrepresented and finally allowing them to tell their own stories. But the fact that a film can’t be talked about without also acknowledging these points is frankly, exhausting. That’s especially true because honestly and frankly talking about how well something ages requires a level of nuance that is exceedingly rare online.
When I am drawn into these conversations, I’m very prone to saying the phrase “nothing holds up.” To be clear, I mean that in terms of style, not content. When we acknowledge that Shakespeare and Dickens didn’t write the the same cadence and sentence structure as authors write today, we should apply the same standards to film and acknowledge that movies were simply shot and acted differently in the ’60s than they are now. Everything is exceedingly of its time and that’s especially true of movies, where the styles of a single year are prominently displayed and committed to celluloid forever. It happens so fast. Forget about comparing a film from the ’60s to one from the ’90s. A movie made in, say, 2003 and a movie made in 2009 look entirely different.
I want to talk about The Graduate, in particular, because it embodies nearly all of the above things. It is a movie about sex, it is a movie with a morally complicated protagonist, it is a movie that doesn’t ask us to choose whether he’s right or wrong as if we’re about to be quizzed on the information. Yet it is, in my experience, one of the movies most often brought up as an example of a movie that “doesn’t hold up.” That is mostly to do with the age disparity of the affair that forms the basis of the plot, even leading to it often being lumped in with the likes of Lolita even though The Graduate is about consenting adults. I think part of that is reflex now, as people often look back on films of the past — especially what they consider the distant past at this point — with the sense that people “didn’t know better” back then. If an old film depicts a morally compromised decision, at least from its protagonists, it’s because we’ve grown as a society. But that’s not this movie. The Graduate is about people making terrible, wrong decisions for almost the entire runtime, and sometimes for no other reason for the simple fact that they are wrong.
It is also one of the best movies about loneliness ever made. The story introduces us to Ben immediately as he returns home after graduating college. He is already drowning, afraid to go to his own party because he’s terrified of all the questions about what he’s going to do with his future. Terrified, even, of thinking about his future. He is adrift and directionless and from that party he is asked by Mrs. Robinson, a good friend of the family, to drive her home. The very short version of events is that Ben begins having an affair with Mrs. Robinson, twenty years his elder. And some time later, of course, he falls in love with her daughter. Are these good choices? No, not at all. But they are deeply human and profoundly moving and those are good enough reasons to tell a story.
One of the most noteworthy things about The Graduate is that the mistakes Ben and Mrs. Robinson are making — as much intentionally as unintentionally, somehow — are for entirely separate reasons. They are getting completely different things out of the affair, things that are natural given the age gap between the characters. This is best exemplified by the scene in which the two try to make conversation and talk about “art,” which is, for me personally, one of the best scenes ever written, a perfect circle of a conversation that could be a short film by itself but means so much in the larger context of this narrative. Ben wants to talk because he feels that if they’re going to be meeting and having sex like this, they should at least strike up conversation and get to know one another. This is, of course, the last thing that Mrs. Robinson wants, but she tries to entertain it. He asks what she wants to talk about, but she doesn’t want to talk. He asks about how she met her husband, so she chooses the topic of art, so he asks about that only for her to say that she hates art, so the conversation circles back around to her husband.
Their demeanor and body language is so starkly different throughout this entire conversation. Ben is lighthearted, smiling, partly because for him this is simply a light conversation and a way of getting to know her, but also crucially because he does not think of her as a vulnerable person. Mrs. Robinson is trying to cut this talk short at every turn because she does not want to reveal nor relive any of this information and the longer it goes, she is losing everything she loved about this affair, piece by piece. It becomes a confession that, from the time she was Ben’s age, her life has never been her own. Sex never got to be a youthful, casual fling for her. Since college, it saddled her with a life she never wanted.
The “art” conversation is one of the most well-written scenes in any film. It’s the perfect way to highlight how these two characters are getting extremely different things out of this affair. Ben is lonely and aimless and he wants connection, he has his whole future in front of him and this is simply a perverse way of getting to know somebody for him, so he starts up this scene just wanting to have a conversation. That is, of course, the last thing Mrs. Robinson wants. She never got to have a romantic fling, she never got to graduate college, she never got to explore her passion, she never got to have her 20s and the things she was forced to give up became things she can’t stand the sight of because of that. The way her face slowly breaks through the scene, the way the guilt slowly fades into his. He feels like, and is, an idiot for even asking about this because this is why she doesn’t want to talk to him about anything and it is this deeply tragic, human scene that is all perfectly framed by the seemingly innocent and harmless topic of talking about art to pass the time.
Ben is an extremely self-sabotaging person. Almost every action he takes in the film, from his affair to even his fixation on Elaine, is an act of self-sabotage. In the opening scene of the movie we have a sea of faceless people telling him how proud they are, how much they know he’s going to accomplish and what, specifically, he’s doing next. From that moment, he’s set on a course to deliberately crash his own future. When people talk about what a kind of shitty guy he can be, and he definitely can, it’s usually without the context of just how much he’s going out of his way to be that person, on purpose. Everyone asks what he’s doing, so he decides to do nothing. Everyone talks to him about his future, so he decides not to have one. He tries to rush adulthood by having an affair with a married woman and then tries to give himself over to genuine young love by deciding to get married. The fact that he’s a buffoon, that these decisions are not only bad but colossally bad is the entire point of the film. It’s a funny and heartbreaking story in equal doses about the relationship between a young man who is trying to crash and burn his own life so that he doesn’t actually have to go get one and a woman whose life was stolen from her when she was his age and she’s simply been existing ever since. Those two characters were naturally meant to blossom into antagonists for one another and to see that unfold through a romantic affair is stunningly uncomfortable.
The Graduate has one of the most famous endings and, in my opinion, perhaps the very best ending in cinema history. It sums up the entire film in one shot. It is a takedown of the entire concept of the romantic comedy in a single scene. Ben rushes to Elaine’s wedding to declare his love. He makes a huge, sweeping grand gesture, he causes a massive scene and probably upends both of their families lives, but they don’t care because they love each other. So she ditches her own wedding and they run away and hop on a bus, and the scene lasts just long enough until the dread starts to creep into their faces, as they realize what they’ve just done. The Graduate is not just a film about flawed people. It’s about the flaws, taking them, and putting them under a microscope and studying why people do utterly idiotic things that they know aren’t good for them. It’s simply a beautiful story about human weakness and the strength that can be carried through it. Mrs. Robinson is an incredibly strong woman to live with such a concrete knowledge of what her life is, who is completely right to not want this relationship to happen no matter what they feel toward one another, because she sees her daughter on the precipice of repeating her own life and that is the last thing in the world that she wants. It’s hard not to commend that character, and that performance by Anne Bancroft, in particular.
Here’s to her.
