Review of Beverly Gray's “Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How ‘The Graduate’ Became the Touchstone of a Generation”

Exactly 50 years ago this spring, back when the Academy Awards mattered at least a little, five movies were in the running for the Oscar for Best Picture.  Several of them were obviously products of the late ‘60s zeitgeist, focused on race and violence.  The winner, “In the Heat of the Night” featured Rod Steiger as a racist Southern sheriff who grudgingly comes to some sort of enlightenment when his first suspect in a murder case, a visiting black Philadelphia detective played by Sidney Poitier, helps solves the crime with him.  Steiger won Best Actor (his memorable line: “I got the motive which is money and the body which is dead”), but Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs gets the movie’s most unforgettable one: “They call me MISTER Tibbs!”  Poitier also figured prominently in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” playing the impossibly perfect Dr. John Prentice, who has to win over his white fiancee’s family in their quest to marry. Katharine Hepburn got an Oscar for Best Actress.  If race relations were at the core of Poitier’s two flicks, stylized violence and glamorization of anti-heroes were at the center of Warren Beatty’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” a movie that signaled a turning point if ever one did.  (“Doctor Dolittle” was nominated because of…what?  Affection for Rex Harrison? Nostalgia for old-fashioned musicals, a form that was rapidly slipping into the past?)  The fifth movie, “The Graduate,” was nominated for seven Oscars, but won only one:  Mike Nichols, for Best Director.*  With its focus on youthful alienation and rebellion, it very much reflects its era.

“The Graduate” is Beverly Gray’s nominee for “Touchstone of a Generation,” by which she means her own g-g-g-generation.  Gray, a Ph.D. in American literature, has been a story editor, reporter, and author of books on subjects including Roger Corman and Ron Howard.  But it is her ability to stay in the mindset of her early adulthood that is both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest liability. It is a strength because the movie has been revisited over and over again, most recently in this 50th anniversary year, when virtually every political, social, and cultural event of that tumultuous year seems to be undergoing relentless reexamination.  As usual with cultural criticism, “reexamination” generally means “revision,” and now, in this era of #metoo, pointed questions come thick and fast:  Is Mrs. Robinson the real hero or the most admirable character in the movie?  Is Elaine too passive to be admirable or even realistic?  Is Ben a stalker?  

It is entirely possible to answer “No” to all these questions, as Gray does, when she addresses them at all, but there are plenty of writers out there who want to say at least a qualified “Yes.”  For a sample, check out The Atlantic’s “The Graduate 50 Years After Its Oscar Win,” the most entertaining element of which may be its reprise of critic Roger Ebert’s 180-degree turn on the movie, 30 years after the fact.

How well the movie stands up over the years and decades is a question well worth considering.  Gray notes, in the last part of her book, that the movie’s influence has echoed through popular culture ever since, from “The Simpsons” to “Wayne’s World” and beyond.  But for historians, trying to see the past as it looked through the eyes of the people living the experience, it is important to try to understand how and why the movie made such an impact at the time.  

Gray is better at the “how” than at the “why.”  The book’s first part, “Making the Movie,” shows, in case there was doubt, that Mike Nichols had an uncanny ability to make the right decisions about casting, scripting, and on-set directing.  For instance, when casting the role of Ben, he went through a long list of candidates (Robert Redford?  Charles Grodin??) before settling on little-known Dustin Hoffman.  (Hoffman thought he was wrong for the role:  Ben, he told Nichols, isn’t Jewish.  Nichols replied, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.”)  He chose Katharine Ross to play Elaine partly because she was the only auditioner to sound angry when confronting Ben and demanding, “How could you rape my mother?”  (First exhibit, of several available, showing that Elaine was hardly passive.)

Nichols also had the wisdom to turn down virtually every suggestion from Charles Webb, author of the book on which The Graduate was based, to improve the script and plot.  Imagine, for example, Ben arriving breathlessly at the locker room in search of Elaine’s betrothed, only to be diverted into a comic scene involving endlessly opening and slamming doors, intended to be reminiscent of the Marx Brothers.  And Nichols essentially discarded Calder Willingham’s script, going with a complete rewrite by Buck Henry (although contractual obligations dictated that Willingham also receive on-screen credit).  Finally, it was Nichols who made the final decision to have Ben arrive at the church AFTER the wedding ceremony had been completed, which made the ending more shocking to mainstream, mid-‘60s sensibilities.

The book’s second section devotes about 70 pages to a close reading of perhaps every scene in the movie. For readers already familiar with the movie, this may be a bit much, but even they might be reminded of details they’ve missed.  Younger audiences (including many of my students) will benefit from Gray’s comprehensive take on how editing, imagery and sound (“Hello, darkness, my old friend”) combined to depict Ben’s isolation so powerfully.

When it comes to explaining WHY the movie resonated so long and deeply at the time, Gray is much less successful.  For one thing, she yields far too often to what my tough-minded high school journalism teacher, Martha Lindey, deplored back in the ‘60s as “Us Girls Journalism”: operating on the assumption that one is writing for one’s intimates, with stylistic results that are cloying and all-too-cozy.  There are all too many phrasings like “thousands of young people like me,” “we young moviegoers,” and “youthful fans like me”—and those three are all on the same page.  Fifty years should be enough time to acquire a little distance from your younger self—and to realize that you shouldn’t be quite so eager to take on the role of spokesperson for a generation. 

One major paradox on which Gray does spend some time:  arguably the most iconic movie of the ‘60s is set in a time before what we now think of as “The Sixties” had occurred.  Ben, his family, and contemporaries are groomed and dressed for the early ‘60s (Webb’s novel was published in 1963).  There is no mention of the draft, Vietnam, or civil rights (with the possible, minor exception of when Ben’s hostile landlord demands to know if Ben is one of “those agitators”).  The counterculture hasn’t arrived; alcohol (consumed by the adults) is the only drug on the scene.  Student radicalism seems nonexistent.  The Berkeley campus is downright serene (possibly because the campus scenes were shot at Southern Cal).  

Still, despite the absence of late ‘60s visuals, “The Graduate” has endured far longer than the movies that followed on its heels that tried to cash in on the ambience, including “Getting Straight” (1970), a mishmash of what were already clichés, and “The Strawberry Statement” (1970).  At least some of my college students have seen “The Graduate”; nobody in years has admitted to watching the other two.  How does one explain the fact that a movie without the “right” period look apparently had just the “right” feel?

Partly, I think, it’s because a movie that might have been received as simply a lively, romantic satire on middle class mores and materialism found an unexpected gear at the very end: the camera had kept rolling while Ben and Elaine sagged, exhilarated and exhausted, into the back seat of the bus, and began to absorb the uncertainties to which they had just committed themselves.  But the main reason, I believe, is Dustin Hoffman’s quirky, unorthodox portrayal of Ben, who for most of the movie seems like he’s been hit by a stun gun, almost in shock, often staring blankly into the middle distance, speaking in a monotone (punctuated occasionally by a muffled squeak—which Hoffman had done only once.  In last cuts, Nichols added a few copies.)  As has been pointed out, it’s almost impossible to imagine Ben having been the accomplished student and athlete that he’s described and congratulated as being. Ben is a blank slate, on to which a generation of young men could project whatever worries and concerns they chose.      

Of course, in the end Ben is revived and (perhaps) redeemed by love, in the tradition of countless romantic comedies.  (Elaine is an active influence in this, coming to him and insisting that he “have a plan.”  Again: far from passive.)  But the enduring image of Ben is the baffled, emotionally anesthetized young man who answers his father’s query about what “those four years of college” had been for with “Ya got me.”  Having seen the movie more than once back then, I can confirm that that line always got a rise out of the audience.  It was the perfect line for a time riddled by middle class college student angst, when the buzz words were “identity crisis,” “alienation,” and, of course, “generation gap”: cultural and psychological concerns, primarily, not political or economic ones.  They had grown straight out of ‘50s concerns, where the buzz words had been “conformity” and “materialism,” and worried middle class youth worried about the price of success, and whether it was worth the price to be an “organization man” in a “gray flannel suit.”  And, despite changes in material and verbal styles, they remain relevant today.

Ultimately, “The Graduate” is still well worth watching, even by people without historical interest in it (do such people frequent HNN?), because, as Gray demonstrates, it is an extraordinarily well-made movie.  Plot, character, setting, dialogue, pacing, even the unlikely-but-effective use of Simon and Garfunkel’s folk rock, are tightly knit and mutually reinforcing. The Academy got at least its Oscar for Best Director right.  Here’s to you, Mr. Nichols.

 *Readers interested in learning more about all five movies and their place in the ‘60s should check out Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution: The Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (2008).)