Graduate

Technically, this is not about 1968, per se. The movie "The Graduate" came out in 67, altho it did win the Academy Award for Best Director for that year, in ceremonies held in April 68. Nonetheless, my cousin read this excerpt of an email I wrote to a young person about the movie and encouraged me to post it here, which, in deference to him, I will.

Anyway, it does serve a a backgrounder...

Here it is:

"The Graduate is one of the most iconic films of the 60s. Altho it came out in 67 (the last "nice" year) it was actually filmed in 66 and written in 65, just as the "agonizing reappraisals" were beginning. This is before the Summer of Love, before Hippies, before Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out, before Nam really got going and before Newark/Detroit. JUST before.

Benjamin's parents' generation represent The American Dream - nice house, pool, money, comfort - and its dark side: ennui, desperation, hopelessness. It is no accident that Benjamin contemplates this in the pool, underwater, floating, directionless. That's where it all leads to. Drowning...

(In those days, having a pool was a big, big status symbol. Only the well off had them. Around that time, gratia largely to Zappa, it became a symbol, particularly on the West Coast, of all that was wrong with suburban surfeit and despair.)

(In fact, if you have never heard it, you might want to listen to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" by Zappa on the "Absolutely Free" album, which not so ironically came out right at the same time. That whole album is a scathing satire/critique of the whole desperation and meaninglessness of the material American Dream...)

Elaine and Benjamin's lives are all laid out for them - best schools (Berkeley, Ivy), comfort, connections, privilege - but all around them all they see is desperation - embodied (literally!) by Mrs Robinson, the dark underbelly of it all.

Bullshit ("I have one word for you - PLASTICS" (Now, hows THAT for getting hit over the head with symbolism??) (Which reminds me, listen to "Plastic People" on that same Zappa album) (Zappa, BTW, was from LA, just like where the Graduate takes place...)) reigns everywhere. And duplicity - Mrs Robinson with Benjamin, Elaine with Benjamin, Benjamin with Mr Robinson, etc.

Elaine and Benjamin represent a literal and symbolic running away, escape from all that. Again, we have symbolism - the older generation is trapped in the church with its own cross. E & B don't ride off in his Alpha Romeo - another symbol of decadent, meaningless wealth - but instead take the bus.

The final scene, as you astutely mention, is ALL ABOUT "Now what?" and this too is symbolic, as they sit in the back of the bus (sound familiar) with the great unwashed masses, contemplating fleetingly their triumph and having no clue what to replace their rejected, all-set-up lives with.

If that ain't the 60s I don't know what is!

I don't think many people resonate with the symbolic power of the movie any more because if you didn't live with what came before the 60s you have no clue how stifling and desperate and depressing it was for many if not most people.

You got all the personal stuff, but not very much of the symbolic stuff, that I can tell, anyway. And not surprisingly. You, right now, in your life, have much more in common with Benjamin that Elaine. It's hard to communicate this to young women, but if that were 1957, Elaine's life was done. Fully determined. Fully figured out. She marries that guy right out of college (as did I and most of my cousins, BTW...), They will settle down in a house in an affluent suburb. She'll have kids, join the Junior League, have cocktails with the "ladies who lunch" (cf Sondheim's "Company", another period piece of the time - check it out - actually, I have a tape of a recent production where all the cast play musical instruments, very cool. I told my daughter I'd digitize it and send it to her. If so, I'll send it to you as well...), have cocktails at the end of the day with an aloof and distracted hubby by the pool and leading a life of quiet desperation...

And Benjamin? Join the firm. Make the bucks. Pork the secretary. Have cocktails by the pool at the end of the day with a bored and depressed (and probably medicated) wife and leading a life of quiet desperation...

All laid out. Cut and dried. No surprises.

Say what you will about the 60s but having lived thru the 50s and 60s and subsequently the 70s (ugh!) and 80s (double ugh!!), I will take the 60s any day, riots and Nam and the whole magilla, because there was at least the hope that things could be different.

I would take sitting in the back of the bus with no clue as to what to do next over a predetermined sentence of a life. Any day."