here's to you, Mrs. Robinson, part 2
Aug. 3rd, 2008 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupAs I was saying, I think that The Graduate is a piece of culture that people tend to have strong feelings about one way or the other. My (non-Jewish) father in law, a child of the sixties, expressed horror bordering on rage when I asked if he liked the movie. Not only was it a sell-out, he informed me, it was actually all about Dustin Hoffman swinging the cross: "Jews getting even with the goyim." (I have to admit, I was so shocked at such a naked display of outright insanity and prejudice that I couldn't think of anything to say back to that one.) I still remember S_ E_'s take on it: "Mike Nichols sure had problems with women." This, I think, is more valid -- the movie has the dichotomy between the worldly Mrs. Robinson and the angelic Elaine, neither of whom really seem very intelligent or deep. And let's face it: Benjamin's behavior could be a textbook for stalkers everywhere.
So let me start by saying that when I first saw the movie, early in college, I liked it only in fits and starts. All that jumping around, the jokiness (even if some of the jokes were very good). And how many times can one hear "Scarborough Fair" in a row?
But one thing that happens when you are in Thinking Deeply mode is that, if you're in the right place, the art seems suddenly to be speaking directly to you. In the aftermath of my debacle with S_ E_, I started to feel almost as though Mike Nichols had made the movie just for me, or that at the very least, had mentally highlighted the parts in it that spoke to my condition.
Here's how I would synopsize the significance for me, and bearing in mind that none of this is really very profound or worth your time to read, just some things I want to mark: Benjamin starts out bored with life and utterly alienated from everything around him -- all the jerking around, quick cuts, and big faces. He can find only one thing of any interest to him at all amid the tedium of suburbia (and after the tedium of college), which is his affair with Mrs. Robinson. He's amazed to find that a constant diet of meaningless sex fits him well, and after a while it comes to feel natural, the only thing he's interested in. He's given up on any other way to live.
The appearance of Elaine, though, breaks through that facade. Suddenly he's face to face with beauty and he reacts at first by trying to protect his torpor by taking her to a strip club to repel her, to reveal his utter baseness. And then, suddenly, he remembers that he's not a bad person after all, or at least wants to be better, and in fact she has brought this out in him. She is pure, he is fallen, but she's the way out. She's the means for him waking up out of being so bored and jaded, and he latches onto her like a life preserver.
The movie then shifts from irony into total identification with Benjamin's addlepated, romantic state of mind. Simon and Garfunkel play a song about true love's impossibility, over and over again, driving out all other sound the way Benjamin's obsession has made him unable to think about anything else. We see things the way he sees them, too. Benjamin sits on the fountain outside of the library with the campus empty, and then it dissolves into the campus filled with people; he turns, and the camera zooms in to pick her out of the crowd -- and my heart stops every time I see this, it's such a beautiful image and so perfectly a representation of how when you're in love you wait until exactly that kind of moment, of intense, laser-like focus on that person, assigning all the meaning in the world to them. (Again, it has to be said, the movie romanticizes stalking so frankly that we can't help but be a little put off by that too... it's over the top.)
Benjamin, having succumbed to this woman as his meaning in life, now doggedly pursues her in spite of what seems hopeless odds. Elaine is given far too little to say for us to understand why she chooses to go away from Benjamin, but it sets up a situation in which the force of Benjamin's love and perseverance can overcome her indifference. And, of course, it does. Benjamin's hopeless, existential gesture of protesting her loss becomes the vehicle for her own existential gesture of rejecting her mother's fate. Yet final scene, in which the camera lingers too long on them, to me is a brilliant comment on the fact that we live in a world where existential gestures seldom have a chance, because they're so bound up in a particular moment, and we have to live a whole life. In spite of having flipped off the Man, Benjamin and Elaine barely know each other or what they've really done to themselves.
So to me, the film isn't just about being a hopeless romantic, it's about going through this whole trajectory from being cool and ironic to being hopelessly in love, to the point of obsession, where all pretense of take-it-or-leave-it simply breaks down in the presence of your want -- a trajectory I felt I understood all too well at the time. I had tried and even succeeded for a while in convincing this woman that I had a certain playful irony to my existence, that I was smart and cool, but the instant that loss loomed up in front of me, it was all mix tapes and hopeless letters, and the jig was up. The more I wanted her to know how much I felt for her, the less the original qualities that had drawn her to me were on display. And I knew it, and I couldn't change, until at the end I was making myself miserable purely to have anything of her to hold on to.
One night that summer I was describing my misery to a male apartment-mate who I didn't know very well. He sympathized but pointed out that one did not go far in life by wearing one's heart on one's sleeve. He described himself as a "player" (he hiked across Europe with a friend, and they gave each other the thumb's up sign across the room as each was screwing a different girl every night, or so he said). "I'm a player, he [my friend Kris] is a player... you're not a player. You have to learn how to do this."
Obviously the nerdly Sanpaku was not ever destined to be a "player." But what stubbornly persisted was that feeling deeply was a) an immature part of me that I needed to hide, b) linked to feeling creative, and c) if you were going to "get" me, you'd have to understand both sides of the equation. The take-home was that art and beauty and feeling went together but were sure no fun at all. So it was around then that I decided that wearing my heart on my sleeve, and all the baggage that went with it, had outlived their usefulness. And, wouldn't you know it, my luck picked up not long thereafter.
You would think that all these years later I would have disentangled these things in my mind. I'm almost in middle age, for God's sake, but the artsy, creative part of me is still stuck around 1993 or so. And I'm coming to think that getting past that is really important if I'm ever going to get out of my current rut and ever do anything interesting with my life. The same old navel-gazing, to be sure. But there's so much goddamn time to make up, and the stakes are getting higher every day.
So let me start by saying that when I first saw the movie, early in college, I liked it only in fits and starts. All that jumping around, the jokiness (even if some of the jokes were very good). And how many times can one hear "Scarborough Fair" in a row?
But one thing that happens when you are in Thinking Deeply mode is that, if you're in the right place, the art seems suddenly to be speaking directly to you. In the aftermath of my debacle with S_ E_, I started to feel almost as though Mike Nichols had made the movie just for me, or that at the very least, had mentally highlighted the parts in it that spoke to my condition.
Here's how I would synopsize the significance for me, and bearing in mind that none of this is really very profound or worth your time to read, just some things I want to mark: Benjamin starts out bored with life and utterly alienated from everything around him -- all the jerking around, quick cuts, and big faces. He can find only one thing of any interest to him at all amid the tedium of suburbia (and after the tedium of college), which is his affair with Mrs. Robinson. He's amazed to find that a constant diet of meaningless sex fits him well, and after a while it comes to feel natural, the only thing he's interested in. He's given up on any other way to live.
The appearance of Elaine, though, breaks through that facade. Suddenly he's face to face with beauty and he reacts at first by trying to protect his torpor by taking her to a strip club to repel her, to reveal his utter baseness. And then, suddenly, he remembers that he's not a bad person after all, or at least wants to be better, and in fact she has brought this out in him. She is pure, he is fallen, but she's the way out. She's the means for him waking up out of being so bored and jaded, and he latches onto her like a life preserver.
The movie then shifts from irony into total identification with Benjamin's addlepated, romantic state of mind. Simon and Garfunkel play a song about true love's impossibility, over and over again, driving out all other sound the way Benjamin's obsession has made him unable to think about anything else. We see things the way he sees them, too. Benjamin sits on the fountain outside of the library with the campus empty, and then it dissolves into the campus filled with people; he turns, and the camera zooms in to pick her out of the crowd -- and my heart stops every time I see this, it's such a beautiful image and so perfectly a representation of how when you're in love you wait until exactly that kind of moment, of intense, laser-like focus on that person, assigning all the meaning in the world to them. (Again, it has to be said, the movie romanticizes stalking so frankly that we can't help but be a little put off by that too... it's over the top.)
Benjamin, having succumbed to this woman as his meaning in life, now doggedly pursues her in spite of what seems hopeless odds. Elaine is given far too little to say for us to understand why she chooses to go away from Benjamin, but it sets up a situation in which the force of Benjamin's love and perseverance can overcome her indifference. And, of course, it does. Benjamin's hopeless, existential gesture of protesting her loss becomes the vehicle for her own existential gesture of rejecting her mother's fate. Yet final scene, in which the camera lingers too long on them, to me is a brilliant comment on the fact that we live in a world where existential gestures seldom have a chance, because they're so bound up in a particular moment, and we have to live a whole life. In spite of having flipped off the Man, Benjamin and Elaine barely know each other or what they've really done to themselves.
So to me, the film isn't just about being a hopeless romantic, it's about going through this whole trajectory from being cool and ironic to being hopelessly in love, to the point of obsession, where all pretense of take-it-or-leave-it simply breaks down in the presence of your want -- a trajectory I felt I understood all too well at the time. I had tried and even succeeded for a while in convincing this woman that I had a certain playful irony to my existence, that I was smart and cool, but the instant that loss loomed up in front of me, it was all mix tapes and hopeless letters, and the jig was up. The more I wanted her to know how much I felt for her, the less the original qualities that had drawn her to me were on display. And I knew it, and I couldn't change, until at the end I was making myself miserable purely to have anything of her to hold on to.
One night that summer I was describing my misery to a male apartment-mate who I didn't know very well. He sympathized but pointed out that one did not go far in life by wearing one's heart on one's sleeve. He described himself as a "player" (he hiked across Europe with a friend, and they gave each other the thumb's up sign across the room as each was screwing a different girl every night, or so he said). "I'm a player, he [my friend Kris] is a player... you're not a player. You have to learn how to do this."
Obviously the nerdly Sanpaku was not ever destined to be a "player." But what stubbornly persisted was that feeling deeply was a) an immature part of me that I needed to hide, b) linked to feeling creative, and c) if you were going to "get" me, you'd have to understand both sides of the equation. The take-home was that art and beauty and feeling went together but were sure no fun at all. So it was around then that I decided that wearing my heart on my sleeve, and all the baggage that went with it, had outlived their usefulness. And, wouldn't you know it, my luck picked up not long thereafter.
You would think that all these years later I would have disentangled these things in my mind. I'm almost in middle age, for God's sake, but the artsy, creative part of me is still stuck around 1993 or so. And I'm coming to think that getting past that is really important if I'm ever going to get out of my current rut and ever do anything interesting with my life. The same old navel-gazing, to be sure. But there's so much goddamn time to make up, and the stakes are getting higher every day.
