Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson

Want more on guilt and shame, how they get confused, the one feeling obscuring the other? Well, let’s look to cinema again, and more specifically, to the fast-fading iconography of the boomer era. In 1968, the year of my birth, the name Mrs. Robinson quickly became a shorthand for a proto-feminist, Betty Friedan era woman who had missed her chance to take life by the scruff, so instead she dons the role of seductress and settles upon a hapless young man as her target of revenge.

That’s at best half the premise of The Graduate, a great sixties artifact that is otherwise about generational divides: young versus old, war versus peace, complacent materialism (“I’ve one word for you, Ben—plastics!) versus the implied vows of poverty from those who would tune in, turn on, and drop out. Ben, as in Benjamin Braddock, the protagonist, gets to take his time before dropping out of anything. In the film’s opening scenes, he is drifting amongst his parents’ friends, amidst the ephemera of white, upper middle-class wealth. He has graduated from college, has won some kind of award for athletic excellence, and is poised to join the rat race, climb the social ladder, find a nice girl to marry—you know, all those unfashionable yet routinely chosen privileges that lay before him, waiting like appetizers on a lavish buffet table. Ben is stolid, lonely and depressed, not to mention repressed, and disillusioned, and as he wades through a celebratory crowd trading platitudes with party guests, the filmmaker captures a fleeting glance of a fly in the ointment: the watchful, likewise alienated Mrs. Robinson. She has Benjamin Braddock in her crosshairs.

The wife of a long-time partner of Ben’s father (their business type stays unidentified), Mrs. Robinson follows Ben to an upstairs room—his childhood bedroom, we’re meant to guess—and appears suggestively at his door, asking for two things: a cigarette, plus a ride home. Right off the bat, the viewer gathers that she is as bored as Ben is by the graduation party at his parent’s home, though her initial queries to him seem like those of a gossipy, traditional house-wife. Is he depressed over a girl? She asks. Unlike Ben’s parents, she is at least attentive to his feeling and curious as to his thoughts, which signals a running theme to the story: the lack of empathy between young and old. Clueless and self-absorbed, Ben is slow to recognize the intentions of the apparently long-time neighbor, but he complies with her wishes (the ride home) out of politeness, or perhaps to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the party. Arriving at her home, she entices him indoors, again with traditional artifice (she wants to be escorted to the door), while Ben still seems reluctant and put out, as if this is all stealing time better spent with private ruminations. Impatiently, he indulges her questions, agrees to wait with her until her husband arrives home, and then, finally, after the queries get increasingly personal and a bit of clothing gets shed, he cottons on to her desire.

Thus, the stage is set for an unlikely affair that takes comic and then dark twists and turns. Not quite a May-December coupling, there is enough of an age difference between the two to make her the dominant personality. However, after traversing first-timish jitters, Ben relaxes enough to request sincere conversation on one of their clandestine hotel nights, during which he manages to get under Mrs. Robinson’s skin. It turns out that she was once an aspiring artist, or at least an art student in college. Dolefully and briefly, she recounts the history of an unhappy marriage, of an aspirational life thwarted because of a grubby sexual fumbling in the back seat of a car, resulting in pregnancy and the later birth of her daughter, the soon-to-be-real love interest of her now younger lover. What kind of car? Ben asks, betraying his callow, nerdy side. Mrs. Robinson scoffs at his irrelevant question, but it is nothing compared to the offense she feels upon hearing his next remarks: “so old Elaine Robinson was conceived in the back seat of a—” (I don’t recall what car it was and it matters even less that I remember the make), followed by an ill-advised quip about dating the daughter, Elaine, in part because that’s what Mr. Robinson keeps hinting at in his odd, cuckolded scenes. In their hotel bed, Mrs. Robinson becomes a black widow, grabbing Ben’s hair, jabbing a finger at him and compelling a promise that he’d never go near her daughter.

Initially bullied into a false promise, Ben soon gets hot under his own collar, thinking that Mrs. R. has now insulted him by implying that he’s “not good enough for her daughter”. It’s not clear why she’d think this besides having good reason to believe he’d not be a faithful partner, which is at least hypocritical of her given that she clearly made the initial advances towards him. One supposes that Mrs. Robinson is feeling protective of Elaine, who is similarly naïve as Ben, yet by implication less corrupted than he is at this point in the story. But regardless, the cover story of “not good enough” seems unconvincing, a not-good-enough narrative of what’s actually happening. Firstly, each seems to be getting very ahead of themselves, as if something is already known and felt about the characters (Ben and Elaine) who at this point in the film have not yet interacted, though they will have been acquainted as kids and it’s tacitly understood that each is attractive. So, there is a putative jealousy in the older woman’s aggression, but that also seems an imprecise takeaway, unless the viewer is meant to infer a profound dearth of self-esteem in her character such that she would react with such venom towards Ben’s suggestion. It’s a kind of how dare you think of her the way you might of me expression. Anyway, Mrs. Robinson apologizes to Ben for offending him, though she stops short of explaining herself more fully and Ben is likewise avoidant of unpleasant truths, at last saying “let’s not talk. Let’s not talk at all”.

Shame. Let’s not talk. Let’s just do that thing we do; that thing that was fun when it started, full of intrigue, mischief, an escape from something banal. That Ben is full of self-doubt and therefore believes he is looked down upon by his older lover is not shocking. We’d seen it in his Hamlet eyes from the first shot of the movie. It was that dissociated gaze that was meant to signify lost if talented youth, floundering in the aftermath of a Kennedy assassination, struggling to maintain fragile ideals. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, and all that. That Mrs. Robinson has regrets, low self-esteem is not shocking. We observe it in her bitter air, caustic expressions and alcoholism. This mid-life crisis, this affair with a younger man, would dwindle from this scene onwards and the prohibition that she aims at Ben regarding Elaine would go the way of many other instructions from her generation: it would be rebelled against. And what of the absent daughter? She pops up mid-way into the story, cheerful and pretty, unremarkably bright yet somewhat oblivious to the cynicism that’s all around her. Under pressure from his parents, Ben does indeed date Elaine. It’s as if his father and hers had arranged their marriage when they were ten or something, though clearly Mrs. Robinson wasn’t consulted on this mooted plan.

Is he good enough for her? We don’t learn the answer to that question, or learn that Mrs. Robinson was necessarily motivated by jealousy when she forbade Ben from pursuing Elaine, or even when she spitefully outs her affair with Ben to Elaine, which temporarily blows that budding romance while sinking the affair that has been a guilty pleasure to observe. What follows is an interesting spell wherein the viewer is left to consider the ironies of what relationships are forbidden and why. In other words, the forbidden match of Ben and Elaine is a displacement from the more forbidden affair of Ben and Mrs. Robinson. Regarding the motivation of the seductress, I suspect a reversal of what she first conveyed to Ben in that hotel bed is closer to the truth. See, her morose reminiscence about a life unfulfilled plus a climactic line from Elaine to her are clues that Mrs. Robinson was likely envious of her daughter’s lot in life rather than merely jealous of Elaine’s youth, charm and beauty. This isn’t mirror, mirror on the wall, and it’s not that Ben is not good enough for her daughter; it’s that he is good enough, that he represents passion and idealism despite his fumbling actions. Ben represents the kind of young man that Mrs. Robinson may have wanted as a partner earlier in life: he’d be a good partner to Elaine; unthreatened by her promise, supportive of her aspirations, faithful—a good friend as well as an attentive lover. And that’s the problem.

“It’s too late”, says Mrs. Robinson when Ben arrives at a church to disrupt the wedding between Elaine and a frat house robot she’d met somewhere along the line. Mrs. Robinson’s pronouncement is delivered twice: smugly at first, but then in a panic as Ben seizes Elaine’s hand. A young woman rips her white wedding dress and dashes from the altar. A mother attempts to pull her daughter from a wedding crasher/bride hijacker who is also her former lover. Yes, the times they are a changin’. “Not for me, it isn’t”, Elaine replies, now matching her mother’s wits. And there it is: a knowing moment between women across a generational divide. A parent is supposed to want what’s best for her child; she is meant to want more for that child than she ever obtained for herself. That’s our Superego talking, injecting guilt into the equation. The Graduate posits amongst its more famous themes that Oedipal rivalry between women exists; that parents’ envy of their children’s hopes is a thing. But it’s okay, Mrs. Robinson. We—meaning the audience that made you famous—celebrate your complexity, your dark humor, your blend of old and new, of good and evil. Ben’s heroism notwithstanding, you were actually the most memorable character in The Graduate, and as your song goes, Jesus loves you more than you will know.