Watching The Graduate with Mrs. Robinson
Let me say up front that it isn’t easy having an intimate conversation with someone who doesn’t have a first name. What do you call her? Do you call her dear or darling or perhaps ma’am as though she’s the Queen of England? How do you establish a rapport with someone who will forever be an honorific, even in the most intimate moments? She and her husband are Mr. and Mrs. Robinson. Her friends are Mr. and Mrs. Braddock. It is only their respective children who have first names. Benjamin. And Elaine. And then of course there’s Carl.
She had agreed to watch “The Movie,” as she calls it. Capital “T.” Capital “M.”
Even at this advanced age, Mrs. Robinson is wearing one of her signature animal print ensembles. She has always mixed leopard with tiger to great effect. Her animal prints and vividly streaked hair put one in mind of another despoiler of the young and innocent. “The curl of her lips/The ice of her stare/All innocent children/Had better beware.” Cruella DeVil was chasing young pups long before Mrs. R. She finds it amusing and appropriate, this woman who came to stand for women who seduce young men, that nowadays, she would be referred to as a cougar. Of course she would. On the other hand, she is not fond of being called a MILF. It is a title without agency. It doesn’t acknowledge who’s really in charge. It doesn’t make clear who really does the fucking. And who gets fucked.
The movie starts. Strange how LAX looks exactly the same as it did in 1967. In a city obsessed with tearing things down, ugly-ass LAX remains the same. The Brown Derby is gone and Schwab’s is gone. The Ambassador Hotel is gone too. The Ambassador that stood in for The Taft where the assignations took place. Of course that’s gone too. After Bobby lying on the kitchen floor, how could you ever go there again? And yet that airport is somehow a relic worth preserving. Well, who would have guessed? 1967. A young man is coming home from college in a suit and tie. That wasn’t going to happen ever again. Not after 1967.
“He’s short.” An illuminating piece of film criticism. Reluctantly, Mrs. Robinson is drawn in. She watches the credits. “Furs by Maximilian” she coos. “Special jewelry by Harry Winston. Yes, so very special.” A small smile plays around her lips.
Well really. She hasn’t seen The Movie in decades. None of it is accurate. None of it takes her point of view into account. How would you like to be married to Mr. Robinson? That drunken, golf-playing fool. “Yes,” she says, “I fucked him in college. I fancied myself an artistic free spirit and for my trouble I got knocked up. He was a lousy lay but I was too young and inexperienced to know it.” Her bad luck. Her bad life. Her baby that she never wanted. Her baby that grew into a young woman who only emphasized the difference between twenty and forty. No wonder she offered herself to that boy. Not her first. Certainly not her last. That stupid, romantically addled boy unable to understand that she was offering something he could never experience with a child like Elaine.
The opening credits continue. Simon and Garfunkel and the lyrics of “The Sound of Silence” transport me back to the darkened theater. I tell her:
“I saw this movie every weekend the summer after it came out. I made all my dates take me to see it.”
“Well isn’t that nice for you dear. I mean that you had all those dates.”
But that year. 1967. The year the movie was made. That year was before everything.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“I mean 1967. It was the end wasn’t it?
“The end?”
I try to explain.
“It was. I mean. It was before. Before all of the 1968 things happened.”
In the movie, it’s funny how the real 1967 looks more like the real -- or the remembered -- 1962. There are no miniskirts. Men wear hats. No one looks like what one would characterize as a hippie, even in Berkeley. It was almost the end of the Sixties but they hadn’t become the Sixties of memory. Not yet.
Look at the cover of Vogue, the special May issue, “The Life That’s In Fashion. The American Woman 1967… Love… Money… Husband-Stealing … Psychiatry … Art… Work …Fun…Entertaining…The Good Life Where the Action Is…”. It has an image of Candice Bergen with hugely teased hair and frosted lips. She does not have the Bambi false eyelashes that Elaine wears. But one could imagine Elaine taking note of this cover look as one worth stealing. A look to take back to Berkeley for the next semester. Not that Vogue has ever been a representation of the counter-culture. But to be fair, neither is the movie.
The movie. We watch the welcome home party. The famous “plastics” line. Otherwise, nothing much really happens. “See,” she says. “Watch how it changes when I show up. Watch what happens when I take control.” Benjamin stares at the tiny scuba diver in the fish tank in his room. It foreshadows his own scuba moment. It tells you that the minute Mrs. Robinson appears, he is in over his head. He is a human in water. He is a fish out of water.
“So interesting that he looks like a little Jew.”
“Benjamin?”
“Well really. Does he look like his parents? Does he look like a track star? Does he look like someone named Braddock? He looks like a little Jew. But God. I look fabulous.”
And so. The seduction scene. Or really. The leg scene. The leg that that became an icon that became a parody of seduction. What do you notice about the leg? Mrs. Robinson is wearing a garter belt and stockings. She is not wearing pantyhose. Why isn’t she wearing pantyhose?
“Why aren’t you wearing pantyhose?”
It’s 1967. Everyone was wearing pantyhose by then. Stockings and a garter belt were passé but they hadn’t yet become shorthand for heavy-handed sexy. They hadn’t achieved “naughty.”
“Have you ever really looked at the bottom half of a woman in pantyhose? You look like one of those plastic Barbies that Elaine had. Like a mannequin. Molded plastic. No snatch. Like those women now who have themselves completely waxed down there. Featureless. Pre-pubescent.”
Mrs. Robinson gives me one of her trademark appraising looks.
“Can I ask you a question?” “Don’t you think the movie is boring when I’m not in it?”
No, I don’t think it’s boring. But it is unquestionably different. It has a different energy. It becomes a comedy. Almost a sitcom. It has shtick. The business with the “Singleman Affair” (the Single Man Affair?) and Alice Ghostley and Marion Lorne who have somehow stumbled in from the set of Bewitched. The interplay between Benjamin and Buck Henry as the desk clerk at the hotel. Benjamin is 21. Has he ever checked into a hotel by himself? Doubtful. The registration card. The alias. Mr. Gladstone. As in British prime minister? Or bag? The business with the desk clerk’s bell and the toothbrush. The phone booth in the lobby. The idea that anyone in any hotel would actually care that extramarital sex is being contemplated. Apparently Benjamin missed the Summer of Love. It’s all very quaint and for a moment, really very television.
We are watching the seduction scene in the hotel room. Mrs. Robinson toys with Benjamin. I watch her watch herself. She is enjoying his discomfort as much now as she did then. She plays the ultimate card. She accuses him of being a virgin. She questions his masculinity. At that point, he has no choice.
“How was the sex?” I ask.
“It was young and hard and completely lacking in either finesse or technique. It was exactly what I wanted.”
Mrs. Robinson remains unnerving.
We have to talk about Elaine. Why was Mrs. Robinson so vehement about Benjamin not taking Elaine on a date? Was she jealous? Did she know that Elaine was pretty and not much else? Did she think Ben wasn’t good enough for her daughter? Perhaps he was somehow damaged goods after having sex with a married woman. All those years ago, it made perfect sense to me that Elaine would be a rival to her mother. I am, after all, an only daughter. Now I’m not so sure. It seems more complicated. More about Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin than about Elaine as a person. It’s questionable whether Elaine is a person. It’s questionable whether anyone in the movie is a person except Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin. Elaine seems more like a concept. An imagination of Mrs. Robinson before Mr. Robinson. An avatar into which Ben can pour his longing and his shame and his desire to be normal and do unremarkable 21 year old things. Why do they fall in love? Apparently, they are never intimate. She seems to constantly reject him and choose to believe that he raped her mother.
“How is Elaine?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Well you know she went back to Carl.”
No, I didn’t know. Carl Smith was another one who seemed to have wandered into 1967 by way of 1962. He was more like Greg Marmalard and the Omegas in Animal House. Mrs. Robinson and I watch that scene in the frat house when Benjamin is trying to find out where the wedding is. Those guys might as well be Marmalard and Niedermeyer and the rest. And Benjamin? Mrs. Robinson is right. He looks like he’d be more at home at ZBT. The Jewish house.
“You don’t happen to know where the Old Make-Out King is getting married?”
“I don’t know. Maybe his old man’s house. Or the maternity ward.”
Mrs. Robinson says, “That’s why she went back to Carl.”
She mimes a big belly. “Like mother, like daughter.”
“Probably one step ahead of the shotgun.” That’s what Carl’s fraternity brothers said. They were right.
“Benjamin didn’t want Elaine. He wanted the part of Elaine that was me. He confused us.”
“But you created the confusion. That’s why you took him up to her room. That’s why you took your clothes off and trapped him in her room.”
“You give me too much credit.”
“Why didn’t you want Benjamin to go out on a date with Elaine?
She gives me a pitying look.
“Elaine is a nothing.”
“She’s your daughter.”
“She’s her father’s daughter. She’s – what do they call it now – a nothing burger. A pretty nothing burger.”
We are drawn back to the screen. Benjamin has shown up at the Robinson home looking for Elaine. Mrs. Robinson has called the cops.
“Mrs. Robinson, you said you live at 1200 Glenview Road. I looked it up. 1200 Glenview Road is in Glendale.”
“Honestly, do you think I would live in “Glendale?’”
She says the word Glendale the way someone else would say “shithole.”
Benjamin is driving his little red Alfa. Simon and Garfunkel are singing nonsense syllables. And then they are singing:
“And here’s to you Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know.”
Mrs. Robinson winces as if she’d been slapped.
“I hate that fucking song.”
“But it’s your song.”
“It’s not about me. It’s my name I suppose, but it’s not about me.”
“What about ‘stroll around the grounds until you feel at home.’? Did you go ‘somewhere?’ Did you go somewhere to dry out after…everything?”
“After everything that happened I just needed a rest. That’s all. Nothing to sing about for Chrissakes.”
“Did you learn to help yourself?”
Eyeroll. Mrs. Robinson says:
“Would you like to talk about Joe DiMaggio dear? They all want to talk to me about ‘Joltin’ Joe’”
“Okay, let’s talk about the Yankee Clipper.”
I was going to talk about baseball and the Yankees and Joe and Marilyn with Mrs. Robinson. What Paul Simon couldn’t explain, perhaps Mrs. Robinson could.
“I know nothing about baseball.”
“Yeah, just like you know nothing about art.”
Eyeroll.
“Anyway, at least they could have given me royalties. If it’s my song.”
It is the scene in the church. Benjamin is screaming Elaine’s name from the rafters. Mrs. Robinson, wearing black and leopard to her daughter’s wedding, looks so proud of him.
You said, “He’s doing it.” But then you were furious. Though there is no audio because your face is shot from Ben’s point of view, it looks like you say, “Son of a bitch.” And then you confront her. “It’s too late,” you say. Elaine says, “Not for me.”
“But she was wrong, wasn’t she?”
Ben and Elaine are sitting in the back of the bus. They say nothing to each other. First they laugh at their getaway. But then, a range of emotions flickers across their faces as “The Sound of Silence” plays again as it had at the beginning of the movie. During the entire summer of 1968, I thought this was a happy ending. I thought Ben and Elaine would live happily ever after.
Maybe it’s a trick of the light but as the closing credits reflect on her face, she looks older, surgical intervention notwithstanding. She has reached the age when one must always be conscious of one’s facial muscles. She has allowed them to relax. To go slack. To tell the truth.
“Can I call you an Uber Mrs. Robinson?”
“I have my own transportation.”
A man appears at the door without having been summoned. He is about 50, handsome and impeccably dressed. He holds Mrs. Robinson’s coat and offers his arm. Her face has rearranged itself into a younger iteration. She smiles.
“Maybe next time we’ll watch a wildlife documentary.”
Claudia Caplan worked in Los Angeles and New York as a multi-award winning advertising copywriter and creative director. Currently, she is a history major at Columbia University. Her writing on business has appeared in Advertising Age, Adweek, and Business Insider. Her writing on sports has appeared in The Fields of Green. Her creative non-fiction is about to be published in The Los Angeles Review.