Why 'The Graduate' Still Matters

by Jonathan Zimmerman

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education," which will be published in the spring by Princeton University Press.

“Would you mind telling me what those four years of college were for?”

So asks the father of Benjamin Braddock, the protagonist of "The Graduate." A half-century after Mike Nichols made this film, it remains popular at "senior week" events and other end-of-college rituals. And that's because we still haven't answered its central question: what are we doing here, and why?

When Nichols died in November, obituaries inevitably depicted "The Graduate" as an emblem of youth alienation in postwar America. In the 1967 film’s most iconic line, a family friend gives young Braddock a single word of advice: “plastics.” The term became an ironic rallying cry for a rising generation of rebellious Americans, who rejected their elders’ bland conformity and empty consumerism.

But Braddock simply repeats the phrase — “plastics” — in a glassy-eyed stupor. As Nichols told an interviewer after the film’s release, Braddock is “a kid drowning among objects and things, committing moral suicide by allowing himself to be used finally like an object or thing.” Young Benjamin knows what he doesn’t like, but he has no idea how — or even whether — to change it.

That’s why Nichols decided to give the role to an unknown actor named Dustin Hoffman instead of to an established star like Robert Redford, who also campaigned for the part. When Hoffman read the book on which the film was based, he told Nichols that Braddock should be played by Redford or by another classically handsome white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

But Nichols had something very different in mind...

Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed