Graduate and the New Left

¶ … Graduate and the New Left

In the United States in the 1960s, the nation was going through a change both in the psychological and sociological makeup of the population. Everything about the country was changing quickly, right down to the very moral code which makes up the identity of a culture. The American Dream and the belief that everyone could become successful if they were willing to work hard and if they lived in America was proving to be a fallacy in the wake of oppression, disenfranchisement, and racially-biased or gender-based prejudices. A group emerged who not only wished to be entirely different from their parents, but they also desired to completely upset if not outright eradicate the status quo and change what it meant to be an American citizen with an American identity. One of the components of this movement was a decidedly liberal perspective and agenda. This group would come to be known as the New Left. The ideology of this group, the inability to conform to expectations, the rejection of post-World War II ideals, and the need to create individual decisions regardless of the potential outcomes, is illustrated in the film The Graduate and the character of young Benjamin Braddock played by actor Dustin Hoffman.

The values of post-World War II America had given way to a revolutionary attitude that demanded change. Those who were reared in the post-war era were raised by a patriarchal, traditional family unit where father was the working man who dealt out the punishments and mother's job was to cook and clean and to nurture. It was expected that the man would hold a job and the woman would stay home. She would raise children who were well-behaved ladies and gentlemen who would then grow to be replications of their parents. Every child born to this dynamic was supposed to repeat it by aging, marrying, and then taking part in the appropriate activities of their gender delineation. However, for some members of the American population, this was not the kind of life they desired and instead of become carbon copies of their Ward and June Cleaver parents turned to drugs, rock and roll music, and a lifestyle of promiscuous permissive sex.

In the era between 1963 and through to the mid-1970s, the United States was in a period of nearly unparalleled upheaval. In a short period of time the country changed from being dominated by Caucasian culture wherein those of other ethnic profiles were devoid of social equalization and where the government was viewed as a benign entity designed to protect the interests of its citizens into an altogether different perspective of the country where people were legally equal and the government was full of corrupt individuals bent upon obtaining and then retaining power. The Civil Rights movement forced a complete change in the perspective many Americans had of race relations and the fallacy of white supremacy in the country. Martin Luther King, Jr. And others worked to change segregation laws and to end the oppression of African-Americans throughout the United States, particularly in the American south where many black people were still prevented from the civil right of voting. Violence erupted from the American south and spilled out through the rest of the country. Before the 1960s were over, three men who were synonymous with peaceful resolutions and change would be dead at the hands of assassins. The death of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and then Martin Luther King altered the country. Each man tried to change the world and make it a better place. JFK prevented a cold war from turning hot during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Robert Kennedy helped curb the influence of organized crime to make the country safer. Martin Luther King Jr. worked for equality of all people. These three men served as beacons of hope and righteousness for the rest of the country. Whereas these men allowed the people of the country to believe that there were individuals willing to instill positive change, their deaths marked the end of naive faith in the government.

Instead of hope and dreams, the American people began equating the federal government with Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam War. Even though the war had officially been started by the Kennedy administration, it was expanded under Johnson and then used by Nixon as a political tool. He kept the nation embroiled in war until after the 1972 reelection, promising to end the war if he retained the office, the truth of Nixon's character not emerging until the Watergate scandal broke ending Nixon's political career and forcing him to become the first president of the United States to resign the office. Many men were being sent away from their homes and their chances for the future into an inhospitable jungle atmosphere fighting a war which few Americans supported and became more and more unpopular as the years continued. Thousands of American men died all the while the media brought back full-color images of the bloodshed, the bombings, and the deaths of men, women, and young children which were occurring in Southeast Asia. Author Phil Hill writes in the article "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out:"

What happened was Youth. Youth became it -- and it became a state of mind and a way of life, whether you were fifteen and hoping or fifty and pretending. 1967 was the year of the student riots in China, the first student protests in the West, of LBJ's disastrous decision to go all out for victory in Vietnam…All this and more happened in twelve short months. A new mood of rebellion was born -- a rebellion with a dream that Youth would overcome one day (8).

All of the social upheaval created a new psychological profile of American citizens. Each person was influenced by these events in a different way and convinced them to pursue ways in which to fix the country somehow, since the government was not doing a good enough job in this department. The young members of the educated middle class of America, and in some cases the upper and lower classes, became convinced that the violence signified a regime change; that the ways of their parents were over and that it was time for the young to make their claim as rightful leaders of the new world order.

The counterculture movement and its members all became the darlings of the media and made frequent, nearly nightly, appearances on the news and on other television programs and then in films as well. These individuals protested loudly against the status quo of their parents' generation while claiming to be interested in social mobility and the bettering of their fellow men. They claimed altruism and a desire to cast off the falseness of the past, "plastic" generation. In reality, their motives were largely selfish, bringing attention to themselves far more so than to their actual causes. Part of the diatribe of the New Left was an anti-capitalistic slant which is heavily ironic in that the majority of the people who took part in the movement were themselves from affluent families with comfortable living conditions. The New Left was mostly made of students who were dependent upon their parents' finances to pay their tuition, but still petitioned against big business and capitalism. These individuals warned of materialism and the rape of the environment while still refusing to perform actions like the African-Americans did in the American South. They were not willing to perform manual labor to support themselves, or to go on hunger strikes, or any protest technique which might cause them physical discomfort.

The character of Benjamin Braddock is a product of the 1960s. Benjamin is a 20-year-old college graduate who has returned home from school and is staring down the potential paths for his future. All around him the adults try to pressure him to determine if he intends to find gainful employment or to go back to graduate school and continue his education. If he goes to work, then he will become part of the capitalistic society in the present moment. If he goes back to graduate school, it will delay his entrance into business in the present, but will make him more valuable a commodity upon his graduation. Benjamin Braddock has never had to be concerned about the harsher realities of the world, such as poverty, hunger, or homelessness. Instead he has a Beverly Hills home and a fancy red convertible all paid for by the earnings of his father (Bapis 41). Instead of showing appreciation for what has been given to him, Ben is instead resentful. At one point in the film he tells his parents that he does not want to become them, that "he has wasted his life, that he is sick of being their 'goddamn ivy-covered status symbol,' and that is taking to the road" (Harris 26). Everything in his life is viewed in terms of financial benefit and the place he takes in the economic basis of the nation. He is told by several people to look into business, such as in the famous party scene where Benjamin is informed that plastics are the means to financial security. However, Ben is not interested in money or in business or in the real adult world at all, but in the satisfaction of personal desire. He is not interested in going back to school or in figuring out his future. Determining what to make of his life is not a priority. Rather his intentions, like many of the members of the New Left, were in commenting about the failings and the emptiness of their fathers and father figures. Their purpose was not to live as individuals but to reflect negatively on their parents and show through their inactivity how much the past generation has failed.

The films of this era in American history illustrate this changing perspective and dared to broach topics which would never have been seen on the silver screen before. For the first time such taboo topics as interracial romantic coupling were viewed in loving relationships rather than as social issues or things a parent should do everything to avoid. Even homosexual couples were sometimes seen on-screen without being portrayed as deviants or comic relief for the macho, straight male although there were those depictions as well. Filmmakers of the period were daring enough to be willing to tackle issues never before seen of film and to set the record straight on topics which had been bastardized and stigmatized in the past. Honest depictions of races outside of the majority white population became more prevalent for example. Instead of the traditional slow-speaking Indians fighting rugged but righteous cowboys, mysterious and duplicitous Asians, or savage black people who served as maids, butlers, or valets, films were made telling honest stories about people and their true culture rather than fallacies based upon dishonest and archaic stereotypes.

The one group of people who was not being honestly represented was that of American females. It would not be until the latter half of the 1970s that the Equal Rights' Amendment and the women's rights movement convinced women to individuate themselves from their position as matronly, motherly beings. Even the female characters in the progressive film The Graduate are not yet individualized as human beings. The two major female characters, Mrs. Robinson and Elaine, represent what a woman of the era could become and the difficult place that females were put in because of the tumult of the period.

In the 1960s, women were striving to overcome their isolation within the home following centuries of oppression. World War II had forced women out of the home and into the factories to take up positions on the home front while the American men were fighting overseas. When the men returned home, the women were once again forced into the role of wife and mother and not able to move beyond these very narrow margins of acceptability. Women in the 1950s and early '60s were thus in a major psychological conflict. The war had taught the female population that they had the ability to sustain themselves financially as well as mentally. They were strong in mind and in body. Then when they had found what they were capable of they were once again marginalized, forced to give way to the dominant male population. Mrs. Robinson is a perfect example of this dichotomy, a woman who has discovered her own wants and needs but at the same time has been forced to be wife and mother and nothing more. As a young woman, Mrs. Robinson had opportunities for self-fulfillment. She was a college student who could have gone on to forge an individual identity for herself, but was thwarted when she became pregnant with daughter Elaine and subsequently forced to marry a man that she did not love. Her biological self overrode her identity and instead of being the woman she might have been, she became simply Mrs. Robinson, a woman completely identified by her role as wife and mother. Although she initially supports her daughter, Mrs. Robinson is willing to let Elaine become imprisoned in the same forced marriage that she was trapped in years before out of anger and a feeling of rejection. She is willing to force Elaine into "her web of suburban hypocrisy" (Hill 8). Mrs. Robinson in this is shown to be a woman ultimately controlled by her sexual desires and then by a desire for revenge, another relic of how dominant males view and then marginalize women of the world.

Elaine Robinson is the other major female character in The Graduate. She is forced to go on a date with Benjamin because of pressure from their two fathers. Their relationship from the very beginning is based upon the will of their parents illustrating that the people who have power are those with financial means. Since Elaine and Benjamin both depend on their parents for financial help, they must give in to their father's wish to date. The only thing they have in common is that they were both born to wealthy parents and resent their dependence, the New Left psychology giving them the impression that they are above their parents because they can see the fallacy of capitalism all the while counting on capitalism to feed them, clothe them, and give them the money so that they need not work and toil, giving them plenty of time to sit around and contemplate how empty capitalism really is. She agrees to marry a fellow Berkeley student named Carl even though she loves Ben. Her reasons for this decision have everything to do with capitalism. Mr. Robinson will never accept Ben and so he will not support the couple in Benjamin's future career or provide them any financial support. Consequently, Ben is not a suitable mate because he cannot provide the same monetary gifts as her father is able to give her. Elaine, though a woman of the period, is still nothing more than an avaricious woman who wants to be taken care of.

The counterculture movement and the New Left was one embarked with a mixture of social discord and uncertainty about what would come from this new sociological freedom. This is seen in The Graduate most effectively in the final scene of the film. After winning the hand of the woman that he loves, Benjamin Braddock and Elaine sit at the back of the bus. They smile and laugh reflecting on the audacity of their actions. Yet, these smiles and giggles quickly fade as the reality of what Ben and Elaine have just done settles in upon them. In choosing one another, the couple has chosen to relinquish their connections to their parents completely. According to Drew Casper in the book Hollywood Film 1963-1976, "In the back of a bus, the smiles of The Graduate and his girl in bridal regalia are replaced by pensive what-the-hell-did-we-just-do expressions, realizing perhaps that their rebellion has ended in middle-class domesticity" (xxxvi). Although they now have complete freedom and have escaped the marriage to Carl, they are also completely on their own and will more than likely wind up just like their parents, having to depend on each other and ultimately taking on the roles that they had worked so hard to eschew. There will be no one to pay for graduate school and no one to network for them and get them into a business. Historians and film critics alike argue that the film could end no other way because even in the midst of the New Left movement there were those who were aware that the end was an inevitability and that the process of domesticity cyclical. Phil Hill writes: