Buck Henry’s hilarious pitch at the beginning of The Player aside, I don’t think anyone’s been clamoring for a sequel to The Graduate. Maybe that’s why it’s taken Charles Webb, who wrote the original novel, 44 years to publish a follow-up. Called Home School, it’s said to pick up 10 years later, with Benjamin and Elaine living in upstate New York, home-schooling their two kids, and still trying to keep Mrs. Robinson out of their hair. According to the Associated Press, Random House is publishing it in the U.K. next year, with a U.S. publication date likely to follow.
May I confess something? I’ve always found the beloved 1967 film creepy. Not because of its quasi-incestuous love triangle, but because it’s basically a movie about a stalker. What does Elaine see in Benjamin, given his disturbing behavior that begins on their disastrous first date and continues for the rest of the film?
It’s almost as much of a mystery as why Baby Boomers made this film a generational touchstone. One thinks of the period as a time of political and social rebellion, but Ben is an apolitical, antisocial guy who seems barely aware of the world he lives in. His alienation and malaise are so vague he can’t even name the unrest he feels, or what he might be rebelling against, or even identify himself as a rebel. Then again, maybe that’s the real source of the film’s appeal: Ben’s dissatisfaction is so ambiguous that practically anyone can identify with it.
I don’t mean to discount the brilliant social satire, cooked up by director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Henry, that’s going on all around Ben (”Plastics”), but Ben’s response to it is… what? For me, the most telling shot in the film is the last one: Ben and Elaine on the bus, looking at each other as if to say, ”What do we do now?” That’s why I think it’s apt that Home School promises to show Ben and Elaine raising their kids in the suburbs: it seems they’ve become the people they were running away from.
Oh, what the heck, let’s play along and cast the inevitable film version. (And while we’re doing so, let’s agree to forget that Rumor Has It ever existed. Jennifer Aniston will thank you, believe me.) Let’s see, Jason Biggs and Kathleen Turner played Ben and Mrs. Robinson on Broadway, and there’s no reason to think they couldn’t reprise their roles. Anyone who saw I Heart Huckabees knows that Jason Schwartzman would also make a fine junior version of Dustin Hoffman. (But please, please, not Ben Stiller.) For Elaine, why not Mandy Moore or Julia Stiles? Of course, if you really want to play up the flesh-crawling Oedipal side of the story, you’ll want Katharine Ross to come out of semi-retirement to play Elaine’s mom.
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Aren’t Julia Stiles, Mandy Moore and Jason Schwartzman a little young to play the lead roles “10 years later.” 10 months later, maybe.
How about John Stamos, Jennifer Garner and Susan Sarandon
Finally someone has come out and said how creepy the Graduate is. I watched it a couple of weeks ago and it was just skin tingling creepy. Ick!
I know what you mean, Melissa. I saw a movie that came out at about the same time as The Graduate; it was about this teenage boy who goes to a party, talks to this girl for,like, two minutes, and the next thing you know he’s trespassing on her lawn and looking at her when she’s going to bed. And when she sees him, she likes it! What a creepy story. I forget what it was called, but Michael York played the girl’s cousin.
I’m 29, and I saw it a few months ago, cuz it’s one of AFI’s 100 best films or something. Underwhelmed, I was. I like Dustin Hoffman, but I just didn’t get the character. What a loser.
I, too, have found the original a bit overrated. Yeah, I’m 30, but while I can appreciate Citizen Kane and (most) of Hitchcock, I was left unimpressed by the Graduate. Hoffman was annoying, and the Elaine charater was annoyingly insecure to have such a strong mother. The films saving grace is Bancroft, who oozes sexuality, confidence, and indifference all at the same time. And the music… well, it set the tone but S&G are so whiny!
Thank you! That’s exactly how I felt about that movie.
Laurie Metcalf & Johnny Gilicki did a brilliant paraody of THAT scene from “The Graduate” on “Roseanne”, as Jackie & David.
How about Steve Carrell as Benjamin?
Okay, I’m 55 and not 30, so maybe I can help you understand ‘The Graduate.’ The one word that Gary Susman uses that best describes what it’s about is “alienation.” It’s not about rebelling against society — it’s about estrangement from it. Benjamin has just graduated from college and he can’t figure out why he did it. Nothing really makes sense to him and everything everyone says is just noise to him. The most important scene in the film is the scene it which Benjamin puts on the scuba gear and goes and sits at the bottom of the pool. That’s where he wants to be — away from all of the noise. Those of us who saw this movie in the 60’s identified with that feeling of alienation. Nothing really belonged to us. Our parents had homes and jobs and a war in Viet Nam, but we really didn’t have anything — and we really didn’t want what they had. It wasn’t rebellion, it was alienation. That’s not a part of me and I’m not a part of it. When Benjamin goes back to college to follow Elaine around, it’s not stalking, it’s going to another place where he doesn’t fit in. He thought college would be the one place where he would feel at home, because he had just left that environment. But even there he was an alien. His affair with Mrs. Robinson is harder to explain, because it does seem that he does it out of boredom. But I think he is trying to figure out what he is supposed to do next. What does it mean to be “The Graduate”? What does a college education make you? An adult? What the hell is that? I still don’t know.
I like to imagine myself as a model, like a fashion type.
It never happened for me, so now I’m going the
glamour route. http://www.geocities.com/swingers_ads_2005/ I came back
for the one in my green heels two days later.
The weather was warm so being bottomless was actually a lot of fun.
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