DISQUS

Goodnight, donna. Thanks for joining in.

Getting late for me too. Lurkers, I hope you're there. I was expecting a few more people and I hope the reason they didn't show wasn't the awful weather in the Midwest. That is, I hope everybody out that way is ok.

Thanks, Jason, Tom, Victoria, AG, and Dan too.

If you're showing up here late, please feel free to leave your thoughts. Like I said, the thread's staying open all week.

Goodnight.

Unplug the coffee pot before you go, please?

Sorry, donna, I guess I was typing while you were answering.

It's been too long since I've seen Carnal Knowledge. I'm afraid to look at it again. Can Art Garfunkel act?

At least donna's still here.

I think you're right. People-hating seems to be one of Nichols' hobbies.

I haven't seen Closer. Virginia Wolf, The Graduate, Postcards From the Edge, Working Girl, Primary Colors, and Charlie Wilson's War all contain variations on a type of woman---the domineering scold who bullies and belittles and bosses all the men and at least one young woman, often her daughter or a daughterly type. But I'm not sure if he's drawn to the movies by those characters themselves or by the opportunities they give to his favorite actresses to strut their stuff.

Sounds like the sound of silence.

What's that I hear?

Things are growing quiet. Too quiet.

Dan, maybe we can make that a future series for Wednesday Night at the Movies.
"Great Films That End With Dustin Hoffman on a Bus."

And like I said, the movie completely ignores the politics of the time.

Donna, I don't think the lurkers are going to help us out, so feel free to give us your answer.

Also, the script contains very little "period" dialog. Nobody says groovy. Simon and Garfunkel turned out to be a good choice for the music, not just for their songs' commentary on the action, but because their style has never gone out of fashion. If you'd never heard them before until today and somebody told you they were kids just starting out you might believe it.

The clothing and hair styles aren't ridiculous either. In 1967 people were still dressing somewhat classically.

Dan, I didn't feel the movie was at all dated, although it's clearly a product of its time. The reason for that is something I was trying to get at in my post above. For all its reputation, The Graduate isn't really a 60s movie. It's almost timeless. Ben's dilemma is universal. There are thousands of versions of his plight being lived out every year at graduation time.

Commenter on my post about Charlie Wilson's War today, over at my place, thinks he sees a streak of misogyny in all of Nichols' films. I'm not sure I see it, but what do you think?

Tom had to pack it in. He says goodnight. I'll hang around for a while yet. Maybe some folks from out west will turn up or the lurkers will get some courage. But the thread's going to stay open forever so feel free to come and go over the next couple of days.

Actually, donna, plastics gets said within the first five minutes of the movie. It's in one of the YouTube videos Tom posted a link to at his place.

You know what though, there's a scene in which Ben and Elaine are in the red Alpha Romeo eating burgers off of trays at a drive-in restaurant and they're just talking and munching on their fries and sipping on the straws in their milk shakes. We can't hear them. But they are clearly wrapped up in their conversation and it's a happy moment. Maybe the only truly happy moment in the whole movie. They just seem so right together. If they aren't really in love, they're close enough.

One of the evils of the situation Ben has gotten himself into is that he and Elaine aren't going to be allowed to have more dates like this. This is all they need right now, a summer romance, but somehow it's got to be all or nothing for them.

There are still lurkers lurking. I can see their shoes sticking out from underneath the arras.

Elaine is another go along to get along type. She does it because she's a good and obedient daughter. But the result is the same. At the end she and Ben are left alone with the one person in the world they don't have to fake it with, which should make them happy. But they just don't know how to do it on their own. The possibility is that they will learn how to be "real" with each other. The other possibility is that they will fall into their most comfortable old habits and start playing along with each other, pretending to be the only kind of married people they know how to be, their parents.

Maybe that's what Nichols meant.

Nichols was an immigrant who came to America as a boy. He never really understood America but he had a gift for observation and "fitting in." Ben returns to his home state but in the years he's been away at school he's become an outsider. He feels like a foreigner among the people he should know best and who should know him best and he finds them and their "customs" strange and confusing. He adopts two strategies to cope. He withdraws and he plays along. The playing along lands him at the bottom of the pool in his scuba gear, feeling alone and lost.

The hotel scenes show Ben trying to play along with the local customs too.

Donna,

One of the things Buck Henry told Mark Harris for Pictures at a Revolution is that he, Henry, thinks that Mike Nichols unconsciously drove the writing and the rewriting of the script in such a way that the character of Ben became something of a self-portrait of Nichols.

Jason, I think you're right about Ben, but I don't know about Elaine, because Ross doesn't give much away. And this gets back to what Tom and I were beginning to talk about up top. Just how much of Elaine is due to Ross' bad acting and how much to her being the kind of a person who has learned how to be an obedient cipher so as not to upset her fragile and volatile mother?

Donna. I think she sees her own lost youth. And an opportunity to cause mischief.

Other writers worked on the script before Buck Henry took it over, and Henry's getting it was the result of an accident. He happened to be at a party that Mike Nichols happened to be at and they happened to wind up talking and they happened to hit it off, according to Harris.

The Graduate started out as a very different kind of movie. Based on what made it to the screen it's impossible to imagine Robert Redford or Warren Beatty as Ben Braddock, but judging by what Mark Harris says about the novel, which I've never read, a tall handsome preppy type would have been the right choice for Ben, if the script had been faithful to the novel.

Victoria, that's an interesting story. I never heard that one before. That would mean that Spielberg's first two big hits were the result of lucky accidents. The mechanical shark never worked right during the shooting of Jaws so he couldn't show the shark as soon as and as often as he'd have liked. Imagine that movie if the shark kept popping up every five minutes.

Ah, the other $64,000 question: Just what does Ben want?

AG:I dunno. The 64K question in the movie and for me is why do the ones who want it the most get hurt the deepest?

Who do you think wants it the most in the movie?