Benjamin Braddock between Charles Webb and Mike Nichols

I. A Novel, a Film, an Era

Charles Webb died in poverty in Eastbourne, on the south coast of England, in June 2020. He was eighty-one and was living in a rented room. He had sold the rights to the novel that made him famous for some twenty thousand dollars and had waived every royalty on the film adapted from it—a film that, in today’s money, has earned several hundred million. He had given to his moral patrons—the Communist Party of Great Britain, Anti-Slavery International—sums he did not in fact possess. His wife, Eve, had called herself “Fred” for fifty years, had shaved her head in protest against the very category of the feminine, and died in a homeless shelter in 2019. Charles outlived her by eleven months.

I keep this biography open, with its almost clinical consistency, because it is the true prologue to any honest discussion of The Graduate. Webb did not write a novel about bourgeois unease: he lived one for the rest of his days. His Benjamin Braddock—the recent graduate who comes home to his parents’ California house and lets himself be seduced by his father’s business partner’s wife—was a dress rehearsal for a life. The refusal of an already-written destiny, an adolescent gesture in the book, became in Webb an unbroken vocation, all the way down to the radical Bartleby of I would prefer not to. Few twentieth-century writers have kept faith with their own characters quite so stubbornly.

The novel came out in 1963. Webb was twenty-four, the son of a well-off San Francisco family and a literature graduate of Williams College. The book is short, dry, built almost entirely from dialogue: you can read it in an afternoon. It met with modest interest. The turning point came four years later, when a young theater director, Mike Nichols—working from a screenplay by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham—turned it into one of the founding films of the New Hollywood: The Graduate, 1967, seven Academy Award nominations, the statuette to Nichols for direction. Best Picture that year went to In the Heat of the Night, and in that small misalignment one can already read the Academy’s lag behind a sensibility that Nichols’s film was, almost single-handedly, in the act of imposing as dominant.

What I want to argue in these pages is a simple thesis, and one rarely advanced: Webb’s book and Nichols’s film are two works apparently identical and in fact antithetical. The novel is a cold, dry, faintly cruel satire of the California middle class. The film is its melancholy requiem. Webb wrote a comedy of manners shot through with political sarcasm; Nichols shot a generational elegy. The countercultural left of 1968 adopted The Graduate as a manifesto, but the manifesto is the film, not the book—and that torsion explains a great deal, including some of what we have since come to know about the psychopathology of Western youth across the past sixty years.

II. Benjamin: Between Novel and Film

It is often said—and until recently I said it myself—that Webb’s Benjamin is “more cynical” and Nichols’s “more fragile.” That is true, but it is a lazy formulation: it explains nothing. The real difference is one of expressive register, and therefore of the very nature of the subject being represented. Webb’s Benjamin is a character who speaks. Nichols’s Benjamin is a character who falls silent. And since the psychopathology of a young man is, before anything else, a question of his relation to language, this difference is not formal: it is ontological.

The novel is built almost entirely from clipped exchanges in the manner of Hemingway or the early Salinger. The set pieces—the seduction in Elaine’s bedroom, the first night at the Taft Hotel, the confrontation with Mr. Robinson—are made up of very short lines, parried and shut down at speed. On those pages Benjamin is verbally full: he ironizes, he mocks, he sends his parents’ hypocrisies back to them, he displays a cutting lucidity about his own predicament. When his father, in the garden, asks what he intends to do with his life now that he has graduated with top honors, he answers with a string of non-answers calibrated to perform his own estrangement. This is a Benjamin who knows, and who, through sarcasm, defends a self that is still intact, even if programmatically recalcitrant.

The film performs a radical subtraction on that material. Henry and Willingham cut whole exchanges, shorten replies, let lines fall into the void. Above all, Nichols hands Dustin Hoffman—then twenty-nine, of Jewish background, physically remote from the Californian WASP the book demanded—the task of building Benjamin out of silence. Hoffman works by removal: the eyes that drop, the pauses that lengthen, the voice that catches in the throat. The famous exchange with Mr. McGuire at the party—the whispered word, “plastics,” meant to contain the future—works because the young protagonist says nothing back, and the void of his reaction makes more noise than any line could.

The first consequence is that Nichols’s Benjamin is not a toned-down version of Webb’s: he is a different character. Webb wrote an angry young man who uses sarcasm as a weapon; Nichols filmed a paralyzed young man who uses silence as a symptom. The first is a satirist in potential, a possible Californian Holden Caulfield. The second is a clinical case awaiting a diagnosis.

The second consequence has to do with time. The novel, like all dialogue-driven novels, is fast: scenes follow one another, the ellipses are brutal, the affair with Mrs. Robinson is dispatched in a few pages. The film, by contrast, slows down. Nichols invents long contemplative sequences—Benjamin floating in the pool in his scuba mask, Benjamin walking through the house like a sleepwalker, Benjamin sitting in his car without turning the ignition—that simply do not exist in the book. It is these sequences, not the dialogue, that make up the image our culture has retained of the character. The film invents, in other words, a phenomenology of drift that the book does not possess and that will become the icon of a generation. I will return to this.

The third consequence is properly political. Webb wrote in 1963, before the escalation in Vietnam, before the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, before the Kennedy assassination. His is a pre-political book: the target is the bourgeois family, not the system. Nichols, on the other hand, was filming in 1967, when the student mobilization was already underway. And though he avoids any explicit reference to the war or to the movements, he constructs a work that the audiences of ’68 would read—legitimately—as a radical indictment of Lyndon Johnson’s America. It is one of the rather rare cases in the history of cinema in which a film becomes more political than its source text, not because it adds ideological content but because it strips speech from its protagonist, and that silence resounds, in its historical moment, as an accusation.

III. Mrs. Robinson: Desire, Power, Abjection

The scene is famous. Benjamin, just back from college, is driven home by his father’s partner’s wife. She invites him in on the pretext of trouble with her husband’s car. She leads him to her absent daughter’s bedroom. She undresses. When Benjamin turns around, he sees her reflected in a painting: an arched leg, the whole body, the fixed gaze. He stammers. She says, in the tone of clinical observation, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?” And then she laughs in his face.

Anne Bancroft—who was thirty-six at the time, only six years older than Hoffman, a fact less well known than it should be—builds in that scene one of the most ambiguous female characters in American cinema. Mrs. Robinson is not the noir’s femme fatale, not the threatening mother of Freudian melodrama, not the cougar of later cinema. She is a wounded, intelligent, alcoholic woman, trapped in a marriage she did not choose, who uses her own sexuality as the last residual form of agency available to her. Sex, for her, is not desire: it is an exercise of will turned against herself and against the world that has stolen her life—a college education attended, an art-history major dropped for an early pregnancy, a husband she does not love. When Benjamin, in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes, tries to talk to her, to ask her something about herself, she reacts with a cold violence. Conversation has been taken from her too long ago, and rebuilding it is by now beyond her strength.

The character in the novel is thinner, less tragic. Webb’s Mrs. Robinson is efficient in her cruelty, manipulative without depth: she is a narrative function more than a subject. Bancroft and Nichols rebuild her from the inside. They give her a history, an alcoholism, a desperate self-irony. They make her the only adult in the film—the one character who understands precisely what is happening and what is at stake, and who, for that very reason, is also the one character condemned.

There is, however, a level on which Mrs. Robinson remains a function in the film, and here psychoanalysis enters not as citation but as a tool of reading. The latent structure of The Graduate is the entirely classical one of the split maternal figure: Mrs. Robinson is the seductive mother who binds the young man to her own unconfessed desire; Elaine, the daughter, is the redeeming mother who authorizes his exit from the family orbit and his entry into adulthood. Benjamin, suspended between them, is not a desiring subject: he is a prolonged adolescent, fixed in what Erik Erikson, in Identity: Youth and Crisis in 1968—exactly contemporary with the film—would call an identity moratorium: a developmental standstill in which the task of constructing an autonomous self is deferred through behaviors of drift. Literally, in Benjamin’s case: the scene in which he lies face-down on the pool float while his father, from the edge, urges him to show the family his birthday gift—a set of scuba gear—is not a visual conceit. It is the precise representation of an oral-regressive defensive acting out: immersion as withdrawal, the mask as barrier, the held breath as a suspension of the task of existing.

Mrs. Robinson, then, is not only a wounded woman. She is also, in transparency, the archaic mother from whom Benjamin must free himself, and from whom he cannot free himself. The nudity reflected in the painting at the end of the seduction scene is not erotic: it is uncanny, in the precise sense Freud gives to the term—something familiar that returns as foreign and threatening. The fact that Bancroft, in that scene, was largely body-doubled by a twenty-two-year-old named Linda Gray—the same Linda Gray who, twenty years later, would play Sue Ellen on Dallas—is one of those production details that, reread today, says a great deal about the troubled relation between the cinematic gaze and the body of the adult woman: Bancroft had simply not been asked to show her own.

IV. The Soundtrack as Generational Unconscious

The scene is famous. Benjamin, just back from college, is driven home by his father’s partner’s wife. She invites him in on the pretext of trouble with her husband’s car. She leads him to her absent daughter’s bedroom. She undresses. When Benjamin turns around, he sees her reflected in a painting: an arched leg, the whole body, the fixed gaze. He stammers. She says, in the tone of clinical observation, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?” And then she laughs in his face.

Anne Bancroft—who was thirty-six at the time, only six years older than Hoffman, a fact less well known than it should be—builds in that scene one of the most ambiguous female characters in American cinema. Mrs. Robinson is not the noir’s femme fatale, not the threatening mother of Freudian melodrama, not the cougar of later cinema. She is a wounded, intelligent, alcoholic woman, trapped in a marriage she did not choose, who uses her own sexuality as the last residual form of agency available to her. Sex, for her, is not desire: it is an exercise of will turned against herself and against the world that has stolen her life—a college education attended, an art-history major dropped for an early pregnancy, a husband she does not love. When Benjamin, in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes, tries to talk to her, to ask her something about herself, she reacts with a cold violence. Conversation has been taken from her too long ago, and rebuilding it is by now beyond her strength.

The character in the novel is thinner, less tragic. Webb’s Mrs. Robinson is efficient in her cruelty, manipulative without depth: she is a narrative function more than a subject. Bancroft and Nichols rebuild her from the inside. They give her a history, an alcoholism, a desperate self-irony. They make her the only adult in the film—the one character who understands precisely what is happening and what is at stake, and who, for that very reason, is also the one character condemned.

There is, however, a level on which Mrs. Robinson remains a function in the film, and here psychoanalysis enters not as citation but as a tool of reading. The latent structure of The Graduate is the entirely classical one of the split maternal figure: Mrs. Robinson is the seductive mother who binds the young man to her own unconfessed desire; Elaine, the daughter, is the redeeming mother who authorizes his exit from the family orbit and his entry into adulthood. Benjamin, suspended between them, is not a desiring subject: he is a prolonged adolescent, fixed in what Erik Erikson, in Identity: Youth and Crisis in 1968—exactly contemporary with the film—would call an identity moratorium: a developmental standstill in which the task of constructing an autonomous self is deferred through behaviors of drift. Literally, in Benjamin’s case: the scene in which he lies face-down on the pool float while his father, from the edge, urges him to show the family his birthday gift—a set of scuba gear—is not a visual conceit. It is the precise representation of an oral-regressive defensive acting out: immersion as withdrawal, the mask as barrier, the held breath as a suspension of the task of existing.

Mrs. Robinson, then, is not only a wounded woman. She is also, in transparency, the archaic mother from whom Benjamin must free himself, and from whom he cannot free himself. The nudity reflected in the painting at the end of the seduction scene is not erotic: it is uncanny, in the precise sense Freud gives to the term—something familiar that returns as foreign and threatening. The fact that Bancroft, in that scene, was largely body-doubled by a twenty-two-year-old named Linda Gray—the same Linda Gray who, twenty years later, would play Sue Ellen on Dallas—is one of those production details that, reread today, says a great deal about the troubled relation between the cinematic gaze and the body of the adult woman: Bancroft had simply not been asked to show her own.

V. The Film’s Afterlife: A Classic That Will Not Age

The Graduate was a runaway commercial event: in 1968 dollars it took in over a hundred million; in present-day money it comfortably crosses a billion. About this, and about the fact that it has become an absolute classic, there is little to add. What is worth asking is why it has not aged.

The usual answer—“because it speaks to every generation”—is the one I trust least. It is press-kit prose, fine for a trailer and bad for analysis. The answer I want to propose is less consoling: the film does not age because the condition it describes—the well-off, hyper-educated young man, indistinguishable from his peers, who does not know what to do with himself and drifts—has in the meantime become a mass phenomenon. In 1967 Benjamin was a charismatic exception. He is now the modal type of the young adult of the upper-middle classes of the West. The film speaks to every generation because, since the one in which it was released, every generation has produced more Benjamin Braddocks than the one before.

Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism in 1979, described the phenomenon with a formula whose precision has not dulled: the narcissistic personality as the historical product of a society that, having saturated the material needs of its middle class, has left its children without resistances against which to forge themselves. Benjamin is exactly this: not a slacker, not a spoiled child, but a subject raised in a world that has stripped him in advance of every occasion to construct a directed desire. The pool, the house, the red Alfa Romeo his father gives him are not rewards: they are the false self—I use the term in the precise sense Donald Winnicott gives it in his 1960 paper on ego distortion—that the family has stitched onto the perfect son, and against which the son cannot even openly rebel. He can only withdraw: drift, fall silent, let himself be passed through. The closest thing to revolt of which he is capable, in the closing minutes, is going to retrieve a girl he is not even sure he wants.

It is in this light that the film’s celebrated, much-cited final shot has to be reread. Benjamin and Elaine have boarded the bus, they have gotten away with it, they have set fire to the wedding at the altar. For a few seconds they laugh, incredulous; then, slowly, the laughter dies down. They look at each other. They look away. They sit in silence as the bus pulls off and “The Sound of Silence” returns. The screenplay had called for a more reconciling ending; on set, Nichols decided to keep the camera rolling longer than expected, saying nothing to the actors, until Hoffman and Katharine Ross stopped, of their own accord, performing happiness. What we see, in other words, is an ending that was found, not written: the face of a young man who realizes, too late, that he has performed an act of heroism without having a self solid enough to bear it. The act has been carried out; now one would have to live, and one no longer knows how. Few endings in American cinema have stated so precisely the way contemporary narcissism turns even its own victories into states of bewilderment.

VI. Conclusion: The Film of a Lifetime

I first saw The Graduate at an age at which the correspondence between what the film was showing and what I felt I was living was so exact it became almost embarrassing. I liked it, and I distrusted the fact that I liked it: one of the first rules I learned, as a reader and a viewer, is that works which resemble us too closely are rarely the most reliable. Only many years later, watching it again from a clinical as well as a personal vantage, did I understand that the film had taught me something no manual of psychopathology had ever stated with quite the same clarity: that there is a way of being unhappy inside the conditions of happiness—health, education, family affection, economic freedom—that is precisely the form of suffering twentieth-century psychiatry learned to recognize too late and that the psychiatry of our century will have to learn to treat better.

The young man who walks into a psychiatrist’s office today, in the middle and upper-middle classes of any Western city, looks far more like Benjamin Braddock than like the clinical cases in the manuals. He is not in mourning, he is not persecuted, he is not delusional. He has an excellent CV, two languages, a master’s degree paid for by his parents, a room with a view; he lies on a float in a pool of warm water and cannot bring himself to dive down to the bottom. The diagnosis on offer—depression, dysthymia, generalized anxiety disorder, university burnout, languishing—shifts from one decade to the next without the substance of the picture shifting with it. The substance is this: a self built entirely on having to be, which cannot make the transition to wanting to be, and which paralyzes itself in the attempt. Nichols’s film, sixty years ago, had already staged it. Webb’s book, a few years earlier, had intuited it without quite finding it.

There remains a question, the one Webb posed in life and answered with his eccentric biography: does one ever leave Benjamin behind? The film’s answer is cautious—Benjamin gets out of the pool, but the bus carries him to an elsewhere that is not yet a place. The book’s answer is more cynical, since the novel simply ends before the question is asked. Webb’s own answer, the real one, was of a radicality that has not stopped questioning me: to refuse, all the way down, every element of the system that had produced Benjamin—money, property, fame, even the stability of his name (Eve called herself “Fred,” as if changing names could be enough to change destinies)—and to pay the price for it. I do not know whether it was a good life; I know it was a coherent one. It is an individual, not a clinical, solution. But it is worth keeping in mind whenever we discuss The Graduate, if only to remember that the character had, off-screen, an author who took him seriously to the very end.

Webb’s novel remains a sharp, ironic, necessary object. Nichols’s film is a total work of art, fusing cinema, music, and cultural diagnosis in a balance that, on rewatching, continues to startle. Together they tell the story of Benjamin Braddock: not a hero, not a case, but a young man trying to figure out who he is, what he wants, and why—having everything—he cannot bring himself to want anything in particular. I know that young man. So do you.

Filmography and Discography

• Mike Nichols (dir.), The Graduate, screenplay by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham from the novel of the same name by Charles Webb, USA, Embassy Pictures – Lawrence Turman Productions, 1967.
• Simon and Garfunkel, The Graduate. Original Sound Track Recording, Columbia Records, CL 2729 / CS 9529, 1968.
• Simon and Garfunkel, Bookends, Columbia Records, KCS 9529, 1968 (containing the full version of “Mrs. Robinson”).

Selected Bibliography

• Webb, Charles, The Graduate, New York, New American Library, 1963.
• Biskind, Peter, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1998.
• Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness. The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Erikson, Erik H., Identity: Youth and Crisis, New York, W.W. Norton, 1968.
• Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, London, Hogarth Press, 1961.
• Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny” (1919), trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition, vol. XVII, London, Hogarth Press, 1955.
• Harris, Mark, Pictures at a Revolution. Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, New York, Penguin Press, 2008.
• Kael, Pauline, “The Graduate,” in The New Yorker, 6 July 1968; reprinted in Ead., Going Steady, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1970.
• Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism. American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York, W.W. Norton, 1979.
• Wasson, Sam, Life Isn’t Everything. Mike Nichols, As Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends, New York, Henry Holt, 2019.
• Winnicott, Donald W., “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self” (1960), in Id., The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, London, Hogarth Press, 1965.