Benjamin, a promising young man from the United States, came home after graduation. After getting off the plane, he stood on a long conveyor belt and slowly moved forward. On the screen, Benjamin is alone, accompanied only by the polite and indifferent airport broadcast. (This scene reminds me of the tweeter of a socialist country or the grim smart computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Ahead, his luggage is slowly advancing in the same manner on the conveyor belt.
In the age of machinery industry, there is no essential difference between people and luggage.
This is a scene of human alienation.
The charm of The Graduate is all in these wonderful metaphors.
Released in 1967, "The Graduate", along with "Bonnie and Clyde" in the same year, is considered to be the pioneering work of New Hollywood. The two films have different themes, the theme of "Bonnie and Clyde" is "rebellion", while the theme of "The Graduate" is "alienation". But they are all targeting the middle class - the face and pillar of American society.
Unlike "Bonnie Clyde" which borrows the past and satirizes the present (with the American Great Depression in the 1930s as the background), "The Graduate" directly refers to the contemporary era: it tells the story of a young Werther-like graduate who is seduced by a femme fatale and degenerates. And then the story of self-redemption.
The discerning person can quickly detect the incest implied in the core plot of "seduction". Of course, the playwright did not arrange for the male protagonist to have incest with his immediate family, but arranged for him another elder, the wife of his father's partner, Mrs. Robinson, but I believe that if Freud is reincarnated, he will be able to see through this at a glance. This kind of "displacement" of desire - Mrs. Robinson, an older woman who has witnessed the growth of the male protagonist, is just a substitute for her mother. Incest only appears in a more subtle and socially acceptable way, and the essence has not changed. And the biggest feature of this movie is that it is implicit and meaningful.
The film's understated style owes itself to a wealth of carefully crafted metaphors and symbols. As soon as the male protagonist got off the plane, a welcome banquet was held at home. The male protagonist, who was more timid in the nostalgia, bit his head to entertain relatives and friends. A seemingly ordinary greeting from an old woman scared him and ran away. The old woman asked: what are you going to do?
Benjamin said: I want to go upstairs first.
The relatives and friends next to me said: I mean your future, your life!
This dialogue line is rich in every word. It seems ordinary but hidden in the thread, which points out the hero's character motivation - confusion. The reason for the male protagonist's incest is the confusion about his future. After graduation, facing his life, he doesn't know what to do, and complete freedom brings a lot of nihility instead. So he resigned himself to the temptation of Mrs. Robinson for a little excitement in the boring life. Just like the plot of the existential novel "The Outsider", the protagonist kills because of boredom, and debates lazily during the trial, only saying "the sun made me sin".
Next, the film reinforces this sense of nothingness with another important metaphor.
The goldfish tank is set in the male protagonist's room, and there is a diver wearing a full set of diving equipment in the fish tank.
The first shot after the subtitle is the male protagonist sitting with his back against the fish tank, his melancholy face and a model of a diver in the fish tank complement each other, expressing the relationship between the subject and the metaphor without words.
When the male protagonist was depressed, he often stared at the diver in the fish tank. Later, his father gave him a diving suit as a graduation gift. The model in the fish tank is two in one.
The goldfish bowl and the diver are symbols of the hero's lonely world. The adults are talking about their own lives, and the male protagonist is like a diver who is submerged in the water, watching quietly, as calm as it should be, as if they are talking about others. An invisible barrier like a transparent glass window separates him from his relatives and friends. This is a feeling that everyone will have. Sometimes it is obviously painful, but it always feels like watching fire from the other side. The movie perfectly conveys this subtle feeling to the screen, and the beauty is difficult to tell with Jun.
The role of Benjamin is very successful in the first half, until he meets Irene. The audience has no trouble guessing that Benjamin will end up falling in love with Irene, and that there will be many trials and tribulations in between. In order to appear less conventional, in the second half, he could only delay his love with Irene by setting up obstacles, and the rhythm suddenly slowed down. After all, it is a movie in the 1960s, and the screenwriter still has to take care of the audience's conservative values. This young man has already put his mother-in-law to sleep, and now it is very difficult to convince the audience to accept him as a daughter, but the talented screenwriter did it, and it was done through a key symbol.
At the end of the movie, when the male protagonist broke into the church to get married, the bride's relatives and friends swarmed up. What did the male lead use to repel the crowd?
cross.
The male protagonist waved the church cross to repel the crowd, stuck the door with the cross, trapped relatives and friends who blocked them in the church, and then fled with the bride to freedom. Jay Chou has a famous song called "In the Name of the Father". In the movie, the cross conveys the meaning of "In the Name of the Father". For the middle class, the male protagonist's violent marriage robbing is a rebellion against the patriarchy, but the cross is waving, implying that this is a rebellion approved by God. Christianity is definitely the main theme of the American middle class, which is similar to the scientific concept of development in Chinese society. In front of the party and God, what is your mother and father?
In this way, the middle class completed the recruitment. When the audience sees the male protagonist waving the cross, they will subconsciously stand on the side of God, without thinking that now the male protagonist not only slept with his mother-in-law but also beat his father-in-law. The way of labeling is very immediate. It is a common method used by Hollywood filmmakers to make up for the shortcomings of the narrative. If you want the audience to quickly feel disgusted with a certain character, they set him as a Nazi or Soviet, and want the audience to quickly develop a favorable impression of the bad guy. Let him go to the church to repent after the murder.
On this level, "The Graduate" is an incompletely revolutionary film. It still refuses to welcome the middle class. It is far less tragic and joyful than "Bonnie and Clyde", and certainly not as good as the film 4 years later. A Clockwork Orange is as shocking and thought-provoking. But it still has a unique value in the New Hollywood pedigree. "Bonnie Clyde" is in the past tense, "A Clockwork Orange" is in the future tense, among the pioneering works of New Hollywood, only "The Graduate" is based on the present tense, which grimly expresses the gradual collapse of the current American middle-class society. , which is the source of American Beauty, a great movie that set the scene ahead. 40 years later, in the story of "American Beauty", the father fell in love with his daughter's classmate, the daughter took pornographic photos with the drug dealer, and the retired military officer kissed the neighbor's uncle late at night... Husband and wife, father and daughter, colleagues, and neighbors all relationships were sexually destroyed. falling apart. The family — at the heart of the middle-class myth — is completely broken. American movies finally had a happy final reckoning with the middle class on the screen.
All of the above interpretations are still based on the same set of methods used by Marx's literary criticism, which requires social backgrounds such as the Vietnam War in the 1960s in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and other social backgrounds.
In fact, there can be another interpretation, which does not require so much social background and is closer to the drama itself. That is an anthropological or psychoanalytic reading. From these perspectives, the theme of this film is the growth of men, the story of how men get rid of their mothers and become free.
Life is always limited by many critical moments, such as birth, school, graduation, marriage, childbirth... In many primitive tribes, men have a grand coming-of-age ceremony when they reach adulthood. After they reach adulthood, individuals acquire complete social rights, such as property rights (when dividing meat). Score him a share) and marriage rights (sexual freedom).
Graduation is an important milestone in Benjamin's life. Since then, he has all the freedom and all the confusion. Freedom is overwhelming. But the film highlights his struggles with sexual freedom. The biggest obstacle to a man's sexual freedom comes from his mother's control or attachment to his mother - Mrs. Broad Robinson in the movie. If a man indulges in maternal love, he will never be able to stand on his own. The extreme of maternal love is incest, so in order to grow up, a man has to break with his mother and start looking for his own partner of the same age. This is "empathy". Benjamin's peer is Irene. In the movie, Irene is a very pale image, far less plump than the coquettish old lady and Mrs. Robinson with a sad past. Benjamin's feelings for Irene are also not enough foreshadowing, because she is the so-called "flat character", her function is set to get rid of Mrs. Robinson's props, and her personality cannot be displayed.
From this obscure point of view, the charm of the film is even more tortuous and long.
Back in real life, financial freedom is the real stressor for graduates. Of course, what is more fundamental is the pursuit of meaning and value. Man needs not much, but everyone wants to be immortal.
Unfortunately, we live in an era of happiness that is comprehensive and mediocre. In this era, there is no revolution, no iron and fire, no sea of blood and mountains of corpses. We do not have to run into communism, but only to outperform CPI. This is a small pursuit. Therefore, I solemnly express to everyone. Recommend this excellent theme movie.
In a blink of an eye, the graduation season is coming again, so good luck, students.
PS: Welcome to make an appointment~
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