hether a scene in The Graduate, takes place in a living room, a bedroom, or a kitchen, director Mike Nichols grimly brings out the nonsense, the drivel that passes for polite and even "civilized" conversation. Perhaps he is heartless at times; perhaps he does become a victim of his own shrewd, relentless, pitiless glare -- in the sense that the cheapness, the vulgarity, the dishonest, pretentious, fake sentimentality that he documents so constantly will naturally be seen by the viewer as his, the director's. The Graduate is thus called a shiny, glossy film, clever and amusing but "basically" (the word of words, the judgement of judgements) dishonest -- when in fact the whole point of the film is to portray the thinness of a certain kind of rich, sensual world.

Ben's first lover, a fortyish, self-proclaimed "alcoholic" and "neurotic," is actually given an almost elegantly compassionate reading by Nichols and Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Robinson). She grows on us slowly, as we begin to sense what is in her, what has happened to her. At the right moment Nichols holds off the conversation, in fact does a brilliant parody of silence -- between a man and a woman who do not really make love but go at it night after night, again and again, without the slightest evidence that anything else can possibly happen between them. For all her "cool," Mrs. Robinson finally disintegrates before our eyes. Anne Bancroft is a sure, disciplined actress; she knows how to take a pitiable kind of indignity and give it a dignified (and gently humorous) interpretation.

Ben meets Mrs. Robinson's daughter, Elaine, because his parents know nothing of his affair with the girl's mother and simply want their boy to meet a nice girl, especially one who is the daughter of their friends. Ben, out of loyalty to Elaine's mother, his lover, who forbade him even the one date his parents prompted, tried hard to be cruel to the girl, but fails. They begin to fall in love. Elaine's mother intervenes and threatens to tell "all." Ben does it first -- and, predictably, Elaine flees the scene. She returns to school, and Ben follows her.

The movie takes a critical turn now, one that has annoyed a number of critics. To spoof the upper reaches of the California bourgeoise is one thing, but one cannot then insist that Ben is, after all, real and not a satirist's tool. It is as if Nichols were being told that the dreary mediocrity he etches out cannot be persuaded to let anyone out of its clutches, in real life or in a film. Once tainted, always no good. Some critics go further. Ben from the beginning is self-centered and spoiled and all that. What "right" -- the word one reviewer uses -- does he have to rebel against society, against the society that, just about every critic agrees, Nichols successfully ridicules? Once tainted, always obliged to stay so good.

In fact neither Nichols nor anyone else has figured out how youths like Ben and Elaine come about, in view of the ornately shabby, empty world that "nurtures" them, if that is the word. That is the central, haunting question of The Graduate -- never stated but there. After the movie I found myself thinking how similar those two were, Ben and Elaine -- struggling, torn, but not by any means dead -- to the men and women I have come to know in Mississippi. There, to, for a different set of reasons, and in a different way, people are brutalized, made cheap, humiliated, turned into shells of themselves. Yet somehow in each generation a few -- and it seams, under an enabling historical moment, more than a few -- emerge with impressive possibilities, potentialities, dignity, whatever. In the early sixties we used to try to "explain" that irony, and never really did very satisfactorily -- except to affirm the cliché that there's more going on in people than words like "past" or "environment" or "problems" or "personality" quite encompass.

So a critic is wrong when he says that Ben is not believable because he, who did so well in college and comes from the home we see, cannot be shy and awkward and offbeat and moody; and a critic is wrong when he claims that a woman like Mrs. Robinson would go after only a beautiful specimen, a surf boy other than Ben; and a critic is wrong when he insists that a wandering, indulged youth cannot suddenly bring himself up short and find a purpose and go tenaciously after that purpose -- a person, a place, a thing, a job. Confident children lose their tongues and manners when they come home. Rich, middle- aged women become as desperate as anyone else -- and desperately try to shed themselves of the very cursed, glittery comforts and values the years have given them. And finally, redemption is always possible among the high and the low -- and suddenly, as well as after 10 years of psychoanalysis.

Nichols does add a touch of heavy symbolism to the end of The Graduate -- after Elaine runs into him, Ben uses a cross to bolt the church doors and frustrate their pursuers. Yet why can a novelist experiment with mixtures of realism, surrealism, and social satire, but not a playwright or a director? Why do we always ask whether a movie's character is a "real-life" one? Bonnie and Clyde, as given us by Arthur Penn, are not "real," nor are Ben and Elaine. But they bring out all sorts of real things, realities about us and our lives and our society that we all too easily shirk noticing. In literature the tradition of close, refined, and near-exclusive character study is one of many open to the writer. If he moves deeply into social and historical matters he generally has to call upon "types," upon more representative men and women -- though great writers like Faulkner and Tolstoy could do both, build a particular person, and place him accurately or revealingly in a certain kind of world. Neither Arthur Penn nor Mike Nichols would expect to be called "great" at this point, but they are trying very, very hard, if not for greatness, then for achievements that illuminate the quality of American life.

Bonnie and Clyde have ironic companions -- from across the railroad tracks -- in Ben and Elaine. When Ben comes to that grotesque church in Santa Barbara to get Elaine and run off with her, he wants more than a "nice, attractive" girl -- and she more than a mere alternative to the medical student. His drive up and down the beautiful (and ugly) length of California, accompanied by folk-rock music -- "light" but "deep," too -- has had both drive and purpose behind it, even if their exact nature or fulfillment have yet to be realized, perhaps in another film. Ben stands screaming for Elaine, his arms stretched as in the crucifixion. That too has been called a bit of heavy-handed symbolism, although Nichols has denied such an intent, and although I though I learned as a child that on every single prosaic day we live and die, are saved or condemned -- let alone on days when we make a decision to get married and commit ourselves to a loved one.

Ben doesn't lose Elaine; they go off together in a bus, stared at incredulously, she in her wedding dress, he ragged and unshaven. It is a "happy" moment as the camera fades out. For all the world the accompanying music could now be that same light-hearted, confident, jazzy, racy score that carries us along with Bonnie and Clyde. Ben and Elaine will never be hunted down by the police, but things may well get increasingly scary and desperate: Men will continue to die from hunger, and the "restlessness" that Lyndon B. Johnson mentioned but quickly dismissed could linger on and worsen. So, like Bonnie and Clyde, Ben and Elaine will also need their irreverent melodies or droll songs.

Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist who now serves as research psychiatrist at Harvard University. He is the recipient of an Atlantic Grant; he has written numerous articles for both general publications and professional journals; he is a contributing editor to New Republic; and his is the author of Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear and Dead End School, a new children's book.

- Trans-Action, May, 1968.