Sons and Fathers

Andrew M. Greeley

ore years ago than I care to remember, a pastor of a well-to-do Irish parish on the southwest side of Chicago woke up to find me under his Christmas tree -- which was particularly embarrassing since it was the middle of July. I didn't seem to be qualified for much else, so I was assigned to work with the "young people" of the parish. In those dear departed pre-Vatican Council days, the status and the training of a Catholic curate were such that he had little difficulty fitting into the world of the late teen-ager -- most of whom had more freedom and maturity than he did.

With zeal and enthusiasm, I tried to persuade my charming and sophisticated young friends that the life of the religious man and indeed of the human being in the middle of the twentieth century could be exciting and rewarding. They listened politely, wished it could be so, and then regretfully settled for the careers and the lives that their parents had arranged for them even before they had been conceived. Or, as the young people themselves would have put it, they sold out.

Such personal remembrances are a prelude to saying that Mike Nichols's The Graduate is a devastatingly accurate portrayal of how upper middle-class young Americans view the society that their parents have created -- so accurate that I found myself painfully drawn back into a world I though I had left behind. Everything was there -- the exploitation of children by their parents (Ben Braddock's graduation party is not for his friends but his parents' friends), the insensitivity of parents to their offspring's feelings (Ben is forced to parade for guests in his father's expensive scuba diving set), the high-sounding but empty advice ("I just want to say one word to you, Ben: "Plastics!"), the sexual manipulation of the young (though Ben's seduction by the wife of his father's business partner is more overt than most such manipulations), the nagging, the invasion of privacy ("You really don't have to tell us, Ben"), the planning of marriages that are thought suitable, the fear that the young person will not live up to his parents' plans and dreams and thus will be a mark of their failure, the self-hatred that plagues the young (Ben hates himself for his affair, and Elaine, the woman's daughter, hates herself for not being sophisticated enough to accept Ben's love), the aimless wondering in expensive cars (in this case an Alfa-Romeo), the phony sophistication about sex (Elaine coolly says to Ben, "Are you having an affair or something?" and convinces herself that she is untroubled by the fact that it is with a married woman -- until she learns that it is her mother). It is the world of the late adolescent, all right, and Nichols has captured it with as much accuracy as he and Elaine May once satirized the conversational idiom of the University of Chicago. Indeed, some of the dialogue between Ben and his mistress sounds like vintage Nichols and May.

By now it is no secret to anyone who reads movie reviews that The Graduate is one of the best American movies of 1967, that Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, and Anne Bancroft are superb, and that Nichols may well be a director who will make American moviegoers forget about foreign films. In addition, it is pretty well known that The Graduate, for all its very explicit treatment of sex, is a highly moral film and that the decision of Ben and Elaine for life in preference to the living death of their haut-bourgeois is a stronger affirmation of purpose and value than many young people themselves would be inclined to make. Yet it seems to me that The Graduate, for all its brilliant satire, falls a half step short of greatness -- and this for a reason I am pained to advance: Nichols is not sympathetic enough to parents.

The strength of the film is in its unerring grasp of the perspective of the young adult. The theatre in which I watched it was filled with the college generation on Christmas vacation; they had no trouble throwing themselves into the story and laughed loudly at lines their parents would not have caught. Nichols daringly ends the film with an uninhibited projection of a young person's fantasy world as Ben rescues his love from a marriage into which her father was forcing her. The audience cheered as they probably had not since the 7th Cavalry rode over the hill when they were young. They were delighted when Nichols flattered them by having Ben fight back his pursuers with a large gold crown. ("See, Ben is a Christ figure!" muttered one of my companions.) And they were overjoyed when the songs of Simon and Garfunkel assured Elaine's mother that Jesus did love her: all very hip.

But while such a perspective may make great satire, it falls something short of the agony of reality. I yield to no one in my dislike of the world of the upper middle-class suburban adult; I agree with one young Irish ally in my days as the "young people's priests": parents are the enemy. If the adults in The Graduate are stereotypes and caricatures, it can only be said that in real life parents usually behave like stereotypes and caricatures in dealing with their children. If Anne Bancroft plays Ben's mistress as a devouring sex-starved bitch, she is really reflecting a suburban type whose name is legion. Yet The Graduate ought to have been able to muster some compassion for the older generation, if only to grapple with the full dimensions of the problem it faces.

I asked my two young companions as we wended our way down the Dan Ryan Expressway after the movie what kind of parents they thought Ben and Elaine would make when they had children. The young man said, "They will be just as bad as their parents." And the young woman observed, "You see, the two of them don't really understand; they don't understand why their parents got the way they did; and if you aren't able to understand your parents, you won't be able to understand your children."

The tragedy of the generation gap, then, is eventually a tragedy of communication and understanding of one generation's fear of examining the values of the other lest their own be lost in the process. It takes courage -- considerable courage -- to generate the sympathy required to begin such understanding. The Graduate suggests more by omission than by explicit statement that such compassion is not possible. Though the ending may look happy, in reality Ben and Elaine are destined to lose contact with their own children and sadness will recur all over again. The Graduate is a film of affirmation, but in the absence of compassion, its affirmation is not strong enough. As my young friends said of Ben and Elaine, it does not understand.

- The Reporter, February 1968.