Entertainment
How Men Were Destroyed By The Most Popular Movie Of A Generation
By Joshua Tyler
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During World War 2 millions of American men were forced to march in lockstep to their death. Whether you think the cause was just or not, the truth is that for years these men had no say, no agency, and no independence. When the war was over, those who survived were released from bondage and returned home. They responded by doing what men have always done in those circumstances: by getting away from those who would control them.
The result was the rise of the American suburb, as returning soldiers left the city life of reliance on government apparatuses like public transportation and cramped apartment regulations for a place that promised more breathing room, your own home that you controlled, and the ability to hop in a car and go anywhere you want, anytime you like. The elites who’d been ordering them around during the war were soon unsettled by this shift in American culture and launched a campaign to demonize those returning soldiers and their suburbanite quest to get the hell away from them.
This pushback against suburban flight culminated in a cultural trend that would last for decades, but it first clicked into place with a singular movie that’s still persuading impressionable minds today. This is the story of how The Graduate screenwashed Americans into redefining success as a prison and failure as the real key to happiness.
Sympathy For A Spoiled Brat
The Graduate is about a recent college graduate named Benjamin Braddock. He’s played by a young Dustin Hoffman who, in addition to being a great actor, is also naturally sympathetic. The movie begins as he’s returning home after completing college. Once home, he’s supposed to figure out his next steps, and he hates every minute of it.
We follow Braddock everywhere, and the film makes sure you sympathize with him, even when you shouldn’t. That’s important because Benjamin Braddock acts like an asshole throughout almost the entire movie.
He bails on a party his parents threw to show him how proud they are of him. He mopes around their house, freeloading, and refuses to get a job. He complains when his Dad offers to help him or when his parents say nice things about him. He’s presented with reasonable choices and opportunities, and treats them like an attack on his soul. He stalks and harasses a woman he barely knows, ruins a marriage, and uses everyone around him.
The Graduate excuses Benjamin’s behavior as if it’s everyone else that’s the problem, even though they’re doing nothing to him at all. On paper, Benjamin Braddock is a total tool, but as the Simon & Garfunkel music swells and he slinks through the flatly shot airport, the movie frames him as a victim entering a trap.
The Graduate frames Benjamin as its surrogate, creating a situation where hating him means hating yourself. You won’t do that, so with a little help from creative camera work, your brain assumes Ben’s in the right, even though he’s clearly a passive-aggressive jerk.
How Moral Reframing Turns Bad Into Good
The movie makes that ridiculous flip happen using a persuasion technique called Moral Reframing. Moral Reframing is the persuasive repositioning of behavior, motives, or outcomes so that actions widely seen as harmful, selfish, or unethical are interpreted as virtuous, principled, or necessary by shifting the moral lens through which they are judged.
The Graduate pulls off that reframing because of the way director Mike Nichols shoots and constructs his film. Nichols frequently aligns the camera with Benjamin’s POV, making the audience experience situations from his perspective. Every shot frames him behind glass, water, plastic, or some kind of architecture.
Benjamin often says very little, even when asked questions. In the real world, that behavior would be rude, but Nichols lets pauses linger, making his confusion and anxiety feel authentic and earned rather than what it really is, which is lazy and passive-aggressive.
Affected By Affect Heuristics
Early scenes show adults crowding him, speaking at him rather than to him. The camera stays close to Benjamin, trapping the viewer in his discomfort. Everything Nichols does makes sure you FEEL that he’s trapped by the world around him, and that world is the suburbs. In doing so, he’s taking advantage of something called Affect Heuristics.
Affect Heuristics are a mental shortcut all humans take, in which immediate emotional reactions, such as fear, liking, disgust, or comfort, are substituted for deliberate analysis. That means judgments of things like risk, value, or truth are guided more by feeling than by evidence.
So The Graduate never outright says the suburbs and success are evil. It doesn’t even show most of them (with one big exception, and we’ll get to HER in a minute) doing anything bad. Instead, Nichols uses reframing to make you FEEL his message. And he does it indirectly, so you’ll never notice what he’s doing to you. So while on screen you see nothing but paradise-like suburbs filled with mini mansions, swimming pools, and supportive parents and friends, The Graduate’s director subtly manipulates the audience into FEELING that, despite all evidence, this place of success is actually one of festering rot.
That’s where Mrs. Robinson comes in.
Mrs. Robinson Gets The Blame
Even if you’ve never seen The Graduate, you know who Mrs. Robinson is. An older woman who has known Benjamin since he was a baby decides to seduce him, and she does so aggressively.
She’s played by Anne Bancroft, who was actually only thirty-five at the time. Hoffman, by the way, was twenty-nine. But the movie goes out of its way to age her, while simultaneously de-aging Dustin Hoffman.
Nichols shoots Bancroft in hard, shadow-casting lighting that accentuates cheekbones and facial lines. Heavy eye makeup, dark liner, and sculpted hair add severity rather than youthfulness. In real life, Anne Bancroft was a smokeshow, but in The Graduate, nothing about her is attractive.
I know the movie’s reputation is that she’s some kind of hot MILF seductress, but that’s a marketing distraction. It’s not what the movie wants you to FEEL. The reality is that, compared to Benjamin, she looks much too old, and their entire relationship is a creepy, creepy betrayal.
What’s more, the movie puts all the blame for their creepy relationship on Mrs. Robinson and almost none on Benjamin. The Graduate never says this overtly, but she’s consistently filmed looming over Benjamin, emphasizing power and experience. Low angles and dominant framing make her imposing and authoritative. She’s always placed in adult spaces like dim bars, bedrooms, and cocktail settings that reinforce her status and power as being superior to Benjamin.
The Power Of Symbolic Guilt Transfer
Mrs. Robinson must be creepy, and she must be to blame, because she represents the movie’s true motives. Mrs. Robinson exists in the film to be the chief representative of suburbia, and it’s suburbia that The Graduate is out to destroy. This is Symbolic Guilt Transfer.
Symbolic Guilt Transfer is a persuasion effect in which negative moral judgment or blame attached to a person, image, or symbol is psychologically shifted onto the broader group, place, or idea that the figure is made to represent, causing audiences to condemn the larger target through its symbolic stand-in.
Mrs. Robinson is the rotting, putrid core at the heart of the suburbs. She’s there to make you FEEL negatively about a place, not a person, and it’s all hidden beneath a veneer of smoky-voiced, granny panties seduction.
Boring Is The Worst
But what are the suburbs really? Everyone has a nice house, they have friends, and aside from Mrs. Robinson, they seem happy and well-adjusted. The suburban lifestyle is so obviously superior to the crowded, restrictive, crime-ridden city alternatives people were familiar with in 1967 that there really was no way to attack that honestly.
So instead, The Graduate makes them dull. Boring. It makes you think BORING is the worst. That boring rots the soul, that boring turns you into Mrs. Robinson. The camera lingers on beige walls, manicured lawns, polite smiles. It sells the idea that nice things are inherently empty and creates an inverted morality in which good is bad and bad is good.
Things snowball as the movie goes on, with Benjamin basically going insane. He becomes a full-on stalker, harassing Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, who behaves like a brain-dead zombie and follows his commands for basically no reason.
Through it all, the movie’s groovy Simon & Garfunkel-powered soundtrack blares, and to audiences back then, that music felt hip and cool, a signal that Benjamin is on the right track. Seen through a modern lens, that endless 60s soundtrack sounds haunting and disturbing, and the film takes on the form of a horror movie as Benjamin increasingly acts irrationally, violently, and abusively.
Because the film was stylish, funny, and backed by a soundtrack that felt modern and restless, the teenage Boomers who piled into its audience didn’t see it as a horror movie. It felt edgy, it felt cool. It felt right. And so The Graduate spread a message of insanity and irresponsibility as optimal, based entirely on feeling and vibes. It packaged and sold a ridiculous anti-suburb, anti-responsibility lie that made success look cowardly and respect look like conformity.
Hollywood Provides Impressionable Minds Social Proof That The Graduate Is Right
The Graduate worked, and the Hollywood elite rewarded it for pushing exactly the right message. Mike Nichols won the Academy Award for Best Director, while the film earned additional Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Dustin Hoffman, and Best Actress for Anne Bancroft.
It exploded into one of the era’s biggest hits, grossing over $100 million worldwide, an extraordinary figure for the late 1960s, and becoming the highest-grossing film of 1967. It’s still regarded by the modern-day press as one of the greatest films of all time, and if you ask most average Boomers about it, they’ll probably tell you The Graduate changed their entire life.
Perhaps more importantly, The Graduate’s runaway success signaled a shift toward youth-oriented propaganda and helped usher in the New Hollywood era, which led to even more manipulative films, like The Stepford Wives, which you can learn more about right here on this channel.
The Ultimate Straw Man
The powers that be couldn’t argue against the Greatest Generation’s post-World War II success, so they constructed a straw man and made people hate it. The Graduate was that straw man, a symbol of everything that stood in opposition to America’s post-War prosperity. You can’t fight a symbol.
Mike Nichols claims his intent was only to show the confusion of youth, but it’s unlikely he’s being honest. That being his only goal doesn’t explain Mrs. Robinson, or the movie’s over-the-top finish, in which Benjamin wards off suburbanites with a giant cross, as if they’re daywalking vampires.
Permanently Implanted With Catharsis
In that finale, by the way, which is the film’s propaganda masterstroke, The Graduate hard-codes all the bad ideas it’s been planting in its audience’s brains by giving them catharsis. Catharsis is an engineered emotional purge that converts built-up tension into relief, binding the audience to whatever action, character, or idea triggered the release.
So when Benjamin storms a wedding, releasing all the tension the movie’s been building up by thumbing his nose at everything, it’s like The Graduate just hit the “save program” button in your brain. It’s why The Graduate still lives rent-free in your Boomer grandparents’ heads, and why there’s no shaking them out of it.
The last we see of Benjamin, he’s boarding a bus with the girl he stalked, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. He’s abandoned the freedom with responsibility of the suburbs and set out on an uncertain journey into nothingness. For Benjamin, oblivion is better than opportunity.
For the audience, freedom of choice is now a prison, and basic level responsibility is a curse. Congratulations, future welfare moochers, you’ve been Screenwashed.
