Thirty-eight: The Transplanted

It goes without saying that The Graduate is an important movie. Few would disagree with this, I believe. The Graduate symbolizes for many an articulation of 1960s rebellion against the plastic world of the Organization Man. This was certainly how I viewed it when I first saw it. Although I was only thirteen, and it was my first weekend at my public (private) school, this was close to the sixties and the feelings of that decade were very much in the air. A few weeks later the school screened Lindsay Anderson’s If, which was asking for trouble since it ends with Malcolm McDowell standing atop Cheltenham Cathedral (if I recall correctly) raining bullets down on the parents and teachers of his own public school. The association of The Graduate with rebellion, which was probably there anyway, was further accentuated in my mind as a result of the juxtaposition of these movies. While confused in its own way – adopting the system’s mode of conformity (Benjamin’s desire to marry Elaine) to protest against conformity – The Graduate nonetheless opens a gaping hole in the monochromatic suburban landscape.

The movie also comes at the end of an era in Hollywood history, and represents an interesting counterpoint to The Jazz Singer. The earlier film represented the coming of age of the Jewish mogul bringing to the fore the internal conflict of the sons of immigrants endeavoring to assimilate into American culture. Produced in 1927, three years after the Johnson-Reed Act effectively cut off immigration, the story revealed Jake Rabinowitz turning himself into Jack Robin and dating fellow Broadway dancer and Jew, Mary Dale. While the movie appears on the surface to celebrate the continuity of Jewish traditions, alongside the emergent “American” culture (baseball and apple pie), the reality of a nation cutting off the immigrants from the “old world”, and the coming rush to the uniform suburbs, left the culture of the cantor and the synagogue seeming quaint and moribund. What followed in Hollywood was several decades of Jewish producers, directors, and actors, helping to create an image of America that was decidedly WASPish in most of its aspects.

The Graduate, however, does the exact reverse of The Jazz Singer. Made by Anglicized [Americanized?] Jews, like the director Mike Nichols, it turns a story of a WASP youth into that of a Jewish rebel thumbing his nose at the establishment. This was not a deliberate move on Nichols’ part, apparently, but rather came to fruition with the hiring of Dustin Hoffman (as opposed to Robert Redford) to play the lead role. Seeing Hoffman’s audition enabled Nichols to see that Benjamin’s alienation could be rendered as more than just a product of generational difference; it could become something embedded in Hoffman’s appearance as not being the tall, handsome, bronzed and blonde California male. The question would be asked, how did these goy parents have this Jewish kid? – though, of course, many Jewish parents would have endeavored to pass as WASPs throughout the 1950s. When you throw in the music of Simon and Garfunkel and Benjamin’s waving of a large cross at the wedding-goers – a reversal of sorts of Jesus cleansing the synagogue of the money-changers, since these were now being locked in the church – then the fact that “Jesus loves you more than you know” no longer amounts to a point of great importance, or anything more than irony. What comes to mind is William Jennings Bryan’s statement, “Thou shalt not crucify mankind on a Cross of Gold,” except the cross is now being waved by Hoffman at all the Christians – when Bryan would have had it the other way around.

In this guise, The Graduate takes on the form of a second pronouncement on the closing of the frontier and a revenge of the east against the west. California was the last land of the settlers, those who responded to the call to “go west young man,” and the most recently developed section of the United States as a result of the great growth of the military-industrial complex during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The establishment of a chemical industry, which provides the single word “plastics” for the movie, represents the coming of age of industrial capital in California, and Benjamin’s return from the East – a land associated in the minds of Dustin Hoffman and Mike Nichols with Jewish intellectuals (e.g., Dylan and Lenny Bruce) who had also been the backbone of the labor movement in the 19th century – is the injection of a foreign agent into this mix. De Tocqueville, one feels, is close at hand. While Benjamin doesn’t fit the mold of the radical protesting at Berkeley, there are allusions to these disturbances, and his protest is powerful nonetheless. In the process, he ends up transplanting Jack Robin back into his earlier persona as Jakie Rabinowitz, taking him out of his convertible (suburban) and placing him back on public transport (urban), all just in time for social historians to rediscover the immigrant community;