When last we saw Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson, they were sitting in the back of a Santa Barbara city bus, flush with the excitement of escape.
That's one of the defining pop culture images of its era, made iconic by Mike Nichols' 1967 film "The Graduate": Benjamin in his torn Windbreaker and Elaine in her wedding dress, the troubled past behind them and their lives together about to begin. Such a scene speaks to possibility -- the possibility to construct one's experience, to break with tradition, to get what we really want.
And yet, for all that we associate this image with the 1960s, it's more a comment on the America of the 1950s, with its buttoned-down conformity, its suburban stifling of the soul. Benjamin and Elaine, after all, were not originally creations of the movies, but of writer Charles Webb, whose novel "The Graduate" appeared in 1963.
That's a long time ago now, before the Kennedy assassination, before Haight-Ashbury, before Vietnam became a quagmire and then a metaphor for everything we lost. Webb, in other words, was there at the outset, and his novel evokes the cusp between two moments, the old world as it gave way to the new.
Webb is very much a product of that transition; born in 1939, he published "The Graduate" at 24 and then embarked on a peripatetic life, producing a handful of novels -- including "New Cardiff," which inspired the movie "Hope Springs" -- turning his back on success each time it came too close.
It's easy to see a bit of him in Benjamin, who walked away from a prestigious teaching fellowship and the advantages of his Ivy League education in search of some more elemental connection, a way of living that was more engaged. That's the note on which "The Graduate" ends, and for 40-plus years, it's been a perfect place to stop.
And why not? Who wants to imagine the nightmare Benjamin and Elaine faced after that bus stopped rolling and they had to step back into their lives? What about Elaine's wedding, which Benjamin had literally pulled her out of? And their families, including Elaine's mother, Mrs. Robinson, with whom Benjamin had slept?
The situation was so loaded that it became a source of humor; in the extended tracking shot that opens Robert Altman's 1992 film "The Player," Buck Henry (Oscar nominated for the screenplay for "The Graduate") pitches "The Graduate 2" to Tim Robbins' soulless Hollywood executive Griffin Mill.
