Five Viewings; Five Different Reactions

Rating: 5/10 (22 December 2015)

1. I first watched this film in 1968 when I was 12 years old. I didn't understand anything about it other than the music, which I loved. Later that year I ran out and bought "Bookends" by Simon & Garfunkel, and the album got me through junior high school alive. (The best song on the album IMO is "At the Zoo," a mostly-forgotten classic that hasn't been played on an FM station in 40 years.)
2. I next watched the film in 1973. I was 17. I fell in love with Katharine Ross and remain enamored to the present day.
3. Next time I watched the movie was in 1976 when I was 20. I loved it, I felt, with all the fervor and angst of a college lit. student, that it summarized and articulated my life, i.e., what's it all about? Plastics? Really? OMG.
4. I next watched it in 1981 and found it enjoyable, watchable, somewhat dated, not accurate about the '60s.
5. I watched it today, December of 2015. It seems radically dated and essentially unwatchable. The thought crosses my mind: it's the most over-rated "cool" film of the '60s; it is to the '60s what "It Happened One Night" is to the '30s, i.e., I guess you had to be there. It has a lot to do with being a smart graduate of Williams College in the late '50s and early '60s (the author of the novel, Charles Webb, is Williams Class of '61) but very little to do with the middle and late '60s and nothing whatsoever to do with Berkeley in the '60s when political engagement was robust. The sensibility is a hip '50s sensibility (i.e., a Mike Nichols sensibility) and besotted with its cuteness.
I was surprised by this latest reaction. I look forward to watching the film again in a few years and seeing if I feel the same way.
Memo to Benjamin Braddock - get your own apartment, dude; everyone else in the '60s was, why not you? (The answer, as noted, is because he's in a '50s film rather than a '60s film.) Memo to Mrs. Robinson - smoke some weed, mama. (Every rich hip suburban lady circa 1968 who was unhappy in her marriage, craved sex, and lived in a college town was smoking weed.) Memo to Elaine - grow up. (In the second half of the '60s, young women like you were breaking loose, reading Cosmopolitan, smashing conventions, and going for it.)