Where does 'The Graduate' go from here?

Rating: 9/10 (2 May 2012)

I actually saw this movie for the first time in Louisville, Kentucky while competing in the Optimist Oratorical Contest. I must have been sixteen at the time, and what I remember most about the film was how it woke me up. I felt energized and trotted back to our rooms filled with inspiration and pep. What I got out of 'THE GRADUATE' was that you could, in the words of Paul Simon, '-get on the bus, Gus. Make a new plan, Stan-'and somehow even without rhyme or reason rise above the Status Quo.
Everything in this film revolves around the title, 'THE GRADUATE', and the irony of this appellation in reference to the title character Benjamin Braddock. He has made his parents happy, met all of society's preliminary requirements with academic and athletic success in sports and games, and yet he basks like a gooey mass in the unawareness of society's expectations of him, or even the people in his immediate surroundings. What exactly is the nature of this 'graduation' he is experiencing at this time, and is it really supposed to feel this way?
We were sitting in the lunch room one day when I was substitute teaching and listening to Doctor Peoples Ph.D explain how he got started coming up from down South to Detroit, Michigan. He explained how he initially stayed with friends and relatives and cast about looking for a job. Eventually, he found one at a Gas Station and worked his way up to managing the place because people kept coming up to him asking for information and solutions to their problems with their automobiles. He related an incident where one customer would repeatedly pepper him with requests and inquiries so that at length Doctor Peoples said to him, "Why are you asking me all this?" The customer looked at him blankly and uttered, "You looked like the one in charge-"
All of us revered Doctor Peoples as he physically resembled a cross between Coleman Young and Joe Louis, the heavyweight boxing champ, and there was about him this unstated strength that placed him above the need to prove anything to anyone. I'll never forget him relating to us how when he was working steady and had some money in the bank, the folks he was staying with asked him humbly, "You think you can make it now?" To which Doctor Peoples replied, just as humbly, "Yeah,... I think I can make it.."
The point of that little story is that I think all young people hope at some point they will 'look like the one in charge' and be able to say, '-I think I can make it now-Let me take it from here-'. The comedy of 'THE GRADUATE' to me was that we have here this product of higher education and yet there's no sense about him being eager to take charge of his life or being able to make it from here. You would think he would have some well defined sense of his own basic purpose by now, and yet it seems totally submerged under the obligation to meet the social proprieties of his times.
Being a member of the Sixties generation I remember that one of our defining assertions was that the rewards of the Status Quo were not enough. The angst of Benjamin Braddock is beautifully interpreted by Dustin Hoffman. We have in Braddock a kind of walking zombie, stuffed to gills with information where a moral center should be, and filled with a need to truly care about something deeply enough to fight for it and figure out the problems attendant to getting it.
The ending is troublesome and problematic while being exhilarating all at the same time, but I felt viscerally that somehow both Elaine and Benjamin finally graduated in demonstrating a willingness and ability to defy and rise above the Staus Quo.
One of the great ironies of 'THE GRADUATE' is that the ending comes across as an 'anti-graduation' and an 'un-marriage', as Elaine and Benjamin have cast themselves away from the safety nets of family, community and even the aegis of the Church, but it is anything but that. It is simply a small step for two people who are experiencing a kind of self creation on uncharted waters where anything is possible. Perhaps even a new sense of Family, a new sense of Community, and a new sense of what it means to experience religion and the Church.
That's what it was like to come up in the sixties, folks...