dark side of the counterculture

Rating: 6/10 (2 July 2020)

Joni Mitchell, having personally gone through the hippie movement of the '60s, expressed her gratification in full with the album Blue. "Carey" is about a hippie community in a Greek island in Crete, and even Paris pales in comparison with "California." Yet Mitchell gives a clue about her loss of a child as well. Being "dirt poor," she had to give her child away for adoption.
Women's living condition was the dark side of the '60s counterculture. With the supposed liberation, women gained sexual freedom at their own expense. As long as they were not regarded as equal beings by men, women still had to pay the price for the mishaps in a relationship, abortion being an obvious case. Mrs. Robinson, the middle-aged woman holding cigarettes and stretching her legs in stockings, is an archetype of a femme fatale. She is, indeed, "the most desirable of all my [Benjamin's] parents' friends" -- and perhaps of ours too. She is smart, resolute, self-conscious, honest about her desires, and owns up to her mistakes too. Mrs. Robinson is a liberated woman of the '60s, mediating between her two roles as a respectable mother and an attractive sexual partner -- the latter, though, not in the capacity of wife.
In The Graduate, the protagonist Benjamin had the pleasure of exploring his life choices by the exact virtue of being a man. Having already had an affair with Mrs. Robinson, Benjamin now devote to Elaine, Mrs. Robinson's daughter, his passion. Now Elaine, a lady-like girl, goes to Berkeley for college. Adamant about her love for Benjamin, she endures his careless mistakes. Like her mother, Elaine rebels against traditional womanhood without completely breaking the constraints, but they nevertheless both fell victims to a reckless man's hunting for beauty, innocence, charms, submission, etc.
What was Mrs. Robinson like when she was young, and who would Elaine become when she grows older? What lays under the sweet disguise of swimming pools, folk music and decadent youth is the exploitation of brilliant women across generation by a witty wasted young man.