Monday, July 20, 2015

Matrimony Month: Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry to Missus Robinson: The Graduate, Love Story, and how the 60’s Generation Inadvertently Slew Romantic Sarcasm by the Dawn of the 70s



The sixties meant change.  Change in the bedroom, the boardroom, the streetcorner and of course your local movie theatre.  With the code breaking and independent zeitgeist films breaking through into the mainstream and winning money and Oscars, every genre was transformed.  There were outsider comedies, dramas….and, of course, romantic pictures.

This new generation of lovers-to-be had about a million different points of view on love.  The first reaction was cynicism; falling in love was something squares did, a symptom of a bourgeois society, and the antithesis of free love.  Novels like The Harrad Experiment demanded open relationships and free love, while other movies – like the 1967 proto-slacker dramady The Graduate – mocked the idea of love, peace and those old wedding bells as the solution to everything.   This is a decade that had Dr. Zhivago, Easy Rider and The Graduate all released within ten turbulent years; that’s a lot of different ways to look at love.




Benjamin Braddock has just graduated college, and he has absolutely no idea what he wants to do with the rest of his life.  At his graduation party he is nearly seduced by his parent’s friend, Missus Robinson, only to fall into a hopeless affair with her while dodging the footfalls of his future life.  His parents, worried about his aimlessness, fix him up with Missus Robinson’s daughter, but Benjamin’s attraction to Elaine soon turns into obsession and his entanglement with Missus Robinson only results in calamitous jealousy.

In “The Graduate”, marriage is a symptom of the bourgeois system.  For Missus Robinson it’s something she fell into just to please her social group; she lives a duel life, the other in which she’s a free and easy as she wants to be with her affection.  Benjamin has played by the rules his entire life; but with the promise of a steady future looming on the horizon he suddenly becomes reactive, rejecting the world o his parents alongside Elaine.  But when the twosome run away together the notion of happily ever together still chills them.



Romance in film took a similarly cynical view for quite awhile afterward, the big watershed turn in the public nomenclature occurring when Love Story was released in 1970.

The plotline could not be simpler; the storyline could not be more clichéd.  He’s an Ivy League Prepster; she’s a working-class intellectual at school on a scholarship.  They fight over books in a library, which leads to a frolic in the snow, bonding over hockey, and True Love.  Their parents worry she’s marrying him for his money; they rebel and marry anyway.  Jenny and Oliver initially seem to have it all – until their attempt at having children ends in infertility, and further exploration results in the discovery of Jenny’s advanced cancer.  As she dies they have to come to grips with the briefness of their time together.


It  couldn’t be more clichéd, and yet this movie made millions at the box office, launching Ali McGraw’s career and becoming a cultural touchstone. When Erich Segal tried to write a sequel about Oliver’s life critics and audiences rejected it, refusing to picture him and his life without Jenny.  It’s success proved that even when popular sentiment suggests weepy, corny romance isn’t cool sentiment will never go out of style. 

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