Culture. Eat it
18 September 2017
I say The Graduate and immediately snap the locks of the memories suitcase. It’s amarcord.
Ben and Elaine are there, sitting on that bus, looking blank and dazed.
In the air, there is the feeling that suggests they haven’t made any radical decision except the instinct to escape together.
Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” and “Mrs Robinson” are playing powerful and unstoppable in the head.
Few people may know that Mike Nichols’ famous film is from a novel written by Charles Webb in 1963. That’s the reason why The Graduate has been defined “the strange failure.”
The novel has been eclipsed by the movie (and by the soundtrack).
The story, with its dialogues, seems to work only when we’re thinking about the film version of Benjamin and the Braddock, Elaine and the Robinsons.
Too strong the idea that those pages were written to be staged, that those characters existed just in front of a camera.
It seems to be in front of a near and far book.
Is close that sense of static, that we live today because nothing is certain or already been written.
He’s familiar with this feelings and he tries to rebel but he’s stuck.
The relationship with Mrs Robinson will not shake him, nor the decision to travel instead of continue his studies.
To break this condition will come Elaine, the first thing Ben really liked after a long time, though perhaps he doesn’t know why.
Far away is the boredom. We don’t even remember how it feels to have nothing to do.
While you’re reading The Graduate you have the feeling that nothing significant is happening and it is a waste of time go further in this.
The reprint of the publishing by Mattioli 1885 gives a new look to the book in an attempt to remind us that before the young Dustin Hoffman, Ben, and the beautiful Katharine Ross, Elaine, there was a story.
A story that perhaps we are not interested in today, but that anticipates the America of the 1968 student revolution.
And who knows, maybe wiping out Mrs Robinson’s black tights from the cover,
The Graduate can only remind us of the loss experienced by a young boy having a predetermined life, not being able to ask himself whether is happy and not knowing what the answer is, or maybe, not yet.
Reading time
an afternoon with Ben
Ph. Sara Cartelli
© The Eat Culture
Author
Bio:
She is an art historian, optimistic and empathic by nature. She imagines a world where sow kindness enjoying the little things. She's in love with stories since she was a child, for the Eat Culture she eats books and arts. Per aspera ad astra says the only tattoo on her skin. It reminds her that the road that leads to her dreams is not always easy but that she never gives up.
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