The Graduate (Blog Response 1)

  In the movie, The Graduate, Ben Braddock is having trouble dealing with life after college. In a way, he is still like a kid after he comes home. He obeys what everyone says, and and seems very young. In the movie, mise en scene plays a very big role. Everything we see, the different house settings, the water, and even the cigarettes, are in the movie is for a reason.

In the Braddock house, every thing is black and white. While this may look sleek and be reflective of the times, it has symbolism in the movie. The black and white may symbolize a prison. His room is wallpapered with black and white stripes, and this gives the viewers a feeling of entrapment. Since Ben is worried about his future, this anxiety may make him feel like he is trapped. The directors of the film didn’t just randomly pick black and white for the colors of the Braddock household, they carefully picked out these colors to give the viewer a sense of the dullness in Ben’s life.

  To get rid of this dullness, Ben has an affair with Mrs. Robinson, who happens to be friends with his parents. Is this really the way to start growing up? Maybe not, but it helps Ben break out of conformity. Throughout the film, water is a recurring role. To me, the water symbolizes purity. After Ben is starting to realize the affair is no good and he wants to clean up his act, there is a scene where he is in his room and we see, out of the window, Mr. Braddock skimming the pool. This scene really stuck out to me. Although it wasn’t Ben skimming the pool, the act of this father skimming it symbolizes that Ben wasn’t pure anymore, but was trying to erase all of the really bad things that he did.

      Although cigarettes are considered bad today, in the 60s, they were a sign of sophistication. In the beginning of the movie, when Mrs. Robinson goes into Ben’s room with a cigarette, he is totally repulsed by the smoke and wipes her ashes into the trashcan. After one of the turning points in the movie, when sleeps with Mrs. Robinson for the first time, we start to see Ben breaking out of his perfect child role; he is starting to grow up. Because he has this new sense of being an adult, he starts smoking cigarettes. In the beginning, he is known as this track star from college, and his parents are pushing him to go to graduate school. Ben doesn’t want to do that, and has other plans for himself. When Ben starts smoking, this is a sign that he is defying what his parents want him to do, and he is not under the control of his parents anymore.