Summary
Mr. Braddock makes an announcement to a group gathered in his backyard, this time during the day for the occasion of Benjamin’s 21st birthday. Braddock announces that he has an attraction in store for the small audience gathered there. Running to the sliding door leading into the house, Mr. Braddock asks if the “Featured Attraction” is ready to reveal itself. In response we hear the meek Benjamin—the Attraction— ask to have a private word with his father. Ignoring his request, Mr. Braddock tells the assembled audience that they need to give a big round of applause to lure Benjamin out of the house. As they cheer and ask for Benjamin, we hear Benjamin from inside the house asking to discuss the event privately with his father. The more he complains, the more his father tells Ben that he is “disappointing them.” Braddock announces that Benjamin is going to give a demonstration of a “pretty exciting birthday present,” and finally opens the door to reveal Benjamin in a scuba diving suit.
Benjamin wanders out of the house in the scuba suit. We see the backyard from his perspective, as he walks past the enthusiastic guests to the pool and jumps in, the only sound his breathing through the scuba mask. Kicking his flippers up in front of him, he hesitates before jumping into the blue water. Trying to come up to the surface, his father pushes his face mask back down into the water with his palm. Benjamin remains underwater, staring up at the surface. The camera perspective shifts to reveal Benjamin sitting at the bottom of the pool, unmoving and confused.
As Benjamin’s image at the bottom of the pool becomes more and more obscured, we hear a voiceover of Benjamin calling Mrs. Robinson on the phone, and hesitantly propositioning her for sex. The scene shifts to reveal Benjamin in a phone booth in the evening, as he asks if he can buy Mrs. Robinson a drink. When she asks, “Where are you?” he responds that he is at the Taft hotel. She asks if he got a room, which he didn’t, and Mrs. Robinson brusquely tells him that she will be there in an hour. Hanging up the telephone, Benjamin lets out an anxious sigh and takes off his jacket, excited but anxious about his reckless decision to take Mrs. Robinson up on her proposition.
Benjamin comes out of the phone booth, lights a cigarette, and enters the hotel lobby to wait for Mrs. Robinson. Benjamin smiles as he holds open the door for an almost endless stream of well-dressed elderly couples leaving the hotel. Just as he tries to go inside, two young couples run in ahead of him. Once inside, Benjamin stands near the front desk and is apprehended by the concierge who asks, “Are you here for an affair, sir?” Visibly startled, Benjamin lets out a confused, “What?” but the concierge clarifies that he is asking if he is there for a private party. Pretending to be looking for the “Singleman party,” Benjamin thanks the concierge and exits, the concierge watching him as he goes. Benjamin is greeted at the door by two smiling older women, one of whom mistakes Benjamin for one of the porters and introduces him to her sister and her husband. When the woman cannot find his name on the guest list, he clarifies that he is only there to meet a friend, and sneaks away to the disapproving frown of the woman with the guest list.
Benjamin makes his way past the front desk yet again and into a bar, where a tango is being played on a piano. Seating himself at a table for two, Benjamin struggles to get the attention of a waiter. The shot shifts to Benjamin in closer view sipping a bourbon and soda, a pack of cigarettes beside him, waiting for Mrs. Robinson. As the camera shifts to show Benjamin’s reflection in the glass table he is sitting at, Mrs. Robinson walks into the reflection and greets Benjamin in her characteristically smoky, calm voice. Wearing a leopard print jacket, Mrs. Robinson asks Benjamin if he is going to get her a drink, but flags the waiter herself to order a martini when Benjamin is unable to attract the waiter’s attention. “You don’t have to be so nervous,” she tells Benjamin, before grilling him about whether he got them a room at the hotel. He says he hasn’t, which prompts her to ask him if he wants to, but when he hesitates, she impatiently asks, “Do you want me to get it?” Benjamin agrees to get the room, confirming Mrs. Robinson’s powers of persuasion yet again.
Benjamin goes up to the front desk and nervously requests a single room, insisting it is just for him. When he signs the register, he rips out the first page and hides it from the concierge in his jacket pocket, electing to write a fake name, “Mr. Gladstone.” Weaving an elaborate fiction, Benjamin lies about having luggage out in his car, and when the concierge rings for a porter, Benjamin abruptly silences the bell, insisting he will leave his luggage in the car. When the concierge offers to have a porter show him the room, Benjamin says he can find it himself.
A waiter brings Mrs. Robinson a telephone at her table at the bar. When she picks it up, Benjamin is on the line, and asks her to look through the glass. He tells her that the man at the front desk seemed suspicious, and she says she’ll come up separately, in five minutes. Benjamin almost hangs up, but Mrs. Robinson stops, waiting for him to tell her the room number, room 568. Mrs. Robinson hangs up, smiling and flicking her cigarette, and asks for the check. When Benjamin walks past the front desk on his way to the room, he makes a performance of telling the man that he retrieved his toothbrush from the car, yawning and retiring to bed.
Benjamin walks down the long fancy hall of the hotel to the room, and turns on the light before immediately turning it off again. Turning on a subtler light, Benjamin surveys the room, then shuts the blinds for privacy, and brushes his teeth in the bathroom. He lets out a faint squeal of anxiety just as Mrs. Robinson knocks on the hotel room door. Upon entering, Mrs. Robinson immediately turns on the overhead light that Benjamin had turned off, and comes into the room, while Benjamin sneaks the “Do not disturb” sign onto the door handle and turns out the overhead light. Bemused, Mrs. Robinson smokes her cigarette, but Benjamin taps her on the shoulder to spin her around. After awkwardly clearing his throat, he kisses her, but she remains lifeless, her eyes darting around waiting for it to end. As the kiss finishes, Mrs. Robinson blows out the smoke she was holding in, and asks if she should get undressed. Benjamin mechanically asks what he should do, and Mrs. Robinson suggests that he should watch. When she requests a hanger, he goes to the closet and asks if she would like wood or wire, and she hangs her jacket up. He helps her unzip her shirt, and she notices a small stain in it as she takes it off. As she is just about to unhook her bra, she is interrupted by Benjamin who has gone to the corner and started banging his head against the wall. Benjamin expresses having second thoughts about sleeping with one of his parents’ friends, in spite of finding Mrs. Robinson very attractive. As Benjamin spins out into deeper anxiety, suggesting they just go to a movie instead, Mrs. Robinson asks him if it is his first time having sex. Defensively, Benjamin tells Mrs. Robinson, “Don’t move!” and slams the door so they are both in darkness, Mrs. Robinson smiling just before the light disappears.
In darkness, Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” plays again, and the scene shifts to reveal Benjamin lying on a flotation device in his parents’ pool with sunglasses on. The water glitters as he moves his head back and forth in the sun. He drinks a beer as the song plays and we see him lounging in various positions, while specters of his parents stand beside the pool. He gets out of the pool, puts on a white shirt, and goes into the house, which transforms back into the Taft hotel room, as the scene shifts to Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson, post coital and relaxed.
Analysis
In this section, as in the first, we see Benjamin continually in situations that are out of his control and desire. This section of the film starts with Benjamin clearly not wanting to perform for the guests at his party. Benjamin continually shies away from the attention that the adults in his life pay him. This is especially marked in his relationship with Mrs. Robinson, and her pushy assertion of her sexuality, but we observe that it is true of all parts of his life. We see Ben’s ambivalence about being in the spotlight on the occasion of his birthday, as he is forced to trot out the scuba suit, to everyone’s delight, and his apparent embarrassment.
Again, Mike Nichols frames much of the narrative through vivid perspective shifts. When Benjamin exits the house, we see the party through the eyehole of his scuba mask, a small portal to the world around him. The viewer can no longer hear the cheers and delight of the party guests, only Benjamin’s breathing as he walks outside. In this moment, we are aligned with Benjamin’s inner life, his ambivalence in the face of celebration and the world of adults that surrounds him. He jumps into the water, a refreshing silence in contrast to the maniacal laughter of the guests above, but when he tries to come to the surface, we are faced with the controlling palm of his father, who pushes Benjamin’s face mask back under the water. The pool is a metaphor for freedom from the sociality of the party, but it also represents a place where Benjamin is captive, a site of his alienation from his community. Having just graduated from college, he is separate, in-between, and outside of the culture in which he lives. His father’s controlling hand symbolizes the way he is trapped on the track towards adulthood, a track that will take him further and further away from freedom.
After the moment of modeling the scuba suit, and feeling all the more hemmed in by his upbringing and his parents, Benjamin decides to take the plunge, and take Mrs. Robinson up on her offer. By embarking on a sexual relationship with Mrs. Robinson, Benjamin takes control of his own life and begins to feel a sense of adventure in his otherwise confined situation. Without a real sense of direction, Benjamin decides to break the taboo and rebel against the mannered and empty existence of his Los Angeles family home. While he is nervous and jittery, Benjamin is also invigorated by the risk he is taking. No longer confined to the pool, or the glib parties of his parents, or the job hunt that seems to lead only to “plastics,” Benjamin finds freedom in the erotic, and in traversing sexual taboos.
It is in this section that we begin to realize that Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are connected by their respective desires for freedom. Stuck at home with parents who do not understand him, Benjamin can sympathize with Mrs. Robinson’s aimless existence as a housewife. While they have starkly dissimilar personalities, they are joined in their desire to transform their realities and break out of the scripts to which they have been confined. While they could not be more dissimilar—Benjamin a hesitant and blundering college graduate and Mrs. Robinson a sexually sophisticated femme fatale—they share a desire to connect and have an experience out of the ordinary.
It is also in this section of the movie that we see Benjamin regain his agency and sense of self by following his libido and embarking on a sexual relationship with Mrs. Robinson. When Mrs. Robinson challenges his sexual experience, he is filled with a passion and an assertiveness that we have not seen in him before, as he slams the door, signaling he is ready to have sex. In the dream sequence that stands in for the depiction of the sex act, Benjamin is no longer at the bottom of the pool, but floating along the top of it on a raft, leisurely drinking a beer, behind the cool shade of his sunglasses. Sex is a transformative act for Benjamin, and he is afforded some freedom from the confined anxiety of his ordinary life.
