Summary
Benjamin drives Elaine in his red convertible, and she asks him about his life living with his parents post-graduation. As her hair blows in the wind, and the engine roars, Elaine asks if Benjamin knows what he is going to do next, which he does not. He tells her he does not plan to go to graduate school, and she worriedly asks, “Do you always drive like this?” as he speeds and slams on the breaks, halting just before the car in front of them. Benjamin and Elaine walk towards a bar as rock music plays and a group of countercultural twenty somethings gather. Benjamin is wearing dark sunglasses and Elaine struggles to keep up with him, and they walk into a dimly lit and smoky strip club, where Benjamin takes a seat close to the stage. Evidently scandalized, Elaine hesitates to sit down next to him, as a dancing girl in a silver sequined bikini dances to slinky dance music. As Elaine stares at him, Benjamin asks her why she is not watching the show, to which she responds, “Benjamin, do you dislike me for some reason?” Elaine has her back to the stripper, who waves tassels with her breasts, which she has now exposed. “There’s a great effect there!” Benjamin yells, and Elaine sneaks a quick peek. The dancer then comes up behind Elaine and spins her tassels just above Elaine’s head, as Benjamin looks at them both vaguely. Elaine begins to cry, Benjamin pushes the stripper away, and they run out of the club, Elaine leading the way.
Once outside, Benjamin apologizes as Elaine insists that she needs to go home. Elaine becomes more and more frustrated, searching in vain for the car, when Benjamin tells her that his parents forced him into asking her out on a date. This only offends her more, and she cannot stop crying. Finally, Benjamin kisses her tenderly, much to Elaine’s surprise. The scene switches to the two of them in the car, eating hamburgers. As Elaine takes big bites of her hamburger, Benjamin tells her about his “compulsion to be rude all the time,” ever since graduating. Elaine understands what he means, and he elaborates that “It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.” Benjamin then turns to the car next to them, which is playing loud rock music, and asks them to turn it down. He then brings their plates of french fries into the car and puts the convertible’s roof back on. They continue their conversation in the privacy of the roofed car, munching on fries and sharing attentive eye contact.
The scene cuts to the young couple sitting in the convertible outside the Robinson residence. Looking at Benjamin, Elaine asks him into the house for a cup of coffee, which gives Benjamin pause. He suggests that they go somewhere else, since it is still early, to which Elaine agrees. They drive away as the camera pans up to a window at the Robinson’s house. As they drive away, Benjamin considers where they can get a drink, and Elaine suggests the Taft Hotel, which causes Benjamin to momentarily drive up on the curb. Elaine is alarmed and asks what’s wrong, and Benjamin lies and tells her he doesn’t remember if the Taft has a bar, so they decide to go see.
Benjamin and Elaine enter the Taft. As Benjamin tries to convince Elaine that there isn’t a bar, a comic number of hotel staff members greet Benjamin friendlily, some of them referring to him by his fake affair name, “Mr. Gladstone.” Benjamin and Elaine shrug at one another, when a bellboy with dwarfism walks up, again greeting Benjamin as Mr. Gladstone. Elaine begins to become confused, asking Benjamin if they know him. When Benjamin replies, “of course not,” yet another member of the staff greets him enthusiastically. Benjamin ushers Elaine out of the hotel, explaining that they must think he looks like someone else, and an elderly lady greets him by yet another name, while Elaine looks more and more confused.
Benjamin drives Elaine in his convertible and makes a confession. He tells her he likes her, and that she is the first person he “can stand to be with.” In a moment of existential ennui, he tells her his life is a waste, before Elaine asks him plainly if he is having an affair with someone. He admits that it’s “just this thing that happened along with everything else.” When Elaine asks if the woman he had an affair with is married with a family, Benjamin tells the partial truth that “she had a husband and son.” Benjamin tells her that the family never found out and that the affair is over now. Elaine says she is glad. The scene shifts to Benjamin walking Elaine up to her front door, and he invites her on a date for the following day. She agrees, as they eat french fries out of the bag on the stoop.
In the following scene Benjamin is shown driving in the rain the next day to pick up Elaine. As we see a female figure scurry through the rain towards the car, we expect that Elaine is coming out for the date, but it turns out to be Mrs. Robinson, wet and frantic. Mrs. Robinson gets in the car and orders Benjamin to drive down the block. When Benjamin tells her that he and Elaine have a date, she snaps at him and tells him to do as she says. As he drives her down the block, Mrs. Robinson reiterates that she forbids Benjamin from seeing Elaine again, and threatens that she can “make things quite unpleasant.” She elaborates, saying that she will tell Elaine all about their affair in order to keep them apart. Benjamin says he does not believe her and runs away from the car in the heavy downpour towards the Robinson’s house. He runs up to Elaine’s room soaking wet, and she is still getting dressed. Anxiously, he tells her to put her shoes on and meet him at the corner, while Elaine giggles at him. He closes Elaine’s bedroom door when he sees Mrs. Robinson coming in the front, and begins to confess his affair with her mother to Elaine, when Mrs. Robinson approaches the bedroom door, also soaking wet. Realizing that Benjamin had an affair with her mother, Elaine becomes suddenly angry, telling Benjamin to leave immediately, screaming and slamming the door behind him. In the hall, Benjamin finds Mrs. Robinson, who tells him goodbye, dripping with rain and hunched in a corner.
His sins having been revealed to Elaine, Benjamin sits at home staring at his aquarium and smoking cigarettes, as “Scarborough Fair” by Simon and Garfunkel plays. Benjamin drives his convertible through the neighborhood, discreetly wearing sunglasses and passing the Robinson residence to spy on Elaine coming out the front door. He drives away, as the scene shifts to a shot of Benjamin watching his father clean the pool from his bedroom window. We then see him watching the Robinsons load up their car to send Elaine back to college, Mrs. Robinson staying behind in the driveway as Mr. Robinson and Elaine drive away. Benjamin is then shown sitting at a desk as the camera zooms in on a failed attempt at a letter to Elaine, her name written over and over again on a sheet of letter paper.
Mr. Braddock congratulates Benjamin as they both stand in the kitchen and Benjamin tells him that he is going to marry Elaine. Benjamin picks up a suitcase as his father hugs him, laughing proudly at the news. When Mr. Braddock tells Mrs. Braddock the news, she screams cartoonishly, overjoyed that her son is planning to get married. Benjamin announces that he is going up to Berkeley today, and when Mr. Braddock says he will call the Robinsons to celebrate, Benjamin says that they do not know, and that neither does Elaine and that he decided an hour before. Wilting, the Braddocks realize that Ben is making a spontaneous, and in their words “half-baked” decision. Benjamin remains adamant about his intentions, and when Mrs. Braddock asks how he knows if Elaine even wants to marry him, he responds, “She doesn’t, to be perfectly honest she doesn’t like me.” Four pieces of toast pop out of the toaster, punctuating Ben’s provocative statement.
Ben drives to Berkeley, winding along the California coast in his red convertible. He walks around the Berkeley campus in search of Elaine. He sits on the perimeter of a fountain on the campus quad as the camera rapidly zooms out to reveal a from-above shot of the campus. The initially empty quad is filled with students and we see Benjamin looking out for Elaine. He soon sees her coming out of a building carrying books and talking with a girlfriend. Benjamin looks longingly at Elaine as she talks to friends. Benjamin takes a room at a house in town, and answers the suspicious landlord’s questioning vaguely. After he says that “he has always wanted to see Berkeley,” the landlord glares at him and asks him whether he is an outside agitator, which Ben flatly denies. Elaine walks through the campus, and Ben watches her from afar.
The scene shifts to Ben drinking a beer at an outdoor table and watching Elaine come out of a bookstore. When Elaine gets on a bus, Ben chases it and runs alongside it. Seeing Ben, Elaine obscures her face, hoping he does not see her. Ben gets on, however, and comes to sit behind Elaine, pretending that their run-in is a complete coincidence. Elaine tells Benjamin that she is meeting someone at the zoo, and Benjamin makes awkward smalltalk, before saying that he will accompany her to the zoo.
At the zoo, Benjamin questions Elaine about where her date is, and she finally snaps at him and questions him about why he is in Berkeley. He tells her he has been auditing classes, and when he asks her if they can get together, she rejects him and walks away. The two of them run into Elaine’s date, Carl Smith. Carl and Elaine walk away, as Ben stays behind, deflated. He makes eye contact with two monkeys and the camera zooms in on a gorilla behind him.
Analysis
This section of the film marks the end of Benjamin’s affair with Mrs. Robinson and the introduction of Elaine, who acts as a naive and innocent foil to her more worldly and sophisticated mother. Acting out against the fact that he has been forced to ask Elaine out on a date, Benjamin takes Elaine to a strip club, which causes Elaine to become panicked and upset, running out in tears. Where Mrs. Robinson was a sexual aggressor the night she asked Benjamin to take her home, Elaine is only looking for a wholesome night out. Thus, the film positions Elaine in contrast with Mrs. Robinson, creating one of the central tensions of the movie, and forcing Benjamin to choose between the two sides of his sexuality. On the one hand, Benjamin is seduced by the more secretive and clandestine world of hotel affairs and smoky strip clubs, and on the other, he is charmed by Elaine’s purity and wants to enjoy an easy evening getting to know a girl home from college.
The film again uses perspective and formal elements to show the emotional dynamic between Benjamin and the world around him, particularly with Elaine. As Benjamin tries to comfort Elaine after having taken her to the strip club, the camera sits at a distance, and we see people walking by the couple in the foreground. Elaine and Benjamin are at a remove from the viewer, sharing a private moment, and the audience is once again positioned as a voyeur, catching a private moment between two twenty somethings. When Mrs. Robinson seduced Benjamin, the camera angles depicted distances that belied the comical sexual tension between them. Outside the strip club, the camera gives Benjamin and Elaine their space. The sexual tension of Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin is replaced by a purer intimacy, as depicted by the perspective of the camera. The young couple standing on the sidewalk is shown in contrast to the bustling and fast-paced world around them, sharing a private moment and then, finally, a kiss.
Perspective is again used to show Benjamin and Elaine’s growing intimacy when they bring their plates into the car and put the roof back up. The viewer watches the two of them create a private space from the world outside them, but we cannot hear exactly what they are saying. The intimacy of the couple is not even quite available to the audience. While the audience has until now had access to the more salacious details of the plot, the exact nature of Benjamin and Elaine’s intimacy remains mysterious. As the couple falls in love, sharing a tender moment of privacy, we are relegated to the status of the outside world, watching them continue their contemplative conversation privately.
The climax of the movie occurs when Benjamin confesses to his affair with Elaine’s mother. Rainwater pours down Benjamin’s anxious face as he struggles to make good on his transgression and tell Elaine the truth. The scene is shot to heighten the suspense, as Benjamin races Mrs. Robinson back to her house through a downpour and hurriedly tries to escape with Elaine. The natural intimacy and chemistry between the two young people only heightens the suspense; the viewer does not want to see the relationship fail, but we know that Benjamin’s affair with Elaine’s mother will have to be revealed at some point, and that it will likely not go well. The affair comes to light in perhaps the worst possible way, with Benjamin barely able to make the confession before Mrs. Robinson appears forebodingly in the doorway, and Elaine puts the pieces together herself. Shocked and betrayed, Elaine screams to get Benjamin out of the house, and their promising romance is tarnished. Mrs. Robinson, a once powerful erotic presence, is left shivering and scowling in the hallway of her house, having just revealed an affair with a twenty year old to her daughter.
Nichols utilizes music and atmospheric transitional shots to vividly portray Benjamin’s journey. After he is rejected by Elaine, Simon and Garfunkel’s version of the traditional song “Scarborough Fair” plays as we see Ben in various states of aimlessness and longing. Unable to be with the woman he loves, he is again faced with the confining symbol of the pool and the aquarium at his parents’ house, and Simon and Garfunkel’s emotional voices further illustrate his pining. When he is not loafing around the Braddock residence, he is hiding near the Robinson’s home, hoping to catch a glimpse of Elaine. Nichols tells the story of Benjamin’s thwarted desires without dialogue, but purely through image and soundtrack. Then again, when Ben decides to drive to Berkeley and win back Elaine, we see him in an extended shot driving up the beautiful coast, as “Scarborough Fair” plays again. The camera then takes a bird’s eye view of Benjamin as he walks through the Berkeley campus, searching for Elaine. Some of the film’s most affecting emotional storytelling is achieved in its unscripted moments, moments of visual and sonic narrative. We understand Ben as a brave, but confused protagonist, wandering blind into a high-risk, but romantic situation.
