Summary
The final section of the film starts when Elaine visits Benjamin at his apartment in Berkeley to confront him about his intentions. Pacing around the room, Elaine tells him that she knows he is there for her and that she wants him to leave. With shaving cream all over his face, Benjamin insists to Elaine that he loves her. Upon hearing this, however, Elaine becomes more upset, accusing Ben of raping her mother. Benjamin is understandably confused, and when he asks Elaine what Mrs. Robinson told her, Elaine swats his hand away, disgusted that he could do such a thing. When he tells her it isn’t true, Elaine attempts to run out of the room, but Benjamin slams the door. Elaine confesses that her mother told her that she was having a drink with a friend at the hotel where Benjamin waited for her in the parking lot, offered to get her a room because she was too drunk to drive, and raped her. With shaving cream still all over his face, Ben flatly denies Mrs. Robinson’s accusation, and starts to tell Elaine what really happened, which she protests.
As Benjamin tells Elaine what really happened between him and her mother, she becomes agitated and lets out a blood-curdling scream, throwing herself onto the bed. Benjamin fetches her a glass of water when there is a knock on the door. The landlord comes to ask about the screaming, and a group of men gather behind him. The landlord asks him what happened and what Benjamin did to the screaming woman, and when one of the men offers to call the cops, Benjamin opens the door to reveal Elaine placidly sitting on the bed, smiling and drinking water. The men disperse, convinced that all is well. The landlord then kicks Benjamin out of the apartment because he does not like him, and Benjamin closes the door and wipes the shaving cream off his face. Elaine sits on the bed calmly, apologizes for screaming and asks Benjamin why he came to Berkeley. With a lifeless expression, Benjamin says he no longer wants to talk about it, and starts to pack up. Elaine asks if she can sit there while he packs, and asks him what he is going to do and where he is going to go. This stops Benjamin in his tracks and he tells her, “Elaine, you’re gonna have to stop asking me that.” She nods and starts to leave the room, but not before she tells him that she does not want him to leave until he has a definite plan. She leaves, and Benjamin watches her walk down the street from the window above.
Later, Benjamin is awakened from his sleep by Elaine who has come into his room and asks him to kiss her. He stands and kisses her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders in relief and asking her to marry him. “I don’t know,” she responds, but remaining unclear. They embrace and she tells him she doesn’t know what’s happening as he pets her hair, and assures her they are getting married. The promise of their marriage seems hopeless to her, and she leaves abruptly, saying she’ll think about it. Benjamin is left once again in the doorway watching her go. He sits on the bed, and lets out an exasperated “Good God!”
The following day, Benjamin and Elaine walk around Berkeley campus discussing their truly half-baked plan. Benjamin prods her about their marriage, but Elaine remains unconvinced. He waits for her outside a classroom before continuing to question her further. As they watch a women’s basketball game, Benjamin suggests they get married the following day, and Elaine distractedly watches the game, saying, “Why don’t you just drag me off if you want to marry me so much?” Benjamin says he will drag her off, but she says she first has to tell Carl, the man who she met at the zoo; Carl is a medical student whom Elaine says she has known for years. She says she has to talk to him first, because she had said that she might marry him. As Elaine leaps up to join the game, Benjamin yells in surprise and disbelief.
Benjamin continues to follow Elaine around her daily life at college. The scene shifts to a hushed library where Benjamin whispers in her ear, “How did he do it? Did he get down on his knees?” Looking up from her homework, Elaine impatiently tells him that Carl said he thought they would make a “pretty good team,” which only makes Ben more skeptical. After he won’t stop asking her questions, Elaine storms out. Ben follows Elaine to her dorm, and when Elaine says goodnight, he asks if they are getting married, but Elaine remains vague about her intentions to marry him, smirking and telling him, “Maybe we are and maybe we’re not,” and finally giving him a quick kiss as she goes into her dormitory.
Ben is then shown buying a wedding ring and presents. He runs up the steps of his apartment and into his room, startled to find Mr. Robinson there, smoking and asking him why he had an affair with Mrs. Robinson. Angrily Mr. Robinson inundates Ben with a number of probing questions about what led him to act so carelessly. Ben insists that he does not resent Mr. Robinson and that it has nothing to do with their relationship, but finally admitting that he does not respect him. Mr. Robinson lists the consequences of Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson’s affair, including the Robinson’s imminent divorce. Indignant about the chaos he has caused, Ben assures Mr. Robinson that he and Mrs. Robinson “may as well have been shaking hands,” and that it meant nothing, adding that he does not love Mrs. Robinson, but Elaine. This only makes Mr. Robinson angrier, who rises and threatens to level a court case against Benjamin and have him imprisoned if he ever pursues Elaine. Swatting Ben away, Mr. Robinson scolds Ben, yelling “I think you are filth, I think you are scum, you are a degenerate!” all under the confused and suspicious gaze of the landlord, who is perched at the top of the stairs in the hall. Rushing past the landlord, Benjamin asks for change so he can use the phone. The landlord repeats that he wants Ben to move out, but Ben persistently asks for change. When the landlord finally yells at Ben to get out, Ben rushes down the stairs, and out the front door.
At Elaine’s dormitory, the woman at the front desk tells Benjamin that Elaine has left school. Elaine’s roommate comes down the hall to deliver a note from Elaine, a note which explains that she cannot possibly marry Benjamin because of her father’s anger and it having no possibility of working out. While she admits that she loves him, she cannot agree to marry him. The scene shifts to Benjamin driving his convertible on the highway at night as a rousing guitar riff plays and transitions into Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” Ben climbs over the fence of the Robinson residence and sneaks in the back door, tripping over something and stubbing his toe in the dark.
Benjamin runs up the stairs and into Elaine’s room, where he finds a stone-faced Mrs. Robinson. In her own room, Mrs. Robinson calls the police and requests a patrol car, suggesting Benjamin is a burglar. Benjamin asks Mrs. Robinson where Elaine is, but she merely says that everything is under control and offers him a drink before he gets arrested. She then apologizes for not having invited him to the wedding, presumably between Elaine and Carl. Ben overturns a suitcase on the bed in anger, as the sound of a police car pulling up outside is heard. Benjamin gets back in the car to make a getaway and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” plays again.
Benjamin once again makes his way up the California coast to find Elaine. Once in Berkeley, Benjamin runs into a fraternity house and asks after Carl Smith, who the fraternity brothers tell him left in the middle of the night. When Ben tells them he is supposed to be at the wedding and asks where it is, they tell him to ask Carter, who yells from the shower that he is getting married in Santa Barbara, perhaps at his parents house. One of the fraternity brothers makes a lewd comment about Elaine, which disgusts Ben, and he gets in the car once again to go to Santa Barbara. He weaves recklessly between cars and lanes on the highway as “Mrs. Robinson” plays once again. Having arrived in Santa Barbara, Benjamin stops at a gas station to use a phonebook, and calls the Smith residence, frantic and practically yelling at the answering service that picks up. When the answering service tells Ben that Dr. Smith is unavailable, he lies and tells her that he is Dr. Smith’s brother, a reverend, and that he needs to find the wedding so he can perform the ceremony. The answering service is unsure, but suggests the First Presbyterian Church. The gas station attendant gives Benjamin directions, and asks whether he needs any gas, but Benjamin speeds off, anxious about missing the ceremony.
Once on the road, Benjamin’s car runs out of gas, and he must continue on without it, running along the side of the road to the church. He runs all the way to the church, but cannot get in the front door, so sneaks in the side, where he finds the wedding ceremony almost over. Pressed up against the glass and overlooking the congregation, he sees Elaine kissing Carl at the front of the church, and lets out a cry of dismay. An old woman at the organ plays a traditional wedding song, as Ben starts banging on the glass and yelling Elaine’s name. Mr. Robinson almost gets up to stop him, but Mrs. Robinson smirks and holds him back to assure him that Ben is too late. Elaine walks down the aisle towards Ben, as the crowd bursts into a dismayed murmur. Looking back at her mother, father, and Carl, Elaine sees their angry faces coaxing her to stay put, and she realizes she wants to run away with Ben. She calls his name and he rushes down the stairs, but runs into a fuming Mr. Robinson. After jumping over the railing, Ben gets in a scuffle with Mr. Robinson, finally slamming him into a wall and retrieving Elaine. Mrs. Robinson slaps Elaine repeatedly, and Ben fends off the angry wedding guests with a giant cross, finally sliding it into the doors and escaping with Elaine. They get on a bus as it rounds a corner and take their seats at the back, much to the confusion of the driver and the other passengers. Smiling at each other, they set off into the unknown together.
Analysis
Mrs. Robinson’s manipulations reach their peak at the revelation of her rape accusation against Benjamin. While the audience saw the entire seduction from the start, and knows that Mrs. Robinson played an active role, not to mention an explicitly consensual role in her sexual relationship with Benjamin, this is not the story she tells Elaine. Rather, Mrs. Robinson vilifies Benjamin by accusing him of a crime he did not commit. What had seemed like a playful breech of taboo, a sexual affair serving to enliven the lives of both Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson, becomes a grotesque pretext for inaccurate claims. In this section, we learn just how low Mrs. Robinson is willing to go to protect her reputation and remain in denial about her actions.
The film pushes the taboos of its early plot points, and their consequences, to the limit. While Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson’s affair seems tickling and comical in the beginning—especially the contrast between his youthful anxiety and her wry resignation—it drives Elaine and Benjamin apart, causes Mrs. Robinson to make an accusation of rape, and causes Elaine great psychic distress. The inciting incident of the affair makes everyone’s lives more difficult and complicated, and the film seems to suggest that the taboos were never worth breaking in the first place, in spite of the seemingly liberating effect on Benjamin’s psyche.
It is in this section of the film that Benjamin’s fundamental aimlessness, which plagues him throughout the movie, is finally called out by someone who can make him hear it, Elaine. As she leaves his apartment in Berkeley, she tells him she does not want him to leave until he has a definite plan. Pushed to the limits of his patience, rejected by the woman he loves, and accused of rape by the woman with whom he had an affair, Benjamin is at a crossroads. Nothing seems to be going his way, but Elaine is the first person to try and motivate him to take control of his life and go after what he wants. If Benjamin’s fundamental flaw is his inability to take control, his existential directionless-ness, then in this moment, Elaine acts as a person who holds him accountable not only to the standards of society, but to his own standards.
In spite of the charged nature of the narrative, the film retains a light touch, maintaining a simultaneously tragic and comedic tone. In one scene, Elaine lets out a despondent scream to rival the despondent woman in a Greek tragedy. In the next, Benjamin is chasing Elaine around Berkeley and following her to every one of her on-campus activities, from basketball to study hall. The complex negotiation of these two poles keeps the audience wrapped up in the narrative and shows us the complex ups and downs of not only young love, but this particular, markedly complicated situation. The viewer suspected that Benjamin’s affair with Mrs. Robinson would wreak havoc, but did not quite imagine it would remain so fun and lighthearted, even in the most tense circumstances.
The film’s skill at portraying mystery, complication and multi-tonal ambiguities extends all the way to the resolution, when Ben and Elaine escape on a bus. At the end of the film, nothing can deter Ben, as he abandons his broken down car to run to the church, and bangs on the glass in the middle of the wedding. At the moment of decision for Elaine, she is confronted by the restrictions of her family and her community, and chooses the unknown in favor of her scripted suburban life. The image of the bride, still in her wedding dress, and the sweaty, dusty man who rescued her, is an apt image for a movie about post-graduate existential aimlessness, as well as the rebellious spirit of the late 1960s.
