Aquarium (Symbol)
The aquarium situated in Benjamin’s bedroom is symbolic of Benjamin’s feelings of being pent up and captive in his own life. Benjamin feels like an exotic fish on display for all the world to peer at. The claustrophobia and lack of privacy he feels in his parents' home mirrors the captivity of a fish in a tank. Trapped and with no way to escape, Benjamin becomes restless and depressed. While the aquarium is a pleasing container, the fish are captive to the whims of their owner. Similarly, Benjamin lives in a beautiful house in an affluent community, but feels imprisoned by his circumstance. In moments of unsureness or stuck-ness, Benjamin looks at his aquarium, a symbol of the difficult situation into which he has wandered.
Benjamin's New Car (Symbol)
Shiny and new, Benjamin's red convertible is a status symbol, a sign of his affluence and his youth. He drives the car all over California in pursuit of Elaine, and it is his means of escape throughout. Eventually, in the final moments of Benjamin's journey, it runs out of gas. The car symbolizes the push-and-pull between Benjamin's sense of captivity and his drive for freedom.
Benjamin first falls in love with Elaine in the red car, and in this moment it symbolizes his escape from a confining situation. They eat burgers and discuss their inner lives candidly. In these moments, the car is a haven, and a place for Benjamin to be honest with a receptive confidant. However, as the conflict escalates, and time runs out, Benjamin abandons the car, along with the other signifiers of affluence in his life. The car transforms into a symbol of the future he wants to leave behind. When it runs out of gas and serves no useful purpose, he readily leaves it behind in pursuit of Elaine. When they make their escape, it is on a bus, not a flashy convertible, and for the first time, the young couple is free, if direction-less.
The Scuba Diver (Symbol)
There are two scuba divers in the film. The first is a toy figurine in the aquarium in Benjamin’s room. The second is Benjamin himself, when he models his new scuba suit and jumps in his family's pool.
Benjamin makes a comical scuba diver, waddling towards the pool, and eventually languishing at the bottom. After trying to get out, Benjamin's father firmly pushes him back down underwater, and the scene is filmed almost entirely from Benjamin’s perspective. While his father frames the event like he is an attraction at a carnival, Benjamin's relative lack of enthusiasm casts him as a pathetically ambivalent adventurer, unwilling to explore the depths, but forced to for the amusement of others.
At the bottom of the pool, Benjamin is shown standing still, an unimpressive Poseidon holding a speargun and looking straight toward the camera as it pulls slowly back. With the shift in perspective, Benjamin is revealed to be in the exact position of the figurine scuba diver in his aquarium. As a symbol, the role of scuba diver represents Benjamin’s feelings of futility and confinement in his own life. It also represents the pressure he is feeling from all sides. The scene is comic, and highlights how Benjamin is still treated like a child by his parents as he struggles to graduate into the real world.
When Mrs. Braddock announces that she will invite the entire Robinson family over for dinner, Benjamin again submerges himself in the pool with the scuba mask on. Benjamin turns into a scuba diver when he feels trapped and unable to control his own life. The scuba diver as a figure in the film, rather than embodying freedom and exploration, is confined and lost.
"Plastics" (Symbol)
The one word bit of career advice that McGuire gives Benjamin—"Plastics!"—takes on greater meaning as a symbol of falsity in the adult world. His parents’ lifestyle and the lives of their friends is revealed as superficial and shallow throughout the film, as none of the adults in Benjamin's life can connect with him in his moment of existential vulnerability. "Plastics," as a corporate path, represents all of the elements of adult life that Benjamin wants to resist and escape.
Plastic has the quality of being cheaply manufactured, but more widely available and easily sold. It acts as a symbolic stand-in for the concept of superficiality. Where Benjamin wants substance and meaning in his post-graduate life, he finds only empty advice and superficial arrangements. In Benjamin's eyes, society appears to be made of plastic: mass-manufactured, mass-produced, and mass-consumed without any real value attached. Benjamin feels as though the entire world is conspiring to make him "go into plastics," a symbol of selling out, and trading in one's values for the demands of the economic market and mass consumption.
The Bus (Symbol)
The bus on which Elaine and Benjamin escape is, rather straightforwardly, a symbol of escape from upper middle class "plastic" society. As public transportation, the bus is filled with “real” people, who are separate from the middle class restrictions that Benjamin and Elaine feel so confined by. Elaine and Benjamin feel an immense sense of relief as they ride away from the church, and the bus represents their deliverance from the rote scripts of their parents' world. The bus is a symbol of freedom and agency and provides a bridge to the outside world, however uncertain and unknown that world may be.
Clown Painting (Symbol)
When Benjamin is first beckoned downstairs to the party by his parents, we catch a glimpse of a painting of a sad clown on the wall of the stairwell leading downstairs. The painting symbolizes the serious but comic aspect of Benjamin’s own persona. The picture is also strangely placed, an almost grotesque image in an otherwise meticulously decorated and serene suburban home. Ben feels similarly out of place in his family home; he is a sad clown, often behaving foolishly, but from a place of deep psychic pain.
Glass & Reflection (Motif)
Glass and reflective surfaces are a motif throughout the movie. They appear first in the aquarium in Benjamin's room. Additionally, the rooms of the suburban house in which Benjamin's parents live is filled with sliding glass doors. Marking the barrier—at once invisible and yet solid—between confinement and freedom, glass becomes a recurring motif throughout Benjamin's journey. When he is beckoned to scuba dive at his birthday party, Benjamin must come through a sliding glass door, and when the camera shifts to his perspective, we observe the party surrounding him through the shield of the glass mask of the scuba suit.
Additionally, when Mrs. Robinson comes to meet him in the bar of the Taft hotel, we see her first in the reflection of the table Benjamin is sitting at. After he procures the room, Benjamin calls Mrs. Robinson from a phone booth in the hotel, and asks her to look through the glass to see where he is. Finally, when Benjamin goes to the church to retrieve Elaine, he calls to her through a glass barrier, disrupting the wedding ceremony and calling her name.
Jewelry/Underwear (Symbols)
Jewelry and underwear become major symbols of Mrs. Robinson's powers of seduction and sexuality throughout the film. When she lures Benjamin into Elaine's room at the beginning of the film, she slowly takes off her bracelets and rings on Elaine's bed, suggestively signaling that she is getting ready to undress and go to bed. Then, in the same scene, when Benjamin tries to leave, she asks him to help her take her dress off, and when he becomes flustered upon seeing her in her underwear, she tauntingly asks him if he's never seen a woman in her slip before.
Later, Mrs. Robinson puts on her stockings as a way of threatening to leave Benjamin in the hotel room and coercing him to stay. Mrs. Robinson's legs stand out in the foreground of the shot, and we see Benjamin at a distance, watching her put on the stocking elegantly. Even though Benjamin is angry at Mrs. Robinson in this moment, her ability to seduce, particularly using her stockings as an erotic object, prompts Benjamin to ask her to stay and continue their affair.
