The Graduate (1967)

When it comes to shot composition, The Graduate is hard to beat, which is why this post features several Frames of Reference. The most important one, though, is the first image in the film. Although it’s about as basic as a composition can get, a closer look shows how director Mike Nichols and cinematographer Robert Surtees packed the whole story into it.

But it’s just a guy’s face on a white background … what else is there to look at? Well, that’s kind of the point. Most films try to have an engaging first image to get the audience on board, you know, wide shots of cities or stuff blowing up. Compared to those shots, this one plain sucks. But that’s the idea: The Graduate twists our expectations on us so that our dissatisfaction with the first image mirrors Benjamin Braddock’s dissatisfaction with his options. So, in a sense, by being disappointed with the “production value” of the first shot, we are already on board with the film, even though we don’t know it yet.

Speaking of Benjamin Braddock, take a look at this guy’s face: is this guy going to be our hero? He’s The Graduate? He’s about as dynamic as a pillowcase. He’s just sitting there, staring, waiting for something to happen … kind of like us. And he’s supposed to be us. Dustin Hoffman is not a matinee idol, and neither are we.

Hoffman’s position in the frame is the most interesting part of the composition. One of the more basic guidelines of shot composition suggests that a character be placed on the left side of the frame when s/he is looking left to right. That way, the character has some room to look. In doing so, the camera leads his/her gaze, and by extension, the gaze of the audience, making the film feel open. In this frame, however, Braddock looks left to right, but he’s placed on the extreme right side of frame. In compositional terms, the edges of the frame represent a brick wall, the edge of the cinematic world, so to speak. Add to it that the shot’s an extreme closeup and the image becomes very claustrophobic. This simple character placement tells us all we need to know about Benjamin’s future: he doesn’t have one. The camera is not leading his gaze because he has nothing to look forward to. All the joy in his life, his accomplishments, his aspirations, all of that is behind him … literally.

This composition informs Hoffman’s expression. He stares into the abyss and is frozen stiff. He cannot turn back, he cannot go forward, so he does not do anything. He drifts. Here the film introduces what will become one its main visual motifs. Benjamin Braddock is drifting through his own life, his own movie, and he has no idea when or how to act or take charge of either. This is the posture he takes for most of the film.

After the opening credits, Nichols takes this idea even further.

Here Benjamin gets a little room to breathe, but not too much. The shot is still pretty tight, and even though he’s got space on either side of him, he’s more or less in the center of the frame, which is about the most boring spot in the frame you can put a character. And, of course, it looks like he’s stuck in the fishbowl -- he’s not just drifting, he’s imprisoned.

The composition reveals more as the shot continues. Benjamin’s father enters and even though his entrance brings some light into the frame, his presence gobbles up half of Benjamin’s space. When his father looks away from Benjamin, he blocks half of Benjamin’s face. When his mother comes in, she obscures Benjamin entirely.

The meaning here is not too hard to suss out: Benjamin’s parents are suffocating him. He’s their pet that they’ve put into a fishbowl—he’s there to be looked at, admired, but never freed. This idea will come to fruition later when his parents give him a scuba suit for his birthday and force him to show it off to their friends, thus placing Benjamin in a human-sized fishbowl. Again, he's almost smack in the center of the frame.

Of course, the major conflict of the film is whether or not Benjamin will be able to break free. Nichols seems to provide an answer at the end of the film, but whether that answer is yes or no never fails to start an argument. On the surface, it seems that Benjamin has broken free: he got Elaine to run off with him, and he locked her parents (and their “establishment” friends) in the church. He’s made it into adulthood. Or has he? The final shot of the couple is deliciously ambiguous.

In terms of shot composition, not much has changed by the end of the film: Benjamin is still stuck on the right side of the frame, looking left to right with an equally blank look on his face. Only now he’s joined by Elaine, who does exactly the same thing. The hard line from the bus window splits them into two separate frames, making them seem together, but apart. Is this optimistic? What kind of future will they have? It appears that Benjamin is still drifting, and so this final image undercuts the triumph of the wedding scene. We can’t put our finger on it right away, but in our gut we know something’s not right. When we look at it again, we see that the scene on the bus is so unsettling because it’s almost a duplicate of the first shot. In the great moment of triumph, we feel the disappointment of the first shot creep back in, only now it’s more upsetting than the first shot because this is not how we expect to feel at the end of a movie, especially a comedy. Classically speaking, The Graduate is not a comedy—it doesn’t end with the restoration of order or with a happy wedding; it ends with the destruction of order, of the dissolution of a marriage (note that Benjamin arrives at the church after Elaine and her Ken-doll of a groom exchange their vows), so while there is a wedding at the end of the film, it is not bringing anything together; it merely gives the story more to tear apart. Once again, Nichols preys on our expectations, just like he’s been doing since the first shot of the film.

But it’s this attention to detail that makes The Graduate rewarding even after multiple viewings. Nearly every scene contains an image that speaks to the themes of the film without seeming “on the nose” or repetitive. Although I haven’t tried it, I’d venture that The Graduate is just as funny and brilliant with the sound off.