Comfortable and Furious

The Unsung: Mr. Robinson, The Graduate

You heard me. I said, Mister Robinson. You can take your middle-aged desperado, the missus of the pair, and stick her back in storage. Benjamin, monstrous louse that he is, can go back to lounging poolside. Maybe finally suck it up, take some good advice for a change, and enter the realm of plastics. And don’t get me started on Elaine. She’d no more make a man happy than fly to the moon. You see, despite all the academic hand wringing, critiques, and endless love affairs with this period of youthful rebellion, it is Mr. Robinson who holds everything together. Dismissed as cold, out of touch, and the generation’s resident dope, he is instead the only character on display who isn’t farting away the future. If America is to survive, it will be all his doing. The rest of this lot are too busy navel-gazing to give a shit.

Mr. Robinson is undoubtedly old-fashioned, though in the parlance of the times, this simply means that he’ll insist a young man work hard and do something with his life. Easy to question it all when someone else is footing the bill. And as the proud papa of a proper young lady, he’d rather she marries well, remain comfortable, and not have to wait tables to support some deadbeat. Because, iconic though he may be, Benjamin Braddock is a loser. A layabout. The exact kind of idealist who insists that true love is enough to overcome the odds. He’ll remain true to himself, of course, even at the expense of society itself. For had the Benjamins come to power fully intact, uncompromised by the Mr. Robinsons of the world, we wouldn’t have escaped the 1960’s. Hippies have a thousand ideas, of course, yet not one iota of understanding about how to fund a single one.

We all know the final glance as Ben and Elaine ride off together on their bus of destiny. Smug, self-satisfied, and beaming from having destroyed hearth and home, they smile readily, content in the knowledge that they refused to let the bastards grind them down. Still, as the wheels turn, they both, as if struck by the thunderbolt of reason at last, realize what they hath wrought. They blew it all up but failed to provide a Plan B. Tore everything down without a blueprint to build anew. Flipping off mom and dad sure feels good, but that Alfa Romeo ain’t going to gas itself. They wanted to live on love, and quickly realized you still need a fucking paycheck. Romantic notions aside, there’s no nobility in poverty. The rational side of me believes that had that last scene run a little longer, Elaine would have gotten off at the next stop and run back to the church, begging forgiveness.

Sure, Mr. Robinson may have been a cuck and is almost certainly intended to be an object of derision. He’s likely impotent. Spends so much time at the office that Mrs. Robinson feels inclined to roam the neighborhood. I get it. I never had use for the nuclear family either, but now that I’m safely away from the age where one could still believe in shit and not look like a fool, it bears repeating that fighting the good fight must eventually yield to getting shit done. It’s easy to lustily fan ourselves in the face of the defiant drifter, but being responsible has the longer shelf life. Think about it: show me an attractive female at 25, and I’ll show you a woman who sleeps with every nitwit not nailed down. No job, no problem. Criminal record? Sure, but isn’t he a dream? Then, when it all sags and fades and blows up at 40, she’s suddenly into stability. Because having a roof over one’s head means a tad more than multiple orgasms. At least it should.

So yes, paraphrasing (and reversing) Tom Petty, how ‘bout a cheer for all them good boys? Men who buckled the fuck down and realized you might have ten, twelve days tops to actually have fun in this life, and the rest is waiting in line. Doing the right thing. Signing your life over because someone must. While Ben is banging some broad – Mr. Robinson’s broad – in some fancy hotel, on a dime decidedly not earned by the two parties involved, the grownup of the group is paying the mortgage. We like to celebrate the wild and the young in any given era, and that’s likely never going to change. Their inherent attractiveness is more than understandable. But as any one of us enters that final act, we’ll see it clearly for the first time. Kudos, above all, to those who endure. The fixers, the cleaners of mess. Patching up the crap the Benjamins never stop giving us.


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