The Graduate

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So someone in mainstream culture actually gets it? What a fucking film



...which really does say everything there is to say about a humanities graduate's spinning state of thick, smokey despair after leaving school: the feeling that nothing makes sense anymore, that everything learned up and to the point has been smashed out of its meaning by a juggernaut of the very things we taught ourselves to distrust (the market, older people, professionals) and subsequently, the crashing perception that life lying ahead appears to consist of a very few, awfully banal choices. The initial part of the film mirrors the thrust of Esther's torment in Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, in that Dustin Hoffman's character is left helplessly sulking after leaving university to find a family home intent on fuelling a lifestyle of bizarre consumerism (purchasing scuba diving kits to try out in a swimming pool) via a day-to-day life of meaningless work. 

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