Surviving "The Graduate" | Hacker News Reader

Surviving "The Graduate"

newyorker.com

112 pointssamizdis32 comments

Something that I was mulling on just the other day. As I grow in my career, on a day to day basis I feel like I'm failing or doing things badly. Maybe because I have no comparison frame for it, because of the growth. Maybe because it's never possible, while you're in the thick of a project, to provide that post-hoc history. The open-endedness feels weird compared with clear causality.

Or maybe because I'm growing beyond my limit of capability. Time will tell.

> As I grow in my career, on a day to day basis I feel like I'm failing or doing things badly.

This is one thing that we should lament about AI generating all the code. You never get to look back at your own "hand crafted" work with the distance of time. Progress or perspective, it does not matter, one would probably find something they could have done better.

I think I'm actually going to miss that feeling.

I can relate to this. I can still recall and feel "pride" in what I shipped from 2006 to 2024/2025.

How do you learn if not by making mistakes? If you weren't ever failing, wouldn't that mean you also were not learning?

As tough as it is, I think it's best for your development to be in a space where you're screwing up regularly.

As an aside, I admire Mike Nichols' ability to make gorgeous _looking_ movies. Many scenes from The Graduate, the State Island Ferry opening scene in The Working Girl, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And even the 2003 movie Closer. That is almost a 40-year span.

Atypically, he worked with 13 different cinematographers across his 19 movies. Woody Allen, as a contrast, as prolific as he is as Mike Nichols was not, used similar quantity of cinematographers across ~50 movies. Woody Allen, only because, I find his movies visually beautiful, too.

In the New Yorker article linked above, for me this stood out:

"Hollywood had never been my endgame. As far as I was concerned, the studios kept beautiful people imprisoned in seven-year contracts."

Reminds me of high-IP people inside Frontier Labs :).

I wonder if it's just me, or if the movie did not age well. I saw it for the first time around 10 years ago, and I was really expecting great things since I was a fan of hoffman and of simon and garfunkel. i found it a very lacklustre movie, nothing I had read about hoffman's iconic performance really landed for me, and the movie as a whole seemed dull and unconvincing. it wasn't a patch on kramer vs kramer or even tootsie.

I like it, I was and still am in the age range to relate to the young two main characters and their whimsy though.

In my opinion the thing that aged the worst was the soundtrack. The Simon & Garfunkel songs from this movie are so iconic and timeless at this point that it doesn't feel like a soundtrack to me but like someone made a TikTok edit and put those songs over the film, if that makes sense. Nobody in my generation knows the connection between those songs they heard as part of pop culture and The Graduate. This is an impossible psychological barrier to pass for me. Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" cannot dissolve into any movie's soundtrack for me when used unironically because I consider it a meme song (Mrs. Robinson as well to a lesser extent). It certainly would not have felt that way back then. I don't feel that way about modern songs with modern movies even though I recognize it is the exact same situation.

> This is an impossible psychological barrier to pass for me. Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" cannot dissolve into any movie's soundtrack for me when used unironically because I consider it a meme song.

The last time I felt this way, I was still in school and disillusioned. Do you not consume unironic media anymore (or ever)?

I think, without trying to disparage GP at all, that unironic watching is very hard for the generations that came after the 90s. Some gems shone through, like the LoTR movies, which managed to be unironic and good, but the fresh air of “Joss Whedon dialogue”, pointing out storytelling conceits as they were happening live on your screen, let everyone feel smart right when “smart” became the only thing worth being.

AI destroying, at alarming speeds, all the bastions of “smart” I think will lead back to a less ironic mood. “I’m so smart” does not impress people who can reproduce your brilliance by asking Claude for “insights, no mistakes.”

> “I’m so smart” does not impress people who can reproduce your brilliance by asking Claude for “insights, no mistakes.”

I'm not convinced. I'm old enough to remember when people said similar about previous waves of tech (search engines, smartphones, etc.) replacing everything from books and handwriting to thinking. People were talking about "the wisdom of the crowd" and living a "quantified life" as recently as a decade ago.

Being "smart" is not only highly dependent on context beyond what computers can sense or reasonably "live in" (even when you're not querying), but also timing and deeper insight. AI has a very very long way to go if we're even keeping that as a goal for it.

I think it's more often the case that anyone trying to be "smart" can't hide how dumb they are. You're right that nobody is impressed by ego-fragile defensive snark or try-hard quotes. I don't think they ever were though?

Based on your other comments containing "I'm old enough", I'm assuming you are close to over three of my lifetimes years old. It's not about being disillusioned, or consuming media ironically or unironically. It's just about frame of reference. It's kind of like how it's functionally impossible to watch "Birth of a Nation" (which is apparently one of the best films of all time) and actually to SEE it as one of the best films for a multitude of technical and cultural reasons. Sure you can watch a film and deliberately try to have a certain perspective or "gaze" but isn't that just a form of ironic watching with extra steps?

The sibling comment was 100% accurate until "unironic and good" and then I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about with Joss Whedon and how AI somehow got shoehorned into the conversation. I watched The Graduate before ChatGPT came out.

You shouldn't take this n=1 anecdote as an authoritative view on my generation either, lots of people in my generation have more empathy and imagination than I do. Have a good night :)

Birth of a Nation is not considered best film of all time. It is considered one of the most racist films tho

The film's issues wouldn't speak to today's young Americans, many of whose parents are (outwardly) too individualistic even for a mid-1960s beatnik.

If someone made an updated version of The Graduate, it would have to pick on a different version of conformity - maybe on "I'm different just like everyone else".

An opportune time for a remake would be the 2010s when working at FANG had a similar cachet to working in "plastics"

My father was in the plastics business for years. I got my business sense from him, and that inspired me to go into tech. But I’ve never made the connection between 1960s plastics and 2010s FANGs before. Thank you!

Yeah, and today's "plastics" is AI.

If that's not apparent already.

I'm old enough to have seen it when I was in high school in the late 70s. More than a decade after its release it still seemed pretty relevant and edgy. Unless your parents were outliers, in the 70s most suburban parents were pretty 'square' and the sort of existential meltdown rebellion at the end wasn't generally part of mainstream culture.

The first time I watched it, I was a freshman in college and I could barely get through it. I hated the sense of awkwardness and what read to me at the time (2012) as intentionally cringe humor.

The second time, I had graduated college, seen more of the world and how people treated each other, and I felt like I got it a lot more. I didn't feel offended by the long awkward moments anymore. It was entertaining and I was able to see the virtues and flaws of the characters, and even recognize traits of myself and other people I knew.

I can't remember for sure whether I've seen it a third time, but I think I have, and it would have been in my mid or late twenties. With that watching, I was able to appreciate it most as a film and a product of its time, and imagine how it might have landed to its audience over the years. My recollection of it now is of someone who is by nature a pretty passive person struggling with the concept of his own agency, which speaks to me personally.

I was blown away by it—still am. It's easily in my top 5 films of all time. Maybe the funniest movie I have seen. And it spoke (I think) not only to the generation of boomers that felt they were under the thumbs of their demanding parents, but speaks to all coming-of-age young adults.

(Such a brilliant edit: https://youtu.be/5FJaoRLpf7M?si=iAinUlOIZw3u89Jw&t=85)

Like Simon and Garfunkle (at their peak at the time), the film was very much a part of its time... 1967. SO much has changed since then, including the uptightness. Without that zeitgeist, that movie loses much of its power.

For anyone not familiar with "The Graduate" or wants a refreshed, this analysis by Steven Benedict is as good as anyway:

https://www.stevenbenedict.ie/2012/12/the-graduate/

(9 minute audio essay.)

People posting here are perhaps missing that it is a comedy - with a bit of tragedy right at the end.

https://archive.ph/Eqn1F

Here is my hot take. His belief that he was failing, helped him succeed.

I don't mean this in a trite way. The character portrayed is supposed to be awkward and anxious. Feeling awkward and anxious in real life, left him in the right frame of mind when he walked on set. He looked awkward and anxious, because he actually was.

Actually feeling what the character is supposed to be feeling, is the heart of method acting. The upside of method acting is that it creates very powerful performances. The downside of method acting is that you have to experience all of the feelings of the depicted drama.

I am in no way trying to undermine your point, but I have to say as I read past that first sentence, it became impossible to not imagine Tobias Fünke's aspirational role as "Frightened Inmate Number Two" as the subject of your commentary.

Maybe the movie was successful because we could relate to Hoffman, while Redford (probably the handsomest actor ever) being rejected was not relatable.

Apocryphal (but probably directionally correct) story I've heard is that Redford didn't understand why Mike Nichols didn't want him for the lead. He really needed an explanation. So Nichols tries to explain the mood he is going for with the character and says something like "You know that feeling when you are out at a bar and you ask a girl to go home with you and she turns you down?" And Redford is confused and is like "um...no...wait, is that a thing that actually happens?"

Back when I'd go to bars, I'd go with a friend of mine. He'd just get a drink and stand at the bar. I'd tease him that his pickup line was "ok". (He was tall and handsome.)

I remember watching and discussing this film in a film appreciation class. Neat to hear Hoffman's side of it (though it sounds like it wasn't a good time).

Must have been quite a trip for Hoffman to see the movie for the first time in that NYC theater, probably thinking it would be a failure given his account of production, only to see the audience reaction.

The graduate is a strange movie for me. I watched it in my late teens and easily identified with Hoffman's character and saw it through his eyes. Seeing it later as a married middle aged man I kind of despised him and his choices.

Why now? These events were 60 years ago.

Excerpt from a memoir that came out recently.

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