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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

They weren’t enough to impress others, but I think they were enough to feel impressive, which is almost as pleasant psychologically.

Joss Whedon, the Simpsons, Letterman, Tarantino, etc. came at a particular time for film and TV too, where everybody watched a ton of formulaic shows and movies which had been influencing each other for decades.

Unrelated to AI, that’s just not true anymore. But also, it’s probably not a coincidence that alongside the parodies and genre-referential humor came a whole range of new types of programming that didn’t fit old genre conventions and arguably displaced them: reality TV, prestige serials, oddball comedy, primetime political talk shows, and later short form and vertical video.

I think a specific song becoming irreversibly memeified is different from a person lacking the ability to engage unironically. I don't know if you're from my generation, but if you are, I imagine what they are experiencing is similar to how we would feel if we watched an old movie with Never Gonna Give You Up played completely straight at a key emotional moment. (But worse, because The Sound of Silence is a very delicate and emotional song, whereas Never Gonna Give You Up is inherently a bit cheesy and fun, so the contrast between the original intent and our experience wouldn't be so extreme.)

There's no such thing as "irreversibly memeified". Just look at all the old pop songs that seemed to be "ruined" until they got a re-release on youtube in the last 8 years or so. They sound totally fresh, especially if you've never seen their music video before. That latter part gets at the root of the problem. It's not really the song, but the presentation. That's how art works. If you stop looking at memes, they stop working. If you start thinking for yourself, the disillusion goes away and is replaced by your own more confident subjectivity.

I can unironically watch American Psycho, for example. It's not that hard.

The Rick Astley meme was always weird guerilla marketing. Unless you've deliberately engaged with the meme, that effect doesn't work. The people who are stuck in that mindset have done that damage to themselves. People used to even joke about actually watching the "for N hours" format to mask their mental health issues, but I'm certain some people actually did it.

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.

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.

"Benjamin, I want to say one word to you. Just one word... agents."

I love the parallels here.

Plastics are genuinely useful. They make a lot of existing things more convenient, and a lot of new things possible. Our world has been absolutely transformed since they became a thing. Things that used to be heirlooms (cutlery, plates) have become literally disposable. They are in every household, on every person, and in every person, whether anyone wants it or not.

It's not just about mass production either; 3D printing wouldn't be there without plastics, and I don't need to tell you how empowering it is.

At the same time, plastics are also fucking up the planet on an unpecedented scale. The waste, the pollution, and the consumerism / disposable culture plastics helped create are unsolved problems.

Plastics are still effectively unregulated; plastic bag bans are not even a band-aid for this problem. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch [1] will outlive all of us, and we have no idea how to get microplastics out of - well, everything now that they are in everything.

And yet, we keep using them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

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.

I think this does nail the issue.

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)

The humor and the performances are subtle in a way that I think contemporary audiences may generally find difficult to appreciate

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