University of Virginia Library

The Graduate As
An Agee Archetype

By Raymond Foery

Raymond Foery graduated from
Notre Dame and has attended
Emory University's American
Studies School. He is presently
taking film courses at the New
School For Social Research in New
York. He is also a VISTA volunteer.

Mike Nichols' The Graduate has
received more critical attention in
the past year than any film of
recent memory. Not only does the
production company stand to gain
enormous financial rewards (The
Graduate may gross more than any
film in history), but such noted
critics as Hollis Alpert and Joseph
Morgenstern have given the film
their aristocratic blessing.

For a film to receive both
popular and scholarly attention to
such a degree is indeed rare. To
attempt to explain such a phenomenon
may be folly, but I think
that a good deal of this film's
success can be attributed to factors
set down rather nicely by James
Agee in his celebrated essay on
"Comedy's Greatest Era," a piece
which originally appeared in Life
magazine, September 3, 1949.

Tempered Style

In a style tempered by a deep
and moving affection for the silent
comics, Agee carefully delineated
some of the factors which contributed
to their unequaled success.
More important, Agee gave to those
of us who never saw them firsthand
a series of masterly portraits of the
great comics themselves. It is the
descriptions of Charlie Chaplin,
Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and
Harry Langdon that render more
understandable - and recognizable
- the dilemmas of Benjamin
Braddock and the beauty of Dustin
Hoffman's portrayal.

For while many critics and
many more young people pointed
to the "alienation complex" or the
"generation gap" or the "plastic
society" as reasons for the success
of the film, a more traditional
explanation can be offered on the
basis of Agee's archetypes. Agee's
thesis is that comedy is the creation
of the comic character and that the
character's relation to his environment
creates both the real amusement
and the audience identification.
The exceptional comic
character is the one whose universality
is most easily accepted by the
audience, the one who reflects
man's dilemma, but who does so in
an extreme - and thereby laughable
- fashion. Such were Chaplin,
Lloyd, Keaton, and Langdon. And
such, I add here, was Dustin
Hoffman in The Graduate.

Significant Similarities

In many ways, in fact, Hoffman
presented in Benjamin Braddock a
combination of some of the characteristics
which so well served the
past masters. This is not to say that
Dustin Hoffman consciously took
something from each of the four,
but some of the similarities are
significant.

For instance, in describing
Charlie-Chaplin, Agee wrote that
"the Tramp is as centrally representative
of humanity, as many-sided
and as mysterious, as Hamlet."
In like manner, Benjamin
universalized the anti-hero of contemporary
society. Hoffman, in his
way, responded to the overwhelming
confusion of his environment
as Chaplin had done in such
classics as City Lights and The Gold
Rush.

Harold Lloyd, Agee explained,
"was especially good at putting a
very timid, spoiled or brassy young
fellow through devastating embarrassments."
Interestingly, Hoffman
played, at different times during
the film, the timid young man (as
at his parents' party), the spoiled
child (with his swimming pool and
Italian sports car), and the brass
adventurer (in the Final chase scene
at the church).

"No other comedian could do as
much with the dean pan," insisted
Agee in his characterization of
Buster Keaton. Yet Keaton's dead
pan may well have been exceeded
by Hoffman's marvelously effective
wheezing - a sort of moan -
during those moments when he was
most obviously at a total loss to
respond to his situation. This bit of
business, unfortunately too often
lost on audiences whose laughter
splashed over it, was far more
effective than any words could have
been. Like Keaton's dead pan, it
expressed in a non-verbal fashion
the reality of a visual dilemma. And
it did so with a mannerism that was
particularly germane to the character's
nature.

Harry Langdon

Of the four Agee archetypes,
though, Hoffman is perhaps most
clearly the descendant of Harry
Langdon. Innocence was the genre
of both, and if Langdon "looked as
if he wore diapers under his pants,"
as Agee noted, then Hoffman
looked as if he had never taken his
off - at least not in the presence of
a woman. The anomaly of a
twenty-one year old male virgin in
today's student generation could
have made a serious credibility gap
in the plot of the film, but
Hoffman was able to dismiss that
thrust, and it is to his credit that
the gap never really developed.

Hoffman not only made Benjamin
the Virgin believable, he made
it possible for large masses of young
people to emotionally identify with
the lovelorn innocent. It was this
innocence which Harry Langdon
was able to express so well, and it
was the same sense of naivete that
propelled Hoffman through his
encounters with the devilish Mrs.
Robinson. It was Hoffman's freshness
which made Benjamin the hero
of the "war on the establishment,"
and thus, alas, an anti-hero. Such is
the stuff of a true comic character:
his audiences react emotionally,
totally, to his dilemma and make it
their own.

All of this is not to say that The
Graduate did not succeed on many
different levels (for it obviously
did) or that the statement of the
film is not significant: but it is
meant to suggest that Nichols,
Hoffman, and company recaptured
a good deal of the true spirit of
screen comedy. It is meant to
suggest, in fact, that Hoffman as
Benjamin Braddock created a true
comic character and did so in a
manner and with mannerisms similar
to those four archetypes of the
silent screen which James Agee
embellished in his essay.

Wide Acclaim

With a film of such wide popular
acclaim, it is tenuous at best to
attempt a delineation of the strands
which formed the successful whole.
The interesting point about The
Graduate is that because the popular
acclaim was reinforced by
favorable critical commentary, any
analysis of contributing factors is
allowed a comfortable latitude.
This analysis of the comic elements
is necessarily only one dimensional:
it alone cannot explain the nature
of the film itself nor its success. But
it can, and hopefully does, provide
an historical context for serious
evaluation.

The Graduate, finally, might
have caused James Agee to add
Dustin Hoffman to his coterie of
archetypes.