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.
I'm 45 and ~21 years into my post grad-school career. I'm finally accepting that I will probably _always_ feel like i'm failing and doing things badly and that's OK. The evidence suggests that I have in fact been doing at least a good enough job in my employers eyes to sustain a career and progress. When I look back on this evidence I don't however look at it as a list of successes, I still mostly just see the things that could have been better. But by accepting that this is just how work feels I am relieved of the stress and anxiety that feeling has caused me for two decades.
This is why engineers (including devs) need mentors at all stages in their careers, not just when they're junior. And managers, who assign tasks and determine compensation, mostly can't be mentors.
> Or maybe because I'm growing beyond my limit of capability.
That boundary tends to become more and more fuzzy as you grow in your career. I think that’s where the feeling comes from. When you’re a software engineer it’s easy to know if you’ve failed or not. When you’re a CTO it’s often a matter of perspective and depends on what will happen in the future.
> 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.
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 suspect most professional cinematographers are all very good at what they do, but directors and producers mostly won't let them exercise their skills due to time and money constraints.
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.)
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.
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 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 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.”
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’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?
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'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 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!
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 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.
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.
I don’t understand some of the things he’s writing in this article.
Why does it matter if the author is Jewish? He mentions it multiple times as if that fact would make himself unfitting to be the lead in the movie…
Like there’s this sentence which is confusing to me:
”I remember thinking, They’re trying to take the Jew off my face, and it ain’t going to happen. All I wanted to do was go home, to ethnic New York, where I belonged. I knew I was no leading man. I knew my place.”
This is very confusing to me. I don’t understand where the author is coming from.
There’s even this part:
”“You’re saying you’re not right for it because you’re Jewish,” Mike said.
“Well, because Benjamin’s so not Jewish.”
There was a pause. Then Mike said, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.””
What the heck does any of this mean? Jewish inside? What?
> Why does it matter if the author is Jewish? He mentions it multiple times as if that fact would make himself unfitting to be the lead in the movie…
Perception on this has shifted quite a bit. Today, I don't know that this would be an issue (but maybe I'm wrong). In the early days of Hollywood, Jewish people tended to work behind the scenes and not as leading characters. In the 1960s things were changing.
Media or events from outside your living memory need an annotated guide providing context if you want to reason about them.
We watched The Bad Seed in class and spent some time talking about the drinks cart as a plot point until it was explained to us that people actually drank that much.
As Hoffman points out, he looks ethnic, i.e. Jewish. He's pointing out that, in the 1960s, someone who looks like him would absolutely not be named "Benjamin Braddock" or live the kind of stereotypical WASP-y California life depicted in the film. In that sense, he's an unconventional casting choice for the character.
> What the heck does any of this mean? Jewish inside? What?
Nichols is saying that he's made an intentional decision to re-characterize Braddock's character using more stereotypically Jewish qualities. Hoffman's portrayal is anxious and alienated, and this has special resonance with a Jewish audience (particularly in the 1960s) watching a movie that's facially a drama-comedy about polite, WASPy society.
I don’t understand this though. How can someone “look Jewish”? And why would someone “who looks like him” not be able to live the upscale California life?
I took a look at a young Dustin Hoffman on Google Images. He looks like a regular white dude with black hair? Somewhat similar to Al Pacino (who isn’t Jewish).
The same way someone can look like any ethnic group: there's some genetics, and a much larger heap of stereotypes.
> And why would someone “who looks like him” not be able to live the upscale California life?
It takes place in the 1960s. At that point, American Jews were not as fully assimilated into broader white American culture. That has changed quite a bit in the last 60 years.
(This is a trope from the period, and applies to other groups as well. The wedding scene in The Godfather has a similar message behind it.)
> Somewhat similar to Al Pacino (who isn’t Jewish).
Italians and Jews often look similar because Ashenazim (European Jews) are mostly Southern European i.e. Italian in their admixture[1].
I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color. But plenty of British people like James Bond actors also have black hair. But maybe they look distinct to other white people I don’t know.
Anyway this is all pretty interesting. Thanks for taking the time to write those responses. I may not fully understand what’s going on with this article but I do feel like I know more than I did a few hours ago.
> I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color.
Yeah, I can understand the confusion from your perspective. You don't have the context. The US has a broad history of discrimination.
In 2026, there's a lot less. In the 1960s it was still common for country clubs (fancy golf courses and social clubs, more or less) to prohibit Jewish people from joining; this was an issue at some clubs even into the 1990s.
(Since you brought up Italians), Italians were also discriminated against in the US, but more in the 1800s and early 1900s; by the 1960s, Italians were largely integrated, although as many were/are Catholic, they would be excluded from 'WASP' - White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Around the same time that Italians faced a lot of discrimination, Irish did too, as they were also largely Catholic.
If you're familiar with redlining as a discrimination practice, to give you an idea of popular discrimination targets, Wikipedia says:
> Redlining has mostly been directed against African Americans, as well as Mexican Americans in the Southwestern United States, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans
But that's not an exclusive list of discrimantion targets, just those that were large enough to target when home lending started getting more organized.
You also had racial covenants prohibiting selling land to non-whites, where that would exclude African Americans, most Asians, often Jewish people, maybe Hispanics and Italians and Irish. Those were made void in 1968, but it takes time and effort to remove them from deeds, so you might run into them.
That makes perfect sense. It's all a question of what things you attuned to. To you they all look the same but to others not. Jews in the US faced a lot of discrimination. Even into the 1970's you'd find things like housing complexes that would not accept Jewish people. Country clubs that would not accept Jewish people. In the 1950's and 1960's universities would have "quotas" for Jews. Even up to the 1990's (and maybe even today) there were clubs and groups that discriminated against Jews. Ethnic Jews are somewhat genetically distinct and so do have somewhat different "looks". It can be minor stuff to you, certainly not as large differences as between people with an "asian" look and "white" (and what you consider "white" is probably different than what some other people consider "white).
No problem! I think it's actually pretty funny/interesting how these classifications, which are ultimately mostly socialized/arbitrary, shift over time. These days, there's certainly much less cultural salience to Nichols' executive choices in the film.
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.
I'm 45 and ~21 years into my post grad-school career. I'm finally accepting that I will probably _always_ feel like i'm failing and doing things badly and that's OK. The evidence suggests that I have in fact been doing at least a good enough job in my employers eyes to sustain a career and progress. When I look back on this evidence I don't however look at it as a list of successes, I still mostly just see the things that could have been better. But by accepting that this is just how work feels I am relieved of the stress and anxiety that feeling has caused me for two decades.
Are you me? Thank you for posting this.
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.
This is why engineers (including devs) need mentors at all stages in their careers, not just when they're junior. And managers, who assign tasks and determine compensation, mostly can't be mentors.
> Or maybe because I'm growing beyond my limit of capability.
That boundary tends to become more and more fuzzy as you grow in your career. I think that’s where the feeling comes from. When you’re a software engineer it’s easy to know if you’ve failed or not. When you’re a CTO it’s often a matter of perspective and depends on what will happen in the future.
> 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.
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 suspect most professional cinematographers are all very good at what they do, but directors and producers mostly won't let them exercise their skills due to time and money constraints.
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.)
Thank you to share!
Also on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2hQgVUyHUjox67XgkmVbRX
People posting here are perhaps missing that it is a comedy - with a bit of tragedy right at the end.
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.)
https://archive.ph/Eqn1F
Wow, gorgeous writing, Ariel Levy was the perfect choice for helping write this.
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.
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 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 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.”
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’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.
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'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 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.
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 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
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.
I don’t understand some of the things he’s writing in this article.
Why does it matter if the author is Jewish? He mentions it multiple times as if that fact would make himself unfitting to be the lead in the movie…
Like there’s this sentence which is confusing to me:
”I remember thinking, They’re trying to take the Jew off my face, and it ain’t going to happen. All I wanted to do was go home, to ethnic New York, where I belonged. I knew I was no leading man. I knew my place.”
This is very confusing to me. I don’t understand where the author is coming from.
There’s even this part:
”“You’re saying you’re not right for it because you’re Jewish,” Mike said. “Well, because Benjamin’s so not Jewish.” There was a pause. Then Mike said, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.””
What the heck does any of this mean? Jewish inside? What?
> Why does it matter if the author is Jewish? He mentions it multiple times as if that fact would make himself unfitting to be the lead in the movie…
Perception on this has shifted quite a bit. Today, I don't know that this would be an issue (but maybe I'm wrong). In the early days of Hollywood, Jewish people tended to work behind the scenes and not as leading characters. In the 1960s things were changing.
> Perception on this has shifted quite a bit.
Media or events from outside your living memory need an annotated guide providing context if you want to reason about them.
We watched The Bad Seed in class and spent some time talking about the drinks cart as a plot point until it was explained to us that people actually drank that much.
As Hoffman points out, he looks ethnic, i.e. Jewish. He's pointing out that, in the 1960s, someone who looks like him would absolutely not be named "Benjamin Braddock" or live the kind of stereotypical WASP-y California life depicted in the film. In that sense, he's an unconventional casting choice for the character.
> What the heck does any of this mean? Jewish inside? What?
Nichols is saying that he's made an intentional decision to re-characterize Braddock's character using more stereotypically Jewish qualities. Hoffman's portrayal is anxious and alienated, and this has special resonance with a Jewish audience (particularly in the 1960s) watching a movie that's facially a drama-comedy about polite, WASPy society.
I don’t understand this though. How can someone “look Jewish”? And why would someone “who looks like him” not be able to live the upscale California life?
I took a look at a young Dustin Hoffman on Google Images. He looks like a regular white dude with black hair? Somewhat similar to Al Pacino (who isn’t Jewish).
The same way someone can look like any ethnic group: there's some genetics, and a much larger heap of stereotypes.
> And why would someone “who looks like him” not be able to live the upscale California life?
It takes place in the 1960s. At that point, American Jews were not as fully assimilated into broader white American culture. That has changed quite a bit in the last 60 years.
(This is a trope from the period, and applies to other groups as well. The wedding scene in The Godfather has a similar message behind it.)
> Somewhat similar to Al Pacino (who isn’t Jewish).
Italians and Jews often look similar because Ashenazim (European Jews) are mostly Southern European i.e. Italian in their admixture[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews#Genetics
I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color. But plenty of British people like James Bond actors also have black hair. But maybe they look distinct to other white people I don’t know.
Anyway this is all pretty interesting. Thanks for taking the time to write those responses. I may not fully understand what’s going on with this article but I do feel like I know more than I did a few hours ago.
> I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color.
Yeah, I can understand the confusion from your perspective. You don't have the context. The US has a broad history of discrimination.
In 2026, there's a lot less. In the 1960s it was still common for country clubs (fancy golf courses and social clubs, more or less) to prohibit Jewish people from joining; this was an issue at some clubs even into the 1990s.
(Since you brought up Italians), Italians were also discriminated against in the US, but more in the 1800s and early 1900s; by the 1960s, Italians were largely integrated, although as many were/are Catholic, they would be excluded from 'WASP' - White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Around the same time that Italians faced a lot of discrimination, Irish did too, as they were also largely Catholic.
If you're familiar with redlining as a discrimination practice, to give you an idea of popular discrimination targets, Wikipedia says:
> Redlining has mostly been directed against African Americans, as well as Mexican Americans in the Southwestern United States, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans
But that's not an exclusive list of discrimantion targets, just those that were large enough to target when home lending started getting more organized.
You also had racial covenants prohibiting selling land to non-whites, where that would exclude African Americans, most Asians, often Jewish people, maybe Hispanics and Italians and Irish. Those were made void in 1968, but it takes time and effort to remove them from deeds, so you might run into them.
That makes perfect sense. It's all a question of what things you attuned to. To you they all look the same but to others not. Jews in the US faced a lot of discrimination. Even into the 1970's you'd find things like housing complexes that would not accept Jewish people. Country clubs that would not accept Jewish people. In the 1950's and 1960's universities would have "quotas" for Jews. Even up to the 1990's (and maybe even today) there were clubs and groups that discriminated against Jews. Ethnic Jews are somewhat genetically distinct and so do have somewhat different "looks". It can be minor stuff to you, certainly not as large differences as between people with an "asian" look and "white" (and what you consider "white" is probably different than what some other people consider "white).
No problem! I think it's actually pretty funny/interesting how these classifications, which are ultimately mostly socialized/arbitrary, shift over time. These days, there's certainly much less cultural salience to Nichols' executive choices in the film.
Why now? These events were 60 years ago.
Excerpt from a memoir that came out recently.