Bringing Down the Establishment: The Graduate and End of the Road: A Dialogue

The subsequent dialogue between the two films developed after much negotiation and cajoling. They were inclined to be hostile to the other. I tried to inform them about their common ground and that they were ostensibly about the same thing. Neither would have that, but they did get together for a brief time to prove to themselves that their respective films best described the growing dissent and revolution against the Establishment in the late 1960s.

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End of the Road (1970): I understand why I would be overlooked. The story was too straightforward about a university graduate, Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach), unable to cope with late 1960s America.

The Graduate (1967): That’s about all we have in common.

End of the Road: I hear a dismissive tone.

The Graduate: I think it was the public, and most critics, who were dismissive.

End of the Road: Both of us begin with our respective graduates emotionally paralyzed. Jacob at a train station, transfixed; Benjamin transported like luggage on a conveyor belt through the Los Angeles airport, glacial and lost. The shot reminds me of the assembly line, linking it to the view that universities were criticized as being nothing more than diploma factories. Later, at his graduation party, he can barely communicate with the adults.

The Graduate: A major difference between us starts with your montage of late sixties events: the Vietnam War, college protests, and urban riots. Director Aram Avakian didn’t want audiences to miss the point. A weakness of the didactic approach.

End of the Road: That beginning not only provides a context but prepares the audience for the violent, upsetting finale. Avakian is sticking his cinematic vision into the teeth of the Leviathan. Jacob isn’t rebelling against his parents. He’s not even rebelling. He needs to get away from the social chaos.

The Graduate: That was 1970. Reaction against the war reached its zenith. Perhaps the heart of antiestablishment protests had their root in complacent parents thinking the world, the United States, was in great shape.

End of the Road: Roger Ebert might differ with your feeling about the opening montage: “It’s become fashionable these days to throw in a few shots of Vietnam or something, to make your movie feel serious. But in this long and thoughtful prolog to the main events of End of the Road, Aram Avakian makes his montage work where so often they fail. Before he can tell his story of Jake Horner, he’s got to establish the absolute impossibility that Jake’s academic hardware could change anything. This way, he’s telling us, lies intellectual impotence.”

The Graduate: Ebert may be right. But he gave me four stars, not three which you received. His words are also very flattering: “This is outrageous material, but it works. . . because it is handled in a straightforward manner. Dustin Hoffman is so painfully awkward and ethical that we are forced to admit we would act pretty much as he does, even in his most extreme moments. Anne Bancroft, in a tricky role, is magnificently sexy, shrewish, and self-possessed enough to make the seduction convincing.”

End of the Road: He writes about you as being a comedy and how you differed from most comedies of the sixties. Nowhere does he bring up the social issues which you consider so subtle, so important, so portending to the youth rebellion against parents and authority.

The Graduate: I emphasize my striking deep into the heart of establishment paranoia. Remember Norman Fell’s landlord, Mr. McCleery, saying: “You aren’t one of those agitators.” A subtle reminder of mainstream projections over campus rebellion being fueled from the outside. Perfectly content, law-abiding students are turned into raving radicals by a mysterious group of outsiders.

End of the Road: Like SDS.

The Graduate: But McCleery has Benjamin pegged as some kind of disruptive force.

End of the Road: McCleery’s absurdity lies in the fact that Benjamin is unpolitical to a fault. In a not-too-distant future he’d really be seen as a stalker. Mr. Robinson’s (Murray Hamilton) tirade in Ben’s room wasn’t far from the truth. He had slept with his wife, Elaine’s mother. Now he was after Elaine. The older generation doesn’t come off half as bad as you want us to believe. Even Mr. Braddock (William Daniels) calling Ben’s intended marriage of Elaine to be half-baked isn’t wrong.

The Graduate: Ben knows this. He calls his pursuit of her “completely baked.”

End of the Road: Ben’s introspection is vacant. He’s not going much further than his social catatonia has taken him. Drifts into an affair with Mrs. Robinson, devoid of passion if not sexual experience. I think Ebert realized this when he wrote a reappraisal thirty years later, reducing it to three stars: “The Graduate (I can see clearly now) is a lesser movie. It comes out of a specific time in the late 1960s when parents stood for stodgy middle-class values, and ‘the kids’ were joyous rebels at the cutting edge of the sexual and political revolutions. Benjamin Braddock, the clueless hero of [the film] was swept in on that wave of feeling, even though it is clear today that he was utterly unaware of his generation and existed outside time and space (he seems most at home at the bottom of a swimming pool).”

The Graduate: I was hoping you wouldn’t find that. It merely indicates that he found Mrs. Robinson the most sympathetic character. Maybe reviewers should regret many of their first opinions. However, he doesn’t damage the reality of my impact on late sixties society. You were a bit late taking on the Establishment.

End of the Road: The film was shot in 1968 and only appeared in 1970. Jacob’s catatonic state stems directly from the elements that you want to ignore.

The Graduate: What do you mean “ignore”?

End of the Road: The protests. The civil disorder.

The Graduate: I don’t rely on specific external forces to affect Benjamin, yet still connect deeply with an audience alienated by the war, the assassinations, the authoritarian reaction to the protests at universities.

End of the Road: Jacob’s situation, itself, is removed from those influences. Unlike Benjamin, he gets a job at a small college. Hair of the dog that bit him! No thanks to the mysterious doctor (James Earl Jones), who prescribes getting the job to help Jacob recover from his entrance into late 1960s American society. No commune for him.

The Graduate: Benjamin hardly goes to a commune.

End of the Road: His parents don’t provide any therapy. Mrs. Robinson takes the job.

The Graduate: She increases his purposelessness. Elaine (Katharine Ross) becomes his salvation.

End of the Road: Benjamin would like to think that. Jacob also has an adulterous affair, with his teaching associate’s wife, Rennie Morgan (Dorothy Tristan). A similarity to Ben, but more profound and complex.

The Graduate: The Robinsons’ marriage is effectively over. Jacob becomes an interloper, betraying his one friend at the college, Joe Morgan (Harris Yulin).

End of the Road: Making the situation more complex. Meanwhile, Jacob is playing around with Peggy Rankin (Grayson Hall) at the seashore. The chaotic state of his personal relationships provides an analog to the societal chaos. Ben is just uncomfortable and uncertain around his parents and their plastic friends!

The Graduate: Because director Mike Nichols understands the generational antipathy growing in our society toward the corporate world of the parents. More than anything, Ben’s rejection of his parents and the Robinsons resonated with audiences. How many in the audience could identify with Jacob possibly getting Rennie pregnant, then helping her get an abortion?

End of the Road: Jacob may not be likable. His affairs should make audiences uncomfortable. Rennie’s abortion is meant to horrify us, especially since it is performed by Jacob’s therapist, Doctor D. The person you overlook in this whole mess is Joe Morgan. He’s the instigator who has psyched out Jacob, going so far as to dangle his wife before Jacob, nearly begging them to start an affair, and then later acting betrayed by the situation. Even Rennie resisted Joe’s prompting and never really gives herself to Jacob emotionally.

The Graduate: Ben needs Mrs. Robinson. She wakes him up to his sad state in the midst of their mechanical trysts.

End of the Road: Only when Elaine comes along.

The Graduate: Jacob never recovers.

End of the Road: Neither did our society.

The Graduate: The end, with Ben and Elaine on the bus, doesn’t foretell how the world will be. Their smiles and laughter turn to somber thought. Will she end up like her mother? Will Ben return to the college factory and get a master’s or PhD and become like Jacob Horner?

End of the Road: The author of the novella, Charles Webb, wrote a sequel to The Graduate forty years later. It’s called Home School. Ben and Elaine are married, living in Westchester county, and fighting to have their kid homeschooled.

The Graduate: The book came out in 1963, and the film adheres closely to it. The absence of protests at Berkeley in the film is partly the result of Webb describing a pre-Free Speech Berkeley. However, the generational issue is there waiting to be plucked by the screenwriters. The book your film is based on, The End of the Road (not sure why the “The” isn’t in the film title), was published in 1958. The issues of the late sixties had to be grafted onto the film script, which weakens the characters created by John Barth. Abortion and racial segregation are dealt with in the novel. Barth, by the way, dissociated himself from the film.

End of the Road: That may be. But the film received a nine-page spread in Life magazine in November 1969. Avakian was interviewed in Playboy and Esquire. Unfortunately, the abortion scene earned the film an X-rating.

The Graduate: The scene at the doctor’s asylum with the patient and the chicken might have done more to push the film to an X.

End of the Road: We had one of the great screenwriters of the sixties, Terry Southern, who knew how to put the sharpest edge on social satire.

The Graduate: He went too far with the chicken.

End of the Road: It’s that kind of scene that ultimately gets a film on the track of being a cult classic. Steven Soderbergh helped revive the film and made a documentary about it in 2013. Over time, audiences and critics have given me a chance to be examined closely. Graeme Clark wrote in The Spinning Image: “Here was a film which could not have been made at any other time, 1970 was ideal for it when the counterculture and many protestors were calling into question the American way of life, giving rise to more celebrated works than this – The Graduate, Easy Rider – but for a production which took a long, hard look at what was passing for polite society back then and finding it a nightmarish ordeal, director Aram Avakian’s conclusions were hard to beat. Even watching it now, the state of alienation Jacob is enduring may strike a chord if you’ve ever watched the news, or even had too many conversations with people far from your wavelength, and wondered if you really are part of the human race, or if you are, whether you can get that membership rescinded.”

The Graduate: AMC produced a series called Movies That Shook the World (2005). I was one of the thirteen episodes. That’s a true legacy. That, and the music of Simon and Garfunkel. The final element to make the film part of the American consciousness.

End of the Road: The music makes the audience comfortable. Too comfortable. That’s what I hold against you the most. Guaranteed to become a mainstay of the new Establishment.

The Graduate: You will be remembered as John Simon had written: “End of the Road is a pretentious, unappetizing disaster.”1

End of the Road: Coming from him, I feel flattered. I didn’t expect him to like me. Quite unimaginable, really, that he could write something as did Lee Hill: “I know this is a minority view, but I think End of The Road is some kind of masterpiece, a tattered signpost pointing to a road not taken by American cinema. The New Hollywood of the late sixties and early seventies, like most new waves, promised more than it could deliver.” Simon played it safe to uphold the pretension of having the highest standards.

The Graduate: You aren’t arguing that you’re better or more important?

End of the Road: Perhaps I deserve to be.

The Graduate: I don’t want to humiliate you but since you’ve persisted. Look at the IMDb numbers. I’m rated 8.0. You, a 6.4. More damning, or I should say, closing the argument, I received 279,000 votes by April 2023. Do want to know how many voted on you?

End of the Road: Probably not many.

The Graduate: Avakian’s last two films got three times as many votes, and they barely made a peep: Cops and Robbers (1973) and 11 Harrowhouse (1974). You attracted 341!

End of the Road: You can’t get much of a reception if your producer throws in the towel a couple days after the premiere. It represents malicious sabotage of a talented director’s career.

The Graduate: It’s not as if I stole your thunder. It would’ve been interesting if you appeared in 1968. A double barrel shot at the Establishment.

End of the Road: I wonder what our long-term impact was. The revolution, the protests, fizzled. The seventies became increasingly narcissistic, exemplified by the “Me Generation” tag, as well as the proliferation of self-realization books like I’m OK, You’re OK. Do we see the incipient form of this in Ben and Elaine’s choice to be together and being proponents for homeschooling?

The Graduate: Is Jacob Horner capable of caring about anything other than himself and his condition? Can he eventually connect with anyone? How much social consciousness does he really have?

End of the Road: As much as Benjamin. Maybe. Both of them are working to survive in society. Jacob’s future is dark. He’s not running away with his princess. This is how we differ. I have no delusion that he has no more choices. How can he live with a comfortable conscience after watching Rennie die on the operating table. His mistake starts with his trusting Doctor D. Then he became friends with the wrong person at the college.

The Graduate: Ben may be reveling in his victory at the back of the bus. He’s taken a man’s legal wife. He’s overcome Elaine’s doubts. But her pensiveness at the very end suggests that she may have gone with him for the wrong reasons. She’s rejecting her parents and their loveless marriage. She will not bend to their will.

End of the Road: I guess she won’t be continuing at Berkeley.

The Graduate: She’s starting to worry about the decisions her mother made after getting pregnant. A marriage to paper over the public embarrassment. Give up her studies in Art History.

End of the Road: Are you saying the Establishment won?

The Graduate: Doesn’t it always? That’s what’s problematic about your strategy to link Jacob to the social upheaval. You believe your political statement is, or will be, history, be your legacy, fortified by public and critical rejection, punctuated by a wispy cult status.

End of the Road: . . . .

The Graduate: Are you there? What are you staring at?

[Briefly, it appeared that End of the Road lapsed into a mental or nervous strain for a few minutes. But said nothing further. The Graduate watched with some sympathy then readied itself for upcoming discussions with Getting Straight (1970) and The Strawberry Statement (1970).]