Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Graduate
1967 · Mike Nichols · The Graduate on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count the doorways, car windows, and glass framing Benjamin. (camera)
Surtees and Nichols keep putting something between you and him: a doorframe, a windshield, aquarium glass. The Robinsons' fish tank turns up again and again with Benjamin sitting behind it.
Payoff: The house is photographed as a tank, and he is the creature kept inside it. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). The reading calls this the closed set: bourgeois space framed and reframed until it works as a vivarium.
Watch how flat the long lenses make the backgrounds. (camera)
Surtees shoots anamorphic Panavision with long telephoto lenses that compress figures against whatever is behind them. Depth drops out of the image and people end up pressed into their own surroundings.
Payoff: The lens keeps sticking him to the world he keeps saying he wants out of.
Watch how rarely Benjamin starts anything himself. (performance)
Hoffman plays him reactive and withholding. He is seduced, steered, summoned, congratulated. Panic and want cross his face and never resolve into a decision. Things mostly happen at him.
Payoff: He sees everything and does almost nothing, which is what makes the comedy uncomfortable to sit in.
Listen for Simon and Garfunkel where a score would be. (sound)
Nichols drops existing recordings against the picture instead of commissioning underscore. The folk register plays over suburban absurdity, and the songs carry the inner life the dialogue keeps refusing to state.
Payoff: Pop records became a legitimate way to score a serious American film, and the practice was normalized here.
Watch the hotel visits collide instead of flowing together. (cutting)
Sam O'Steen cuts the affair as a rapid montage that scrambles place and time. A room becomes the pool becomes the lobby. Months compress into one numbed, repeating stretch.
Payoff: The cutting hands you his experience of the affair rather than its chronology, and the experience is flat.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the raft turn slow circles in the pool. That shot is the whole film's nervous system.