Why mrs robinson

It makes alienation seem to spring from unreasonable idealism, from overreaction to the harmless vulgarity of plenty. No matter. And in an unforgettable early scene, Mrs. Robinson has Benjamin drive her home, then lures him upstairs and takes off clothing as he protests vehemently — a scene that feels uncomfortably close to many of the kinds of allegations that have been made against powerful men from Harvey Weinstein onwards this year.

What happens next is instructive. Benjamin changes his mind and invites Mrs. Robinson to the Taft Hotel, where they start an affair that seems born out of boredom and curiosity for him and some kind of desperation for her. Elaine is more or less a blank canvas for others to write their futures on.

And devoid of actual interests of his own, Benjamin is destined for a lifetime of getting what he wants and then getting tired of it. He seems a lot like the guy that many powerful men have turned out to be — acquisitive, careless, brutal, and yet somehow incredibly boring. At times it feels like The Graduate , for all its filmmaking merits, is a story sent out into a world that expected us to see that person as interesting. Benjamin turned out to be a dud.

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Benjamin initially turns down Mrs. Robinson, but eventually cinema's first and greatest cougar snags her prey. In the midst of their affair, Benjamin falls in love with Mrs. Robinson's daughter, Elaine, and sets his mind on marrying her.

Robinson, horrified that her innocent pride-and-joy might marry the now-corrupted Benjamin, forbids it, forcing the suddenly clear-eyed young man to drive thousands of miles, pound on church windows, and battle groomsmen with a cross in order to win his bride.

Throughout the film, we are reminded of the mess the older generation has made of the world, from the artificiality of their vision—"one word: plastics"—to the emptiness of their marriages. Robinson epitomizes it all. Worn out and a drunk, possessing everything but feeling almost nothing, her only source of satisfaction is her daughter. But Elaine is also her darkest secret: conceived not in holy matrimony, but rather in the backseat of a Ford.

Perhaps most wickedly, Mrs. Robinson is not content to wallow alone in her misery. Instead, she's driven to corrupt the young Benjamin, a confused but idealistic year-old. Yet as much as this film celebrates the comparative purity of the young, the future these kids envision is pretty conventional.

Once Benjamin comes out of his fog, all he can think about is getting married. He doesn't want to run off to a commune or shack up with Elaine in some hippie love den.

He wants to get married. Within his fairy-tale planning, he even builds in time to get blood tests. Paul Simon's song makes only a limited appearance in the film. The version of "Mrs. Robinson" that was released as a single and included on Simon and Garfunkel's album Bookends told us much more about the musical Mrs.

Robinson than we learned in the movie. For example, the Mrs. Robinson of song spent some time in an asylum or rehab, but a verse at the center of the track speaks to the hypocrisy that sits at the core of Mrs. Robinson's film-and-song existence:. Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes.

Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes. It's a little secret, just the Robinsons' affair. Most of all you've got to hide it from the kids. It's not completely clear to which secret the song refers. It could be the fact that Mrs. Robinson is an alcoholic and stuck in an empty marriage. Or maybe the lines refer to the premarital conception of her daughter.

Perhaps drugs as well as alcohol are stashed in her pantry. Or maybe she's hiding the birth control pills that allow her to run cougar-wild. These were property developers whose business interests she was incidentally in a position to advance.

The affair has ended with Mrs Robinson's attempted suicide, Mr Robinson's anguish and political embarrassment as Northern Ireland's first minister, and the possible destablisation of power-sharing with Sinn Fein.

What a grisly, painful story. But the "here's to you" gags keep coming. Now Belfast radio stations are reportedly bombarded with requests to play the toe-tapping Simon and Garfunkel song. This was the soundtrack centrepiece to Mike Nichols's classic film The Graduate , in which Dustin Hoffman played a shiftless college graduate who tumbles into an affair with Mrs Robinson, the fatale-sexy wife of his dad's business partner, played by Anne Bancroft.

For over 40 years, that iconic film has helped reinforce the perception that cradle-snatching sex is pretty hilarious so long as it's an older woman and a younger man. Only this week, in Nancy Meyers's romcom It's Complicated , Meryl Streep's ex-husband Alec Baldwin makes an attempt to play happy families with Meryl and their three grownup children by putting on a video the way he used to in the old days. And the film is … The Graduate, perfect innocent-yet-sophisticated fun.

Iris Robinson from real life and Mrs Robinson from the film could not be more different. In Belfast, there were 40 years between the lovers. On film, well — Hoffman's character Benjamin is young, certainly, but the very title emphasises that he has adult status: a college graduate.