Getting Started in a Ford
And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson. For some reason, Kim put The Graduate on TV tonight. It has been a while since we’ve seen the movie, but some things always stick with you. In the case of The Graduate, the memorable runs to everything from the dialogue to the music. The music in this most famous Mike Nichols classic from 1967 was, of course, the dulcet tones of Simon & Garfunkel. They had reached their recording pinnacle in the two years before and Nichols was somewhat obsessed with their new mix of folk and pop music. Their ascendancy had begun with Sounds of Silence and gone on to the medieval eeriness of Scarborough Fair. Add in April Come She Will fit in as well, but it was the specifically written Mrs. Robinson that made the soundtrack, and, in my opinion, made the movie. I think its fair to suggest that their greatest work was ahead of them with Bridge Over Troubled Waters, just like one might wonder whether Nichols peaked on this movie with his Best Director Oscar versus his failed nominations for Silkwood and Working Girl.
Very rarely do such creative forces come together at such an auspicious time and define a moment, or perhaps the passing of an era, the way they do in The Graduate. This movie takes place in a physical span between Pasadena, Santa Barbara and Oakland (Berkeley). But the times they were a changing for sure. There isn’t a counter-culture character in the bunch. And remember, both Elaine and her fiancé attended the University at the center of sixties foment, Berkeley. But rather than hippies and rock stars, this movie had preppies in Alfa Romeo sports cars, blonde blue-eyed frat boys snapping towels and businessmen touting “plastics”. In many ways, this was a movie of the early sixties that got released after the world had started to change. Kids at Berkeley weren’t listening to folk/pop, they were listening to Jimmie Hendricks and Janis Joplin. And even those prone to folk music were listening to Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and were a lot more socially conscious than to have affairs at the Taft Hotel (perhaps the Huntington in reality).
Watching the movie today feels strange and somewhat hard to suspend disbelief. A hard-charging suburban kid who probably attended somewhere like Dartmouth has an affair with his father’s partner’s wife. That’s not so unbelievable. The kid is somewhat confused and lost about his future and that’s not so strange. It starts to get strange when that kid falls in love with his mistress’ daughter after half a date. It gets more strange that she falls for him after that half a date and learning that he’s been bedding her mother. As this kid drives here and there up and down the California coast, I find myself wondering where this unemployed kid is getting his gas money. Did he ask Dad for a few bucks? Did he have a trust fund? And then as I try my best to follow his convertible driving patterns as Paul Simon finally belts out “and here’s to you Mrs. Robinson…” as the Alfa rockets across the Bay Bridge. It then gets hard to follow as the Alfa seems to come up the coast to Santa Barbara with Benjamin in desperate search of Elaine.
The final biblical scene of “Father” Benjamin leaving the out-of-gas Alfa by the side of the road while he rushes up to the First Presbyterian Church, is both stark and seemingly final. He gets there too late, the vows have been taken, but Benjamin takes on the Christ figure in the upper deck of the church, despite never having done anything Christian nor suffering for anyone’s sins but his own. That doesn’t stop him from escaping with Elaine in her wedding dress and barricading the church door with a golden crucifix as they run to a conveniently stopping bus. The scene could keep movie analysts talking for years about what the ending expressions on Elaine’s and Benjamin’s faces mean in all their changing shapes as the bus drives away from the church, leaving normal suburban life and the prized Alfa Romeo behind.
Earlier in the film, when Benjamin pries some information out of the dispassionate Mrs. Robinson, he learns that her marriage was one of necessity as she had become impregnated with Elaine. He asks where and is told that the blessed event had occurred in a car. For inexplicable reasons, this privileged and derelict kid who drove his graduation present Alfa Romeo most nights to the Taft Hotel for his affair with Mrs. Robinson, needed to know the brand of car where Mrs. Robinson had become impregnated. Elaine’s life got started in a Ford and Benjamin found that all too hilarious.
Today, if you start a life in a Ford in a place like Plano, Texas, you have six weeks to figure out that you are pregnant and then you can pretty much take on the sad and unfulfilling life of Mrs. Robinson or risk having anyone from anywhere decide to roll the dice and sue you for $10,000 for having, assisting, advising about or just thinking about an abortion because Mrs. Robinson (or at that time presumably Miss X) is no longer in control of her own body and is not allowed to do any harm to that six-week-old fetus.
So, it seems that if The Graduate was remade today, Mrs. Robinson would have to be portrayed as the Christ figure since it is suddenly entirely her cross to bear the joint procreation that has occurred in the back seat of that Ford. At some point there is a need to accept that nature and grace have a divergence and we have presumably been granted minds that can reason and have moral suasion. Situational ethics demands that we consider the equity to all concerned in a situation and determine the optimal path that balances the equitable interests of all involved. Unfortunately, all the best ethics in the world can’t inform us of when life begins. That is also a place where science isn’t necessarily the answer. I’m not sure anyone on any side of this debate would want to have a purely objective and clinical definition of when life begins.
What I do know that when it comes to the ever-present issues of rape, incest and mother’s health (physical and emotional), I have differentiated views. Incest is a clear medical risk issue and I think we can all agree that the act defies the laws of nature as well as man. To my thinking that issue is clear cut. Rape goes to the emotional stability of the mother. Not being a woman I will never understand the feeling of something growing inside of me that will become a new life, but I can certainly imagine the distress associated with the mental stress to mother AND child if the fetus is a product of a forced and illicit tryst. This is not a healthy situation for anyone and I am left with a view that if a case of incest is ethical (as I am defining it), an abortion should be an option up until the fetus is viable on its own (considered to be after 24 weeks of gestation or after the second trimester). As for cases of rape or severe and clinically diagnosed physical and mental distress of the mother (since that is how I choose to position the situation of rape) then, since abortion is possible with a pill during the first eleven weeks, that is the minimum time during which women should certainly have the right to choose or be diagnosed as needing an abortion. I would grant a degree of flexibility between eleven and 24 weeks in cases of late diagnosis and extreme impairment.
One in four women in the U.S. have abortions before age 45 according to Planned Parenthood. This is not a casual or isolated issue. It affects a large swath of the female childbearing age population. We owe it to women to allow them as much freedom to choose what happens within their own bodies for as long as possible during pregnancy. They, in turn, have an obligation to not procrastinate and to take decisive action as soon as possible.What gets started in a Ford does not have to end in a delivery room. As rational beings we should be able to divine a sensible solution like what I have suggested (and I am certain plenty of others have done as well.)