Fantasy and Anxiety: Light, Shadow, and Jewish Alienation in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967)

Resumo

The European film renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s notably influenced Hollywood cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. This period is usually referred to as New Hollywood or the New Wave. The post-neorealism of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini heavily informs the styles of films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Chinatown (1974), and The Graduate (1967). However, this article suggests that Jewishness also influences the films of this era, specifically The Graduate. Mike Nichols effectively uses chiaroscuro, creating strong contrasts between light and darkness to emphasize Jewish alienation, particularly as this feeling relates to the coded Jewishness of its main character, Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman. Post-Holocaust readings of several scenes explain how shadow and light throughout the film underline the sexual, cultural, and ethnic dichotomies as well as the dread associated with an undesirable future outcome and a hopeless romantic fantasy. The Christian and Jewish worlds collide and are critiqued through these images, informed by the Jewish history of exile and persecution, and the shadow sides (suspicion and bewilderment) of faith in conflict with the flight of fancy and the mystery and elusiveness of the Jewish God.