All The Quarter Life Stories The Graduate Inspired

The Graduate didn’t invent the quarter-life crisis, but it might have been the first movie to really dramatize it. This 1967 classic, starring Dustin Hoffman as directionless college graduate Benjamin Braddock, should feel a little dated, considering it’s a portrait of American youth that’s over 50 years old. But while there are plenty of cultural touchstones that root it specifically in the late ‘60s, the movie remains surprisingly relevant in its depiction of twentysomething alienation. It was one of the first big-hit American movies to admit that the post-college years might involve some kind of uncertainty, rather than a path straight into stable adulthood. It also feels predictive of quarter-life-crisis movies and shows that we’ve seen in the decades since. Here’s our take on how Benjamin’s problems are still found in so many characters today, and why the movie itself still endures so many decades later.

The Graduate’s Major Hollywood Impact

The Graduate didn’t materialize out of nowhere. It’s a relatively faithful adaptation of a book released in 1963 and, through its translation into film later in the decade, it managed to capture an ongoing cultural transition. We follow Benjamin as he begins an affair with Mrs. Robinson, a longtime friend of his family. Benjamin is a 21-year-old in 1967, which puts him on the older end of the Baby Boom, and he’s not quite tuned in to the youth culture of the day – though the movie does use a series of Simon & Garfunkel songs on the soundtrack, a gentle halfway point between older forms of pop and more raucous rock and roll of the era. Benjamin yearns for something like the counterculture movement without quite embracing any of its signifiers like longer hair, more casual dress, or a more laid-back social presentation. He seems to want these things without knowing how to achieve them, or even necessarily put them into words. At times, older characters become so frustrated that they attempt to articulate Benjamin’s ennui for him because he’s doing such a bad job at it himself.

The film’s casting itself was also used to make this generational schism more apparent. Hoffman was 29 playing younger, a stark contrast to male stars of the older generation who often looked older than their years. And, as he pointed out to the filmmakers at the time of his casting, is also a Jewish actor, playing a WASP-y character – something that director Mike Nichols thought would help further depict Benjamin’s alienation from this privileged, moneyed world and its social expectations.

The movie was an enormous success; at the time, it was the third-highest-grossing movie ever in the United States, and part of the New Hollywood period of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, where American directors made more of a mark on world cinema as individual artists. Some of the film’s content roots it firmly back in 1967, and certain aspects play quite differently when viewed today. The sexual relationship between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson was always supposed to be a bit transgressive; today there would almost certainly be extensive discourse about their age gap, and about who is manipulating who in this relationship (though the movie clearly stresses both characters’ sadness and loneliness.) More troubling is the way that Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine, who Benjamin falls in love with, doesn’t have much agency as a character. She’s depicted as a passive young woman who loves Benjamin more because their similar situation pulls them together than because there’s anything particularly special she likes about him. And this is despite his indiscretion with her mother, as well as his initial behavior toward her. This lack of free will reflects Benjamin’s own arc, that of a scuba diver trapped in a fish tank… or a pool.

But the emotional context of the movie – Benjamin’s uncertainty and listlessness, his alienation from his parent’s generation, and the superficiality and consumerism he sees around him – may feel familiar to anyone who has grown up in the American middle class. Benjamin is constantly told that he’s ready to enter the adult world but at the same time, he receives mixed messages: He’s treated like a child at various social gatherings, but also expected to face adult responsibilities that are described as firm obligations. The advice he receives is vague and, again, superficial, stressing what he’s supposed to be doing with his life rather than any kind of soul-searching or personal epiphanies. This still speaks to the way many are feeling today, with millennials and Gen-Z completing college with degrees that may have prepared them with a plethora of general background knowledge, but without the legitimate tools and trade skills needed to confidently enter a career. It’s as though the general advice to enter college straight out of high school, complete a 4-year undergraduate degree track, and then get a job is missing some steps. And today’s younger generations are calling out this shoddy manual in ways Benjamin struggled to articulate back in the ‘60s.

Nichols drives home this feeling of hopelessness by isolating Benjamin visually or crowding the frame with older characters in a way that makes every party look claustrophobic. Of course, the movie is also limited to an upper-middle-class point of view; not everyone can deal with their twentysomething ennui by floating listlessly in their in-ground pool and driving around in the car their parents gave them as a graduation present. But the movie is also aware of that limited point of view, specifically aiming to explore how an upper-middle-class twentysomething fumbles his way toward the counterculture without really knowing how. And elements of Benjamin’s quarter-life crisis reverberated throughout multiple generations in the decades that followed.

Same Story, New Decade

The Graduate began to articulate young-adult fears and anxieties that were felt by Baby Boomers, so it was only natural that a quarter-century later, Generation X would have its own take on twentysomething angst, very much informed by their parents’ version. Because of The Graduate, Gen-X angst-and-talking comedies of the ‘90s like Kicking and Screaming, Walking and Talking, and Reality Bites were able to be a bit more open about their youthful struggles. In 1967, Benjamin can only react with a baffled fake agreement when a family friend famously gives him a shallow piece of career advice. But by 1989, a similar ambivalence about soulless capitalism informs the ethos of characters like Say Anything’s Lloyd Dobbler. No one calls Benjamin a slacker, but that’s how his disaffected reaction to his entry into the post-academic world reads, and in this sense he shares a kinship with Troy, the disaffected antihero of Reality Bites or the former college students who hang around their old college town in Kicking & Screaming, embracing old routines because they’re too scared and uncertain to move forward.

There are important differences, too, between how Benjamin and these later characters approach their uncertain future. The Graduate pointedly makes Benjamin lacking as a conversationalist; he can only begin to articulate to his parents how he’s feeling, and his efforts to engage Mrs. Robinson beyond sex sound like a desperate teenager. In the movie’s famous final scene, Benjamin and Elaine are reunited, but their rush of excitement doesn’t last. Soon, they’re just sitting together on a bus, unsure of their destination, the silence between them growing louder with every moment. His ‘90s equivalents share his ambivalence about what to do, but they have plenty to say, at least superficially. While pop culture doesn’t really feature in Benjamin’s life, such references are all over movies like Reality Bites and Kicking & Screaming, reflecting a generation that grew up on television in a way that Benjamin didn’t. It’s no accident that this same time period featured plenty of pop-culture parodies of The Graduate, specifically scenes that spoof that famous final sequence.

Later in the 2000s and 2010s, it was millennials’ turn for post-graduate, twentysomething stories, with movies and shows like Frances Ha, Chewing Gum, The Worst Person in the World, and Girls. Many of these characters echo Benjamin’s aimlessness, but in a very different context, with different motivations, stretching beyond just post-graduate blues. Many of these modern characters have a stronger idea of what they’d like to be doing in an ideal world; usually it involves making art or making some other contribution they see as meaningful. The drifting comes from lacking certainty over how to accomplish these goals, particularly in an economic climate that can be pretty harsh, with the increase of the “gig economy,” the indignities of “rise and grind” culture, and a growing sense that maybe work shouldn’t crush you but instead make you happy. In a way, that’s what Benjamin is struggling to figure out in The Graduate: He isn’t sure what he wants to do next because he can’t seem to picture any of the normal options – grad school, a corporate job, “plastics” – making him feel happy or fulfilled.

The most prominent and well-drawn female character in The Graduate is Mrs. Robinson, who belongs to Benjamin’s parents’ generation and becomes a villain in the film’s eyes. After her, there’s Elaine who isn’t really given any interiority. But starting with the aforementioned ‘90s comedies about twentysomethings, which tended to be more ensemble-driven, later descendants of The Graduate gave women more of a voice in communicating that generational lostness, too. By the early 2010s, characters like Frances, Hannah, and Chewing Gum’s Tracey became the primary portrayals of this kind of crisis, opening up conversations about the specific struggles of being a young woman trying to find her way in the world.

This corresponds with a shift in emphasis away from the types of romantic relationships that Benjamin seems to consider a possible means of escape from his dissatisfaction. These later movies place more importance on friendships – something Benjamin seems to lack. Until he starts dating Elaine in the second half of the movie, almost all of his interactions are with people his parents’ age. In contrast, Frances Ha pointedly avoids any direct romantic entanglements to better chronicle the heartbreak of losing a friend to the grown-up world. This change doesn’t necessarily make the characters happier, but it clarifies and specifies their loneliness.

Now as the oldest members of Gen-Z have graduated college and started making their way in the adult world, we’re starting to get new quarter-life crisis films from their perspectives. Take the recent indie Cha Cha Real Smooth: It’s about a recent college graduate who moves back home, feels uncertain about what he actually wants to do with his life, clashes with his parents, and becomes unexpectedly involved with an unsatisfied older woman—sound familiar? Cooper Raiff’s Andrew plays like a Gen-Z variation on Benjamin in how he communicates, too: Though he does snark at his stepfather in a way that’s reminiscent of Benjamin’s dismissal of his parents, he doesn’t retreat into solitude or secretiveness like Benjamin. Instead, he tries to use his natural gregariousness and emotional openness to become involved in the lives of others, including through a temporary job working as a party starter for his hometown’s bar mitzvah circuit. The movie is largely about what Andrew can do to be a better and more aware person as he begins to figure out the rest of his life and how he might use his people-pleasing tendencies to improve himself, rather than simply making himself feel better and comforted in the face of romantic rejection or uncertainty. Similarly, his relationship with the older woman, a single mother played by Dakota Johnson, is more about him seeking emotional, rather than sexual, validation. And while this is a sweeter and less satirical film than The Graduate, with a more hopeful vibe in its ending, Cha Cha Real Smooth also demonstrates how durable this story is – how stories like these by their nature can’t tie things up too neatly because coming-of-age doesn’t magically come to an end at age 18 or 22. Andrew has changed by the end of the movie, probably more definitively than Benjamin has, but the path to his future self isn’t completely clear. He doesn’t suffer from the same social expectations as Benjamin, but he also has even less guidance about how to go about creating a good, productive, potentially happy life.

Conclusion

Benjamin Braddock’s aimlessness and ennui in The Graduate derives from some very specific 1967 circumstances, but a major reason that The Graduate endures is that, besides being funny and well-made, it recognizes that these kinds of inner conflicts and twenty-something angst are widely relatable (and not going anywhere anytime soon.) The movie’s real accomplishment is admitting that they’re there in the first place – that the transition from childhood to young adulthood and beyond is much more complicated than popular culture was willing to admit previously. And thanks to its openness and long-lasting success, we’ve been rewarded with a whole host of films to carry us along on our journeys to the “real world.”