Growing up, we didn’t have a VCR, cable, satellite dish or any of those fancy things in my house. My parents, who were a little conservative, thought that television and movies were a distraction that their children could do without and that we were too young to be exposed to all of that anyway. Thus, we grew up on a staple diet of books, PTV and once-a-month movie treat at my grandma’s house. It was much later that cable finally made an appearance in our house (in my second year of A-level, to be precise).

So it was hardly surprising that I missed out on many of the great movies that came out back then. I had no clue about Stanley Kubrick’s sheer brilliance or Francis Ford Coppola’s insights into the human mind. Nor did I know that Orson Welles did a little more than just narrate (and adapt) War of the Worlds on the radio in the ’30s. Until recently, of course, when I decided that I would acquaint myself with all that I had missed out – what is now referred to as timeless and absolutely classic cinema. It all started with Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, which, insisted many, was a movie that I must watch. It didn’t take much to convince me since the movie gets its title from a musical composition by the same name; a personal favourite of mine. It also didn’t take much for me to Google random facts about the movie (read Jared Leto) which is when I came across a list – the 100-greatest-movies-of-all-time list, also the inspiration for this project. As I went through it, I realised that I had maybe watched barely 10 movies featured on it. So I did what any self-proclaimed ‘connoisseur’ would do – I decided to watch them all and then write about them.

And this is exactly why I settled down to watch The Graduate last weekend; a movie that I had heard a great deal about mostly through the mediocre Jennifer Aniston/Kevin Costner starrer Rumour Has It. Expecting a comedy – since that seemed to be the general opinion – about an oh-so-handsome Benjamin Braddock’s (Dustin Hoffman) bedroom adventures with Mrs Robinson (an equally stunning Anne Bancroft) and, later on, her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), I was somewhat surprised to find the movie opening to the tunes of Simon & Garfunkel’s sombre ‘Sound of Silence.’

It was about some 30 minutes into the movie that I realised that The Graduate is not a comedy. If anything it’s kind of sad and somewhat disturbing. I mean, here we have, this 20-something man who has returned home to his parents after graduating from college. Like most fresh graduates today, Braddock has no idea what he wants to do with his life or his degree for that matter and the unsolicited advice generously given to him by his parents and their friends isn’t really helping his situation. If anything, the advice preys heavily on his sense of alienation and it is in one such moment of listlessness and perhaps even boredom that Braddock takes up Mrs Robinson on her offer to have an affair with him. Thus begins Braddock’s first affair with an older woman who, in turn, is using her young lover to put an end to her own boredom as well as the demons in her closet. As expected, things get complicated when Braddock goes out with Elaine and more drama ensues. Don’t get me wrong though, the movie does have its moments of comic relief, which become funnier thanks to Hoffman’ s deadpan expressions and nervous energy. But The Graduate is a movie about alienation and ‘existential angst’ if you will. And it is perhaps for this reason that people still haven’t stopped talking about it; because no matter where you live or when you were born, the sense of isolation was pervasive at some point in your life. The challenge lies in overcoming it – even if it means having an awkward affair or a clumsy attempt to redeem oneself.

Next week: How Kubrick ended up in my living room.

The writer is a freelance journalist

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