The Graduate, the December 1967 box-office smash starring newcomer Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock and Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, is often recounted as a major volley in the history of the Generation Gap. Made on a $3-million budget, it took in over $100 million domestically, which would be around $700 million in 2013 dollars. (In this century, only Avatar has earned more.)
Continuing my intermittent series reinterpreting American history, it’s worth reconsidering what The Graduate was actually about. Looking back from nearly a half-century later, The Graduate seems less like a landmark in the short-lived Generation Gap and more of a milestone in the long-lasting Ethnic Gap.
http://takimag.com/article/stranger_in_a_wasp_land_steve_sailer/print#ixzz2hBwUa53Z
Another excellent job by Steve Sailer. Someone commenting on Sailer’s review pointed out that Ann Bancroft was not a WASP, but an Italian, but that is neither here nor there. It seems that many in the Jewish community see almost every white gentile as either a ‘WASP’--which, along with ‘Anglo,’ is sort of our n-word, but since it is usually given a humorous spin, anyone is rendered silly or petty who might take notice of any such slight--or WASP wannabee who is only slightly less potentially dangerous, Holocaust-wise.
At the time, young and impressionable, I enjoyed the film, the cast and the soundtrack. It also helped that I was only about four years younger than Hoffman’s character was supposed to be, was socially awkward and had a crush on a girl that looked somewhat like a more petit honey-blond version of Katharine Ross, also named Kathy.
There is obviously a generation gap component to the film. Some confusion arises from many people looking back at the Sixties who think that almost all people in their early twenties were some combination of firebrand radicals or hippie dropouts. But even by mid-decade most young people were not politically active or hippies, and were still pretty ‘straight.’ Hence on the same AM station you could listen to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, the Carpenters and Johnny Cash. But there was this disorienting building excitement of generational change in the air, which turned out to be a slippery slope.
This is particularly true because meanwhile on other fronts our friends in academia, Freudian psychology, Hollywood and elsewhere had been feverishly gnawing away at the underpinnings of the West, as explained so ably by Kevin MacDonald in ‘The Culture of Critique.’
Of course the timing of the Vietnam war was an absolute godsend for such Western civilization deconstruction efforts. We who are being demographically phased out are now living among the collapsing ruins of our own founding majority culture. Some of the principals of that film may be reluctant to acknowledge the generational gap aspect because it was being gleefully deployed to cargo in another agenda. Sound familiar?
However Sailer’s main point is exactly correct. This is the same core theme that runs through so many Hollywood films: Swarthy sensitive endearingly confused young Jewish guy--sometimes an Italian or another less northerly white will be the stand-in--of great potential, surrounded by big loud shallow selfish grasping white gentiles, from which he escapes, trailing in hand [cue uplifting romantic score] a nordic goddess who has fallen madly in love with him.
Need more proof?
Add several dowdy dresses, heels, falsies, commendable comic acting and writing and you have ‘Tootsie’.
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