Here's To You, Mrs. Robinson

In 1967 The Graduate, made cinematic history with a young man’s affair with a much older woman. Today, the figure of Mrs. Robinson remains iconic (with the help of the eponymous Simon and Garfunkel song, and the indelible image of Dustin Hoffman framed by that stocking-clad leg- as alluring as it is ominous). It was a groundbreaking story, told very much from a male perspective. Not to say that Mrs. Robinson – a glamorously embittered alcoholic housewife – wasn’t a compelling character. But the audience knows her only as far as Hoffman’s Benjamin does. We can only speculate about her feelings and motivations based on the information that Benjamin is privy to.

            The Graduate is about a young man who is seduced, not a middle aged woman who seduces. If Hollywood was hesitant to address issue of an older woman’s desire head-on, then consider the casting choices Exhibit B for their discomfort. Anne Bancroft was a fantastic Mrs. Robinson. She was also thirty-six, to Hoffman’s thirty at the time of filming. Hardly the gaping generational gap suggested by the script. Ava Gardner also auditioned for the role, but at forty-five was considered too old to play the world-weary mother of an adult child.

            In 1967, even a movie that sought to push the envelope with a forty-something woman sleeping with a barely legal man couldn’t bring itself to cast either age accurately. Fifty years later, the envelope is more or less right where it was. When older women take up with much younger men in real life, eyebrows still raise. In movies (at least American movies) the attitude is “ok, but only if it’s kinky”. It’s remarkable that this remains a taboo, especially considering the ubiquity of the reverse situation.

The upcoming movie season features a number of couples that pick up where Hoffman and Bancroft left off, but through a female gaze and with age-appropriate actresses. In Adore, lifelong female friends start sleeping with one another’s grown sons. In A Teacher, a high school teacher beds one of her students. In Bright Days Ahead a married woman spices up her retirement with a May-December affair. Movies like The Lifeguard and And While We Were Here feature thirtyish women taking up with teenage boys. 

Two things are at work here. First, it’s an important (if ludicrously delayed) step to have movies portray post-menopausal women as sexy and libidinous. The absence of older women in erotic situations implies that a woman’s sexual relevance expires along with her reproductive capacity. There are a whole lot of problems inherent to that mythology, so any film that combats it is making some kind of progress.            

            Secondly, and equally progressive is the notion of a woman as the more sophisticated, powerful partner. The one who can pick up the check. The one who knows how to behave at a fancy dinner party. Couples where the woman is older, more educated, and makes more money, and the man is young and hot and happy to be there. We’re so used to the dusty old paradigm of the men dating vapid teeny boppers instead of their distinguished female peers. Here it is flipped, with women finding themselves drawn to callow youth despite the availability of men their age and older. 

In all of the movies mentioned above, the romance is illicit. Rarely (if ever) do we see a love story between an older woman and a younger man carried out in broad daylight. Mrs. Robinson was married, a friend of Benjamin’s parents, and (eventually) his prospective mother-in-law. Her 21^st century counterparts are likewise often married, or inappropriately linked to her young lover. As in The Graduate, the affair is complicated or cut short when the young man abandons his folly to pursue a serious romance with a girl his age. So the love stories are steamy but unethical, ardent but doomed.