Part of Your World: Water Symbolism in The Graduate

 Tova Byrne

Part of Your World: Water Symbolism in The Graduate

Benjamin Braddock is established immediately as a fish out of water. When the opening credits of Mike Nichols’ The Graduate subside, the first shot is a centered, almost uncomfortably tight close up of Ben’s head in front of a fish tank. The fish swim aimlessly in their confined space and a figurine of a scuba diver (foreshadowing!!) amongst artificial seaweed as Ben sits for a moment. Ben is dragged from the solitude of his bedroom and submerged fully in the party, and as the proximity of this long take to Ben’s face and the bombardment of the well-intended questions about the future from his parents’ friends create a sense of suffocation. Ben is in a fish tank; this is the world he has been put in by his parents, and, although he may have other fish to interact with, he will always be confined within its glass walls.

In fact, the whole film seems to be hopping from fish tank to fish tank in a desperate clamor to escape. Ben fishes the keys out of the tank in his room at the very beginning of his spiral into his affair with Mrs. Robinson. For a moment, perhaps he has found a way out of his parents’ world. Ben spends an entire montage floating, purposeless, in his parents’ pool. “Well - I would say that I'm just drifting,” he says from the raft in response to his father’s aggravated questions about what he thinks he’s doing. But the presence of water in this film is beyond just fish tanks and water rafts, it also presents itself in one of the most classic moments of the film. As a 21st birthday gift, Ben’s parents buy him a full set of scuba gear. This succeeds in not only figuratively but almost literally alienating him (for there is no denying how unbelievably strange he looks in the complete getup.) In addition, it is but another instance in which Ben is suffocating in the world of his parents. The scene is uncomfortable to watch due to it being shot from Ben’s point of view (sound as well) along with the fact that as he tries to surface, his father pushes him back under for the sake of demonstrating this party trick for the sake of the guests. The camera zooms out and Ben looks small, almost doll-like in the pool, and we remember the figurine in the shot that we started with.

“In this case it was drowning in things,” director Mike Nichols explained, talking about how he portrayed Ben’s isolation in the film. “And the danger of becoming a thing, the danger of treating yourself or other people as things. So that preoccupation led to the choices of the compositions of shots, and where the camera was and how isolated he was.”