(Some very
interesting insights on Hollywood's methods to destroy American Christian
culture - and it is only one example of a constant, relentless 100 year program
which succeeded beyond their wildest dreams because of the willing cooperation
of 'Christian' churches. Ephesians 6:12 explains the fact and process simply
and explicitly - which is either misunderstood or mis-explained from DaPulpits.
Why? DaSeminaries
were already ahead of Hollywood! - CL)
The 1967 film The Graduate was a
landmark in Jewish cultural subversion (see also Edmund Connelly’s treatment).
By the time of the film’s release, Jewish film-makers in Hollywood were
becoming more explicit in their antipathy for White Americans and their
culture, and this was increasingly reflected in their output. In 1963, the
Jewish producer Larry Turman came across the 24-year-old Californian Charles
Webb’s novel The Graduate which, he claimed, “had an emotional
coloration for me like [the Jewish playwright] Harold Pinter. The book was
funny, but it made you nervous at the same time.”[1]
In his novel, Webb looks back in anger at his gilded California
lifestyle as the son of a Pasadena cardiologist. His semi-autobiographical
protagonist, Benjamin Braddock, a 20-year-old recent graduate from an East
Coast college, returns to his Californian home for a long, hot summer over the
course of which he stumbles into a passionless affair with the much older Mrs.
Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner. Braddock becomes
infatuated with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine who reciprocates his feelings
but rebuffs him after learning of his relationship with her mother. Mrs.
Robinson sends Elaine off to college at UC Berkeley, where she becomes engaged
to her classmate Carl Smith. A desperate Benjamin crashes their wedding and
elopes with Elaine to the great distress of her family.
Turman bought the rights to the book for $1,000 and sent it
unsolicited to Jewish director Mike Nichols (born Mikhail Peschkowsky) who
signed on to the project. Turman’s search for financing led him to Jewish film
mogul Joseph E. Levine—“the schlockmeister of the world”—who put up $3 million.
Turman’s impulse purchase of the rights led to one of the most consequential
films ever. Released in December 1967, The Graduate grossed
almost $105 million (equivalent to almost $1 billion today), the third-highest
ever at the time, and was nominated for seven Academy Awards including best
picture and acting nods for stars Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman and Katharine
Ross, plus an Oscar victory for director Nichols. The
Graduate has since become one of the most referenced films in the popular
culture lexicon of the Western world.
Nichols assigned Jewish screenwriter Buck Henry (born Henry
Zuckerman), then writing for the TV spy spoof Get Smart, as
screenwriter. Henry ended up sharing writing credits with the non-Jewish Calder
Willingham who had written a rejected first script. Songs by the Jewish duo
Simon and Garfunkel were used for the soundtrack. Given the many Jews involved
in the film’s production, it’s hardly surprising that Jewish sensibilities and
ideological fixations pervade the final product.
The Graduate was not
meant to read Jewish in the novel: the non-Jewish Charles Webb wrote the 1963
novel when he was just out of Williams College, which at the time is alleged to
have been “notoriously anti-Semitic, even at the administrative level.”[2] In
the hands of director Mike Nichols, however, the story became a scathing
critique of bourgeois WASP American culture and the oppressive burden it
purportedly imposed on young Americans. Nichols employs two recurrent visual
metaphors to symbolize this oppressive culture: black-and-white stripes and
water. The former representing prison bars confining Benjamin, while the latter
(the numerous scenes referencing pools, aquariums, Scuba diving and rain) are
said to symbolize the oppressive weight of societal expectation. The “troubled
water” theme recurs throughout the film, with Benjamin floundering in a toxic
social order where “he is submerged, underwater, trapped,” his world appearing
“claustrophobically enclosed like a fish in a small water tank.”[3]
Nichols’ prison bar metaphor
The film resonated with a generation of young people concerned, as
recent college graduate Benjamin Braddock is, about their place in the adult
world they were reluctantly entering. Beverly Gray, author of the 2017
book Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How “The Graduate” Became the Touchstone
of a Generation, claims the film “strikes me as having a Jewish soul.” Laurie
Shapiro, writing for the Forward, agrees,
observing that “Despite the All-American storyline of the novel, The
Graduate, the film version has always signaled a very Jewish sensibility
to me, starting with Dustin Hoffman oddly cast in the lead as super-Waspy
Connecticut kid Benjamin Braddock.” Referring to its Jewish director Mike
Nichols, Gray notes how:
The film seems to me Jewish in a social sense, in terms of the
Jewish outsider, which is certainly the way Mike Nichols viewed himself.
Nichols was feeling a bit askew among the comforts of bourgeois America. It’s
important to remember Nichols as a very young refugee from Nazi Germany. He
never really got over the experience of fleeing Berlin at age 7. I’d go on to
add that Nichols has made the following comment: “Dustin has always said that
Benjamin is a walking surfboard. And that’s what he was in the book, in the
original conception. But I kept looking and looking for an actor until I found
Dustin, who is the opposite, who’s a short, dark, Jewish, anomalous presence,
which is how I experience myself.” It’s a provocative statement, because
Nichols was neither short nor dark, though clearly he felt a strong inner
discomfort about the way he presented himself to the world. He certainly
identified with the angst felt by Benjamin Braddock.[4]
The perennial theme of Jewish alienation from a WASP-dominated
mainstream American society played an important role in how the character of
Benjamin Braddock—and the entire film—were conceived by Nichols—though this
only became fully apparent to him after the film had been made. “My unconscious
was making this movie,” Nichols later recalled. “It took me years before I got
what I had been doing all along—that I was turning Benjamin into a Jew. I
didn’t get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine
after the movie came out, in which the character of Dustin says to the
character of Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad
aren’t?’ And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly
embarrassing and fairly obvious: Who was the Jew among the goyim? And who was
forever a visitor in a strange land?”[5]
It was with his casting of Benjamin Braddock, described in the
book as a tall, blonde, and athletic, that Nichols took his biggest risk.
Unable to resist the urge to engage in Jewish ethnic networking, he passed over
Robert Redford for an unheralded, diminutive 29-year-old Jew, Dustin Hoffman.
Nichols cast Hoffman, “despite the fact that he was virtually unknown and
looked nothing like the leading man described in the script, which called for a
tall, blond track star, not a short, Jewish guy with a schnoz for the ages.”[6] Hoffman
later recalled telling Nichols, “The character is five-eleven, a track star. …
It feels like this is a dirty trick, sir.” The director replied, “You mean
you’re Jewish, that’s why you don’t think you’re right. Maybe he’s Jewish inside.”
Nichols claimed that casting Hoffman emphasized Benjamin’s alienation from the
WASP middle class world around him and its oppressive expectations. For the
Jewish director Steven Soderbergh, Nichol’s choice was “the seminal event in
the defining of motion picture leading men in the last 50 years.”[7]
Director Mike Nichols on set with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft
A number of early reviews of The
Graduate described Hoffman as “ugly.” An article in Life magazine
referred to him as “a swarthy Pinocchio,” and made humorous reference to his
prominent nose. According to Gray, however, “What was important was the way
young audiences embraced Hoffman, big nose and all. Suddenly it was okay not to
look like Robert Redford and still play a romantic leading role.”[8] Hoffman’s
anti-heroic character gave the green light for Hollywood to promote “the ethnic
Jewish matinee idol and youth icon in the forms of George Segal, Elliot Gould,
Richard Benjamin, Charles Grodin, and Gene Wilder.”[9] These
Jewish romantic leads were invariably paired onscreen with beautiful non-Jewish
actresses like Marsha Mason, Candice Bergen, and (in the case of Dustin
Hoffman) blondes like Mia Farrow, Faye Dunaway, Susan George, and Meryl Streep.
The new era was boon for Jewish actors, who, as Gray points out, suddenly
no longer had to fret about not resembling the WASP ideal, nor did
they need to hide (as such stars as John Garfield and Kirk Douglas had done)
behind anglicized names. The casting of Dustin Hoffman as The
Graduate’s leading man was a shock to Hollywood, which had spent decades
trying to sidestep the Judaic roots of its founders. But in the wake of The
Graduate, young Jewish males were suddenly everywhere, and often they were
playing characters with backgrounds similar to their own. This was the era that
launched Richard Benjamin (Goodbye, Columbus, 1969),
and Richard Dreyfuss (The Goodbye Girl, 1977), along with Grodin. It
was all part of what film critic J. Hoberman, paying tribute to Elliott Gould
in the Village Voice, wittily called the Jew Wave.[10]
While celebrating the “Jew Wave” inaugurated by Hoffman’s casting
as Benjamin Braddock, Shapiro laments that Hollywood’s enthusiasm for casting
Jews as romantic leads didn’t extend to Jewish women, who, she contends, “still
struggle to be cast in a lead if they don’t look like Natalie Portman, Mina
Kunis or (yes, she’s Jewish) Scarlett Johansson. Men can keep their original
noses and surnames (Ben Stiller, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Adam Brody,
Adam Levine) but Jewish women elect for plastic surgery to ‘correct’ what
Hollywood execs like Harvey Weinstein deem ‘unfuckable’ looks, and then hide
their names and heritage.” Shapiro also resents that some Jewish biopic female
roles have been handed to non-Jews like Nicole Kidman (as Diane Arbus) and
Felicity Jones (as Ruth Bader Ginsburg)—despite the existence of Jewish
actresses that “meet or even surpass most people’s standard of beauty” like
Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, and Mila Kunis. This is largely, she insists,
because “Hollywood seems to have never gotten over its infatuation with
blondes, especially when paired with dark-haired men.”[11]
Hollywood did make efforts in the 1960s to promote Jewesses as
romantic lead characters. The Jewish film historian Neal Gabler notes, for
example, in his book Barbara Streisand: Redefining Beauty,
Femininity and Power, how, in the late sixties, Streisand was repeatedly cast by
Hollywood studios who deliberately attempted to make her Jewish ethnicity part
of her public appeal. Gray notes that “In the wake of her success, many young
girls thought twice about requesting a nose job as a Sweet Sixteen gift. But I
would argue that Streisand started no trend toward the acceptance of other
leading ladies who defied the WASP standard of physical attractiveness.”[12]
Dustin Hoffman certainly defied the WASP standard of male physical
attractiveness, and Nichols sympathized with the young actor’s view of himself
as an alienated Jew in a gentile world, and Hoffman, in turn, was able to
comprehend the role once “he caught Nichols and Henry’s vision of Benjamin as
the ultimate outsider—not a part of the culture, but not a part of the
counter-culture either.” Nichols and Henry envisioned the Braddock character as
a “genetic throwback” among the “walking surfboards” of angular, blond
vigor—the American WASP mainstream. Nichols wanted Hoffman to project an
estrangement that began in the blood. Renata Adler, writing in The New
York Times, was the first to openly state the reality of Benjamin’s Jewish
identity—with the Jewish film critic J. Hoberman endorsing Adler’s observation,
identifying Benjamin as an obvious “crypto-Jew” and “an example of an ascendant
Jewishness” in Hollywood.[13]
Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock: “an example of ascendant
Jewishness”
Hoffman won the role over Charles Grodin, another Jewish actor who
was no model of conventional WASP good looks. On the morning of Hoffman’s
screen test for the role, he was marched into the makeup chair, where experts
worried over his thick eyebrows, muscular neck, and less-than-perfect features.
Hoffman recalled Nichols fretting, “Can we do anything about his nose?” Two
hours later, when he went before the camera alongside co-star Katharine Ross,
matters got worse: “The idea that the director was connecting me with someone
as beautiful as her, it became an even uglier joke. It was like a Jewish
nightmare.” Trying to ease the tension between them, he pinched or patted
Ross’s buttock (accounts differ), leaving her furious. Nor did his reading of
the role of Benjamin run smoothly. Just before the film’s release, when Ross
was asked about her first impression of Hoffman, she pulled no punches: “He
looks about three feet tall, so dead serious, so humorless, so unkempt.” She
remembered thinking “This is going to be a disaster.”[14]
While Benjamin Braddock might have been, according to Nichols,
Jewish on the inside (and on the outside to the extent of his casting Hoffman),
the Braddock and the Robinson families were supposed to be representative of
WASP middle class America. Despite this, Jewish characterizations even crept
into the portrayal of these characters, and Gray notes how
the film is basically Jewish in a Lenny Bruce sense: New York
neurotics are all Jewish, whatever their ethnic and religious background.
Interestingly, the two overtly New York characters in the movie, in terms of
speech patterns, are Ben’s father and Mrs. Robinson. I can certainly see Mr.
Braddock (played by William Daniel) as an upwardly mobile “Jewish” man,
enjoying the fruits of his labors. And of course Mrs. Robinson is the very
definition of neurotic. But her husband and daughter don’t seem in any way
Jewish to me, despite their presence in a Beverly Hills mini-mansion of the
type that Jews of that era favored and that I recognized all too well.[15]
As those who have seen the film know, Benjamin Braddock sleeps
with Mrs. Robinson but loves her beautiful daughter, Elaine, who is disgusted
when she learns what her mother and boyfriend have done. Elaine ends her
relationship with Braddock and becomes engaged to Carl Smith, portrayed by the
decidedly non-Jewish actor Brian Avery.
Carl Smith (Brian Avery) with Elaine (Katharine Ross)
Undaunted by Elaine’s rejection, Benjamin pursues Elaine and
crashes her wedding. This scene, as conceived by Nichols, is laden with Jewish
symbolism and socio-political fixations. Hoffman’s character invades the
sanctity of the church (a metaphor for the Jewish infiltration of Western societies?)
to take Elaine from Carl who is depicted as Braddock’s physical and ethnic
opposite (a tall and blonde Nordic archetype). Benjamin uses Christianity’s
most sacred symbol (a crucifix) as a weapon to fend off the wedding attendees’
attempts to stop this profane intrusion. He then thwarts their attempts to
reclaim Elaine by jamming the crucifix into the door of the church, leaving
them barricaded inside and allowing him to flee with Elaine (see lead
photograph).
The wedding scene of The Graduate
Such overt anti-Christian imagery jarred with the film’s first
audiences—but was only the start of Hollywood’s disparagement of Christianity,
and seems tame by today’s standards. Such efforts culminated in depicting nuns
in sexual roles. Notoriously, the opening scene of the pilot of Californication, a
program starring and produced by the Jewish actor David Duchovny (whose father
was a publicist for the American Jewish Committee), depicts a nun performing
oral sex on Duchovny’s character Hank Moody in a church. This pornographic
debasement of Christian symbols by Jews is a blatant way of defiling Christian
culture.
The wedding scene in The Graduate is
supposed to be a triumphant moment: two young people rebelling against and
liberating themselves from the oppressive expectations of their parents and
their pathogenic culture. The conclusion to The
Graduate glorifies breaking away from familial, cultural (and
implicitly ethnic) constraints in favor of individualism. The
Graduate’s core theme can be broken down to a general societal and
political defiance. In the first scene of the film, Benjamin rides to the left
on an airport conveyor belt as everyone else accedes to the airport’s public
announcement system’s request to “Please stay to the right.” The political symbolism
is obvious.
The Graduate was made at a time when
the New Left was ascendant in the United States, and when the ideas of Jewish
intellectuals like Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse were displacing orthodox
Marxism in leftist movements throughout the West. Indeed, Nichols’ film can be
seen as a subversive exposition of ideas espoused by Marcuse in his seminal
1964 work One Dimensional Man. During the late 1960s and
early 1970s, Marcuse’s work was probably the most influential social theory of
its day and enjoyed a wide readership. In One
Dimensional Man, he argued that advanced industrial societies like the United
States repress their populations by creating false needs via mass advertising,
industrial management, and modes of thought which resulted in a “one
dimensional” universe of thought and behavior which stifled people’s capacity
for critical thought and oppositional behavior. Marcuse advocated what he
called the “great refusal” as the only effective opposition to these
all-encompassing methods of social control. He championed sexual and ethnic
minorities and outsiders “to nourish oppositional thought and behavior.”[16]
A generation of young radicals took up Marcuse’s texts as
“essential criticism of existing forms of thought and behavior,” and Marcuse
himself identified with the New Left and defended their politics and activism.
For Marcuse, the traditional European family structure served “to legitimate
authoritarian institutions and practices” and predisposed individuals to
“accept social authority.” Alongside fellow Frankfurt School intellectuals Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, he viewed the traditional Western family was an
important institution “for the production of ‘authoritarian personalities’ who
are inclined to submit to dominant authorities, however irrational.”[17]
Herbert Marcuse
There are also strong points of intersection between Marcuse’s
ideas and those of Jewish post-Freudian intellectual Wilhelm Reich. In his 1933
book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich argued that the
authoritarian family is of critical importance for the authoritarian state
because the family “becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology
are molded.”[18] Crucial
for Reich was the repression of childhood sexuality, which, in his view,
created children who are docile, fearful of authority, and in general anxious
and submissive. Reich claimed the role of traditional “repressive” Western
sexual morality was “to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and
humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order.” Marcuse agreed with
Reich that the “liberation of sexuality and the creation of non-hierarchical
democratic structures in the family, workplace and society at large would
create personalities resistant to fascism.”[19]
Marcuse, like Nichols, a refugee from National Socialist Germany,
is said to have been “extremely sensitive to the dangers of fascistic
tendencies” and his work was an important part of the great cultural shift from
the affirmation to the repudiation of inherited values.[20]
The familial, religious and ethnic ties of White people were
presented by Jewish intellectuals like Marcuse (and Hollywood writers and
producers) as an oppressive burden imposed by the past—a way in which parents
encumber their offspring with an inheritance of dysfunctional norms.
Frankfurt School intellectuals, including Marcuse, held that the
psychologically healthy White person was someone who had broken free from these
dysfunctional norms (i.e., the traditional Western moral code), and realized
their human potential without relying on membership in collectivist groups. The
embrace of radical individualism among non-Jews, promoted by the likes of
Marcuse, was, of course, conducive to the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive
group. Yet while Marcuse promoted individualism and condemned White racial
feeling as deeply immoral, he was a committed Zionist who strongly supported
“the establishment of a Jewish state, capable of preventing the repetition of a
holocaust.” Marcuse justified supporting ethnic nationalism for his own tribe
on the basis that “The United States didn’t do a goddamn thing under Roosevelt
about the persecution of Jews before and during World War II,” and because
“There is a continued effective anti-Semitism that could explode at any time in
a neo-fascist regime. … Anti-Semitism is rampant in all states, and still
exists in all states.”[21]
This line of thinking motivated the activism of Jewish New Left
leaders like Mark Rudd who actively promoted Marcuse’s ideas. Rudd claimed that
for him and his New Left colleagues, “World War II and the Holocaust were our
fixed reference points. We often talked about the moral imperative not to be
good Germans. We saw American racism as akin to German racism towards the
Jews.”[22]
Alongside intellectual activists like Marcuse and political
activists like Rudd, Hollywood has played an incredibly important role in this
Jewish campaign to attack and destroy the fabric of White American society.
Hollywood’s guiding principle, as articulated by Jewish Hollywood director Jill
Soloway, resides in the perceived necessity of “recreating culture to defend
ourselves post-Holocaust.”[23] This
ethnic “defense” has entailed the promotion of radical individualism for White
people, racial diversity and mixing, the denigration of Christianity, the
hypersexualization of popular culture, the glamorizing of sexual non-conformity
and the breakdown of traditional gender roles—all alongside constant reminders
of “the Holocaust” with its concomitant themes of Jewish victimhood and
unsurpassed German (White, European) evil. This is Jewish ethnic warfare waged
through the construction of culture. The Graduate was
an early shot fired in this ongoing war.
Notes
[1] Alec
Scott, “When ‘The Graduate’ Opened Fifty Years Ago, It Changed Hollywood (and
America) Forever,” Smithsonian Magazine,
December 2017.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/graduate-opened-50-years-ago-changed-hollywood-forever-180967222/
[2] Laurie
Gwen Shapiro, “50 Years Later, Just How Jewish Was ‘The Graduate?’” Forward,
November 15, 2017. https://forward.com/culture/387524/50-years-later-just-how-jewish-was-the-graduate/
[3] Gus
Cileone, “What does the water imagery in ‘The Graduate’ express about the 1960s
youth mindset and destiny,” The Take, October
7, 2015.https://screenprism.com/insights/article/what-does-the-water-imagery-in-the-graduate-express-about-the-1960s-youth-m
[4] Shapiro,
“50 Years Later,” op cit.
[5] J.W.
Whitehead, Appraising The Graduate: The Mike Nichols Classic and Its Impact
in Hollywood (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011) 58.
[6] Steve
Almond, “Remembering Mike Nichols And The Cinematic Landmark That Was ‘The
Graduate,’” wbur, November 21, 2014.https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2014/11/21/mike-nichols-the-graduate-steve-almond
[7] Scott,
“When The Graduate Opened Fifty Years Ago,” op cit.
[8] Shapiro,
“50 Years Later,” op cit.
[9] Whitehead, Appraising
The Graduate, 63.
[10] Shapiro,
“50 Years Later,” op cit.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Whitehead, Appraising
The Graduate, 63.
[14] Beverley
Gray, Seduced By Mrs. Robinson: How “The Graduate” Became the Touchstone
of a Generation (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2017), 42-3.
[15] Shapiro,
50 Years Later,” op cit.
[16] Douglas
Kellner, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional
Man: Studies in Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London:
Routledge, 1991), xi.
[17] Douglas
Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984) 110.
[18] Wilhelm
Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (London: Penguin, 1970)
64.
[19] Kellner, Herbert
Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism, 111.
[20] Ibid., 296.
[21] Herbert
Marcuse & Douglas Kellner (Ed.), The New Left and the 1960s: Collected
Papers of Herbert Marcuse (London: Routledge, 2004), 180.
[22] Philip
Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance(Melbourne,
Victoria; Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 254.
[23]http://estherkustanowitz.typepad.com/myurbankvetch2005/2009/04/jenji-kohan-jill-soloway-and-the-hebrew-mamita-inside-the-jewish-noggin.html
(Republished
from The Occidental Observer by
permission of author or representative)
https://www.unz.com/article/jewish-themes-in-the-graduate-1967/
