Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

But Mrs. Robinson’s character also changes (or is changed?) significantly over the course of the film. As her affair with Benjamin continues, we learn more about her — a shotgun marriage that ended her college career, a chilly and sexless life with her husband — and she grows more realistically multidimensional; director Mike Nichols allows her the vulnerability of a woman at a certain age for whom life is a gilded-cage disappointment, determined to seek out and hold on to whatever small or visceral pleasures she can, while she can. And when Benjamin arrives at the Robinsons’ to take Elaine out on their first date — which a jealous Mrs. Robinson had desperately sought to prevent — the camera creeps close and rests on her face, now stripped of makeup, dry-lipped, lined, defeated, her hair careless, an afghan draped old-lady-like across her lap. She is no longer glamorous; she is simply sad, and she hurts my heart.

But Nichols isn’t done with her. As Benjamin and Elaine “fall in love” (quotations mine, to indicate my eye-rolling rejection of this superficial “relationship”), Mrs. Robinson’s vulnerability turns vengeful; by the film’s end, when Benjamin rescues Elaine at the altar of marriage to some plastic Ken-doll guy, she has become a desperate shrew, the caricature, if not the prototype, of the shrieking, scorned, unstable older woman. She is easy to ridicule and dismiss, exactly as we are meant to.

I have no idea when I first saw The Graduate , but I was young enough to feel awed by the early Mrs. Robinson, impressed by her glamorous self-possession: This is the type of in-charge woman I wanted to become and to be. However, I was also young enough to feel comfortably distanced from the horrible wretch she devolves into: How pathetic she is, this older woman. No, she is no longer an older woman ; she is just old . She is all done for, by the movie’s end; no more Benjamins await her, no more erotic interludes. Time to pack up your animal-print lingerie and bourbon and bag of seductive little tricks, Mrs. Robinson, sorry — that’s all over for you, now.

Nine months before my fiftieth birthday, I am sexually propositionedby a thirty-three-year-old young man (and he is a “young man,” to me; he seems so Benjamin-boyish), and the first thing I think, and blurt out in response is “What, why ?” Why me , is what I mean — he knows exactly how old I am, he has his choice of moist-skinned, lustrous-haired twenty- and thirtysomethings, and I am flummoxed by his forthright interest. The next thing I think, delighted, is Well, here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson . I think of martini assignations in hotel bars and black lace garter belts with sheer stockings, of shared, soaped-up showers and steamy gropings in cars. I think of the delicious word tryst . I think of how long it has been since I strolled naked and sex-sated across my bedroom in the morning light before someone’s watchful eyes. . and then I think of how long it has been since I worked out, of the dusky circles under my eyes I now feel compelled to cover with makeup, of the failed promise of that expensive new collagen-boosting moisturizer. I laugh with what I hope is elegant, glamorous style — and I tell the young man how flattered I am, of course, but I could not even consider such an outrageous thing. I send him on his way, and then I start to think some more.

It’s been a while, is what I think. My twenties and thirties were so busy with dating, and sex, and love, my oyster world of boyfriends and girlfriends and a seemingly endless supply of romantic partners and scenarios, all those tequila shots and couch cuddles, all that sweaty lace. But I had also become a little weary of the stale loop of first-date stories, the So, where is this going? third-month conversations, and all the overwrought drama of mismatched vulnerabilities and priorities and needs revealed by the tempering of sexual heat. All the inevitable complications and compromises. And for a while now things have been, yes, gloriously peaceful, satisfyingly calm.

But I realize my last actual date — and by that I mean sex, my last invitation to a sweaty tryst — has been much more than a while , has in fact been over five years ago; it was as if I awakened on my forty-fourth birthday to an erotic wasteland, a sexually barren landscape (and the sudden need for reading glasses in every room). Where did everybody go? Or. . is it my appeal that has withered, expired, slipped away? Have I aged out of a romantic career, been retired from the game? Is it just the anthropological reality of a woman my age, the inevitable fade into sexual invisibility? Something I should simply accept with resigned grace — get rid of the lingerie, get out the afghan? Is it my turn to be done for , is it really all over for me now?

Perhaps not — for here is this adorable young man, charmingly nervous as he tries to explain just why he finds me so irresistibly hot, making me feel so alluringly self-assured, offering me, well, what could be the perfect arrangement , as Mrs. Robinson would say (the early glamorous Mrs. Robinson, of course, not the horrid later one). And I remember the thrill of this long-lost feeling: Being desired. The ability to quicken someone’s pulse and feel my own begin a responsive sprint, the smell of someone’s blood-heated skin, the dizzying myopic high of it all. And the young man keeps pursuing me — delightfully, flatteringly — and I finally think: Why would I turn down this opportunity? One that has become, I have realized, so increasingly rare? How much longer do I have, to offer my no-longer firm and young flesh, to tempt in this way? Shouldn’t I seek out whatever small or visceral pleasures I can, while I still can?

And then I decided to stop thinking about it all so much, and simply say Yes .

The older man/younger woman pairing in films is beyondcliché or trope — it simply is , has always been: Art reflecting a double-standard fact of life. The actors age into distinguished gentlemen, the Carys and Clints and Harrisons and Seans, while the ingénues, once they’ve lost their ingénue-ishness, are replaced by a fresher, up-and-coming array — and, if they’re lucky, age-morph from playing the enticing lover or eyelash-batting girlfriend into wife and mother and grandmother roles, or divorced or still-single career gals, distinguished primarily by their anxiety.

There are far fewer cinematic models for the older woman/younger man arrangement, and they generally aren’t very happy ones. If the younger man is still technically an underage boy, the older woman tends to exhibit a dysfunctional neurosis or all-out pathology. In 1983’s Class , prep student Andrew McCarthy has a passionate affair with roommate Rob Lowe’s mother, Jacqueline Bisset, who turns out to be an emotionally damaged, alcoholic loon. 86 Notes on a Scandal ’s Cate Blanchett “yields” to the precocious advances of a fifteen-year-old student, replaying her own seduction as a young woman by an older teacher and shredding two families in the process. 87In The Reader , Kate Winslet seduces yet another fifteen-year-old boy and is revealed to be a murderous, unrepentant Nazi. 88Or, the alternative narrative is the nostalgia-fantasy of a boy’s initiation at the hands of a loving and sensitive “teacher,” as in Summer of ’42 , with soldier’s wife Jennifer O’Neill introducing young Gary Grimes to seaside, soft-focus sexual love, or the surprisingly tender My Tutor , where mature blond Caren Kaye “tutors” high schooler Matt Lattanzi in French, and oo-la-la, so much more, that lucky, lucky jeune homme . 89