Mike Nichols’ The Graduate gracefully transcends genre conventions with the use of one key factor: perspective. A perspective suffocated by youthful malaise for events yet to come. A submissive perspective tossed and turned by the will of adult superiors rather than his own. A perspective viscerally experienced through use of long tracking close-ups of Ben Braddock’s shuffle through the thick cascade of grown-ups, visual motifs emitting his inner sense of confinement, and his awkward, satisfying arc from a caged goldfish to a free-spirited dolphin.

This initial passivity is handled to full potential, generating tightwire tension from the elder Mrs. Robinson’s attempts at seducing his diffident innocence. Nichols analogizes Ben’s emotional states to bodies of water, once being trapped and controlled by outside forces in a swimming pool, and in another, sailing smoothly on a cozy pool bed and relishing in the presence of a lively, decorative fountain. Simon & Garfunkel’s soundtrack further enhances this thematic weight, figuratively charting Ben’s rise from the dark, silent abyss of emotional emptiness and passivity to a town-hopping hero charting his own path to instill a little more certainty into an undoubtedly uncertain future. Through Ben’s eyes, the older generation are represented with humorously exaggerated flourish, with the writers brilliantly tapping into parents’ natural, incessant need to control their children’s paths as well as their over-dominance that kickstarts Ben’s thrust into a more active control of his life.

By slowly exposing Elaine Robinson’s emotional scars and the similarities of her predicament, the universal naturality of Ben’s struggles is captured; with her joysticks also in hands of different pilots, the film’s themes immediately transcend social and gender boundaries and become mutually shared experiences. The same can be said for its masterful final seconds, which captures, through face alone, that despite the impermanence of life’s elations and the anxious uncertainty of an undrawn fate, these emotional pains can be eclipsed if fought together rather than toiled through alone.