Benjamin Braddock Grows Up
What do Dustin Hoffman's clothes over three films say about the emotional development of one male archetype?
Note: This post discusses, and includes screenshots from, Kramer vs. Kramer. In several interviews starting in 1979, Meryl Streep discussed the abusive treatment she endured from Dustin Hoffman, including verbal taunts, sexual harassment, and physical violence. Hoffman also allegedly acted inappropriately with Katherine Ross during the filming of The Graduate, and in 2017 seven women accused him of sexual harassment, accusations which he has denied. Annie Hall is also discussed, and a screenshot of Woody Allen as Alvy Singer is included. The following films are discussed with the awareness of the allegations surrounding their stars, and in the hope that continuing to confront them as works of art can still provide valuable insight into the lives of ourselves and others.
Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate is an enduring cultural touchstone, its coming-of-age story about a young man rejecting the established path made for him by an older generation and searching for one more authentically his own still resonant today. I’ve written before about the film. In an Instagram post in November 2020, I wrote that while Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is often held up as a prime example of “heyday Ivy,” he is actually already pushing on the boundaries of stylistic conformity: “Katherine Ross’s pipe-smoking Berkeley douchebag fiancé… is a pretty perfect representation of Young Republican campus Ivy circa 1967. Benjamin? You can bet that by 1969 he has a mustache and a pair of cowboy boots to go with that corduroy and jeans combo.”
Well, did he? The Graduate ends on a tantalizing question mark. After searching for an authentic path for the whole film, Benjamin finally realizes it in the form of Elaine (Katherine Ross), the daughter of Mrs. “Are You Trying to Seduce Me” Robinson (Anne Bancroft). However, their life together is left unseen, and our only clues as to what comes next are the film’s ambiguous final shots:
So, what does come next? In a novel published in 2007, Charles Webb, author of The Graduate’s source novel, imagined Benjamin and Elaine in the 1970s, married and fighting with the Westchester County school system for the right to homeschool their children. But the characters of a novel and the characters of an adaptation are not the same: springing from the same root, the literary and cinematic Braddocks branch into alternate timelines. So, where does the film’s timeline lead? Does it make good on my reading of The Graduate, that Braddock is a young man in search of a counterculture? And whether it does or not, what does this tell us about style as an expression of values or worldview?
John and Mary was a film made by people on top of the world. The director, Peter Yates, had just directed Bullitt; Hoffman’s last film was Midnight Cowboy; co-star Mia Farrow’s was Rosemary’s Baby. The film was released in 1969, adapted by John Mortimer from a 1966 novel by Mervyn Jones. Compared with these other films, or with The Graduate, its cultural presence is negligible — my own awareness of it came purely from some great photos of Hoffman playing tennis in Central Park in winter, wearing a Yale sweater and khakis, during the production of the film (spoiler alert: this look does not appear in the movie itself).
The plot is minimal: John (Hoffman) and Mary (Farrow) meet in a bar, then return to Hoffman’s apartment, where they hold a series of conversations and get to know each other, all punctuated by flashbacks to their previous relationships. The Graduate is a talky film, but it’s constantly in motion: the characters walk, hide, drive, and run to their next conversation; their emotions are pent-up, bouncing off the walls of their fumbling discussions. John and Mary is sometimes in motion — the film opens with a long shot of the bar, as John follows his friend through a crowd, and there are other moments of movement throughout, but it’s largely static, a kind of bottle episode of a movie, as John and Mary circle each other somewhat warily in the airy, white apartment, feeling each other out and deciding how much they can trust the other and let their guard down. Taken on its own, the film is a bit flimsy.
In The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock spent most of the film in various kinds of shadow. He inhabited a world of limbo between darkness and light: unable to remain in the role expected of him by his overbearing parents and their friends, who see him as a bright young man in conservative clothes and a red sports car on the road to a successful career in something like “plastics,” and yet equally unable to find his way clearly to a new path.
Well, by 1969 Hoffman’s John hasn’t gone into plastics, but he doesn’t seem to have settled on a replacement, and his wardrobe reflects this. In his own apartment, a white space distinctly lacking coziness or hominess, he wears foundational garments of college kids in the late 1960s, like sweaters and 5-pocket corduroys, that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on Benjamin Braddock. In my earlier Instagram post on The Graduate, I identified Benjamin’s style as an indicator of this need to break free from expectations: while his clothes are certainly traditional, they are not the pure Ivy League uniform of Elaine’s pipe-smoking, glad-handing Berkeley boyfriend, but rather a more up-to-date twist on the Ivy style, favoring two-button jackets and slightly spread collars. His climactic disruption of Elaine’s marriage is a bold statement of purpose, one which breaks away from the staid conformity of his parents and the exploitation framed as rebellion in which he’s been trapped by Mrs. Robinson. As Benjamin and Elaine drive away from the church in a bus, they are embarking on a complete unknown.
The clothes John wears out of the apartment represent this unknown. His graph check point collar shirt and striped tie in the film’s opening scene are relatively conservative, if less Ivy League than Braddock’s wardrobe, but his single-breasted peaked-lapel tweed jacket is stylistically muddled. Taken together, the pieces of the ensemble don’t cohere — it’s J. Press meets Playboy.
Similarly, John’s outfit of a dark sweater under a decidedly more Braddock-like tweed feels unfinished rather than intentionally casual — an uneasy mixing of his comfortable interior world and his armored exterior one.
This uneasy, ultimately unsuccessful balancing act mirrors the action of the film. In The Graduate, Benjamin is pulled in two directions — the unthinking conformity of his parents, who see material possessions (a car, scuba gear) as markers of adulthood and accomplishment, and the unfeeling relationship with Mrs. Robinson, who sees human possession (of Benjamin) as a means for her own survival and to gain some control in her life. Benjamin escapes these two unhappy prospects with Elaine, who is more her own person and who has forced Benjamin to take some measure of the person he wants to be. By the time of John and Mary, John has successfully established himself as a person apart from the poles of conformity or possession, but seems unable to penetrate to the meaning of who he is. The film’s awkward dance between John and Mary, who constantly wonder how much to reveal of themselves and how much of the other is being revealed, is not one of comfort and ease in oneself but one of suspicion and even trauma.
Kramer vs. Kramer, in some ways, brings our Hoffman protagonists full circle. Ted Kramer doesn’t work in “plastics.” In fact, he is a creative -- the director of ad campaigns. However, he is also an executive, toiling in a prototype of the bland, yuppified workplace from which Albert Brooks’s David Howard, another ad executive, tries to escape in Lost in America (1985). And far from being a rebel against the system, Ted has oriented his whole life around it, so obsessed with career success that he doesn’t even know what grade his son is in.
The film’s most celebrated fashion moment is undoubtedly the outfit Ted wears when he and Billy meet Ted’s ex-wife, Joanna (Meryl Streep) in the park: Ted wears his trademark Gucci loafers with corduroys, a casual shirt, and an M51 Army jacket. As the WASPy, Upper East Side preppiness of Gucci loafers has seeped into the popular imagination thanks to the Official Preppy Handbook and countless inspo photos online, and as the trendy pairing of menswear basics and military surplus has been codified into canon, this image of Ted in his M51 has become emblematic of a certain kind of 1970s cool. In fact, the costume designer on Kramer vs. Kramer was Ruth Morley, who worked on films like The Hustler and The Miracle Worker in the 1960s before making her mark on film fashion history with two iconic movies: Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977). Notably, Travis Bickle, the disgruntled and ultimately doomed loner at the center of Taxi Driver, and Alvy Singer, the neurotic Jewish intellectual in Annie Hall, both wear military surplus jackets, the M65 and the M51. Charles McFarlane, who knows much more about military surplus than I do, writes that
[b]y the late 1960s and early 70s, the classic green four-pocket military field jacket was the ultimate symbol of the disaffected. Returning veterans from Vietnam marching against the war, young college students protesting for peace and looking to unplug from a consumer-focused society, and revolutionaries all donned the army field jacket. The field jacket’s outsider status was set in stone with Robert De Niro’s portrayal of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Al Pacino’s appearance in Serpico. Two somewhat similar characters: outsiders fighting in a harsh city against a corrupt system. All these years later, ad copy for Alpha Industries (the commercial supplier of M65 field jackets) still references Taxi Driver and trades on the field jacket’s ‘60s and ‘70s tough outsider status.
However, while Morley chose the wardrobe for all three films, I see a real difference between the effect of the jackets in Taxi Driver and Annie Hall as opposed to Kramer vs. Kramer. Bickle, who pairs his M65 (complete with patches from service in Vietnam and a large campaign button for the politician he hopes to assassinate) over jeans and a pair of cowboy boots, and Singer, whose M51 almost seems like armor against a world he perceives as working against him, feel like part of a zeitgeist -- street-level protagonists who reflect real-world anxieties and pressures, inverted Übermenschen for a post-Vietnam age. Kramer’s M51 is sending a different signal. McFarlane calls the evolution of military surplus from a symbol of the outsider to the insider the “yuppie-fication of the field jacket.” “By the late 70s and 80s,” McFarlane notes, “the field jacket had gone from counterculture to yuppie culture. Dustin Hoffman pairing his M65 with bit loafers, or Woody Allen wearing his M51 field jacket in The Sorrow and the Pity, is as insider as it gets. The field jacket begins to represent past youth and a self-conscious longing for outsider status from a generation that has become the establishment, but that at one time was looking to tear it all down. It has become a prop, a stand-in for taking a stand.”
Ted’s clothes tell this story of a man straddling two worlds. His suits follow the trends of the 1970s, only just starting to return to the conservative center of the 1980s: wide lapels, flared trousers, ugly ties, long collars. In more casual settings, he wears a tweed jacket over a denim shirt; at home, he falls back on basics, like sweatshirts, corduroys, and flapped-pocket khakis.
While Kramer’s denim shirts, flared trousers, and casual sweatshirts fit a young, athletic, casual man -- one at home in a creative field -- his bland suits are pure corporate. In the scene where Ted demands a new job, at lower pay, to bolster his case for custody of his son, Billy, his wardrobe meshes perfectly with the suits of his new employers. The only idiosyncrasy is his pair of black Gucci loafers worn with a suit or a denim shirt and flannels, a piece of blingy flamboyance which manages to be both a thumbed nose at the system and a capitalist endorsement at the same time.
For Kramer, then, his M51 hearkens back a decade, to when he was perhaps a more rebellious man, more firmly planted in the creative, rather than the corporate, world. As he seeks to find himself through his dissolving relationship with Joanna and his emerging one with Billy, he finds it harder to “go along to get along” in his executive role, and more inclined to explore his individuality. That the M51 appears only after he has started this exploration, then, makes sense. As @ariannai_, Instagram’s resident movie screenshot expert (who recently posted photos of Kramer’s M51), says, “Ted Kramer is a hard working man who unexpectedly becomes the only caretaker of his little boy: he needs to prioritize clothes that make the transition between work and play-time smooth. In one of the most iconic scenes we see him wearing the classic horsebit Gucci loafers, M65 jacket and brown cords: good indicators of how behind the ‘workaholic’ Ted lies Ted the father, whose thoughts are softer and surely centered around the little Billy.” Indeed, McFarlane writes, “The field jacket... has an urban connection at the time, the sense of the ‘city’ as still being a place you have to be tough to survive in, even on West End Avenue. You need the rugged jacket to keep the damp cold off while waiting for the train and the unfussiness of the utilitarian garment to take coffee spills as you fumble for your keys.” For Kramer, then, the M51 perhaps represents Ted’s shift from the intellectual (dis)comforts of the office to the more physical (dis)comforts of life with Billy, as well as his general upward mobility from the subversive rebel class into the establishment yuppie class.
And yet, as much as Kramer vs. Kramer returns our male protagonist to the pull of conformity, and demonstrates Ted’s concessions to that conformity (and the cost of those concessions), it is also a more hopeful movie than either The Graduate or John and Mary. For while Benjamin and John are able to remained armored against the world, pulled in the direction of genuine connections and motivated by authentic animus towards sacrificing their sense of self while never finding a way to really open the door to their own identities, Kramer transcends his armor. Far from being pristine, his clothes are functional, subjected to the demands of school drop-offs, hectic breakfasts, and Billy’s blood. Perhaps his military jacket speaks not only of yuppie mobility and wannabe rebellion, but also of Kramer’s own ability to hold and protect his son, to feel armored not in a suit and Gucci loafers but in a faded, fraying green jacket that matches his son’s parka. They are both protected, together, ready to be themselves in the world.