Benjamin and Anne

Benjamin and Anne: 

Contextualizing Anne Sexton’s Live or Die
in Comparison with Mike Nichols’ 1967 film The Graduate

In 1967, Anne Sexton received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her work, Live or Die. That same year, 

Mike Nichols’s film The Graduate was 

nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The combination of the film’s themes of alienation, nonconformity, and the revolutionary Simon and Garfunkel score struck a chord with audiences and shook the cultural foundations of 1967 America.  Anne Sexton’s work, though dissimilar in subject matter, carries comparable themes and tones and shook the foundations of 1967 American poetry. The speaker in Live or Die is open and almost unafraid to encounter her emotions, whereas Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate seems to be emotionless and moves through life trapped in the capsule of his own body. 

Similarities between Anne Sexton and The Graduate’s Mrs. Robinson can also be made, as they both rely heavily on a narcissist need for self-involvement. Throughout Live or Die and The Graduate, readers and audiences are exposed to themes of alienation, isolation, narcissism, depression, and a hunger for something more. Both pieces present these themes in entirely 

different ways and spawn from entirely different circumstances, but both prove to convey these themes effectively and in a way that allows everyone to relate. It is not so much about what is being said, but rather how it is being said.

1967 saw many films that broke the mold of what was going on in that medium at the time. As Entertainment Weekly columnist Mark Harris states in his article “Here’s to You Mrs. Robinson”:

Half of the Best Picture nominees of
1967 seemed to be sneering at the other
half: The values of Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner were trashed by The Graduate;
the hopes expressed by In the Heat of the 

Night had little in common with the

middle finger of insurrection extended
by Bonnie and Clyde. And Doctor Doolittle

was just a universally dismissed children’s
musical.
                      (Harris, 39).

In the Heat of the Night may have won Best Picture that year, but it was The Graduate that still stands out as the film that defined that era. In The Graduate, the first moments of the film 

present Benjamin Braddock as a disorientated young man looking for direction and seeking a way out of his own graduation party. Benjamin is a character that represents more than just bewilderment, but rather a depiction of the stage between boyhood and manhood. The viewer 

also meets Mrs. Robinson, a character without a first name. She is more than a character – she is an entity. Mrs. Robinson is an entity born out of unpleasant circumstances. She is someone who used to love studying art and who became pregnant at a young age and was forced into 

marrying someone she was not in love with. She is the fell destroyer of her surroundings, an alcoholic neurotic who relies on others to bring her out of her fits of woe. Benjamin is just one 

in a long line of disasters for her. Mike Nichols is quoted in Mark Harris’s article, as saying, “the boy drowning in material things saving himself in the only possible way, which was through madness (39).” Anne Sexton, in a letter to a student, describes madness as a destructive force of nature stating: “Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing… nothing 

grows from it and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.” Then adding, “poetry led me by the hand out of madness. I am hoping I can show others that route” (Sexton and Ames). Both The Graduate and Live or Die, provide audiences with an engaging central character journeying through madness to find some sort of meaning in life. The idea of madness is openly present in 

both works and is not just dealt with, but fully encountered.

In the beginning of the film Benjamin is forced to show off his new scuba gear for the guests. He is thrown into the pool and left by himself. He is cut off from everyone and he can only hear muffled dialogue. This immersion is not a baptism; it’s a visual representation of his struggle 

to face the future. He is trapped in a state of arrested development 

that, for whatever reason, will not allow him to move forward. In Live or Die, Anne Sexton reveals a similar emotion in her poem, “Those Times…”

At six
I lived in a graveyard full of dolls,
avoiding myself,

                                          my body, the suspect

                                          in its grotesque house.

                                          I was locked in my room all day behind a gate,
                                          a prison cell.
                                          I was the exile   

                                          who sat all day in a knot.

Sexton is describing the same feeling that the audience sees when Benjamin is floating in the pool, alone. Sexton, at age six, felt the impending doom that faced her in her years that were to come between girlhood and womanhood. Much like the same feeling that is seen in Benjamin’s face, as he floats in the stages between boy and man:
Ben: I’m just…
Mr. Braddock: …worried?
Ben: Well…
Mr. Braddock: About what?
Ben: I guess about my future.
Mr. Braddock: What about it?
Ben: I don’t know. I want it to be…
Mr. Braddock: …to be what?
Ben: …Different.

As Benjamin is about to encounter his next step, Sexton describes just a small piece of her journey: “I knew that if I waited among shoes / I was sure to outgrow them” she says in 

lines 65-66 of “Those Times…” In Live or Die Anne Sexton has a luxury that Benjamin Braddock does not – she is writing looking back, while he is in the present discovering life as it happens and his situations are based on decision-making that happens has life comes. Sexton is looking back upon a life of decisions made and reliving them in a state of reminiscence that is affected by her present state 

at the time of her writing. In No Evil Star, Sexton writes that “it’s almost in a way like keeping a scrapbook to make life mean something as it goes by, to rescue it from chaos – to make ‘now’ last (Sexton, No Evil Star). In the last lines of “Those Times…” she looks back at what she did not know and looks at what she can take away from what she could not hear at the time:

I did not know that my life, in the end,
would run over my mother’s like a truck
and that all that would remain
from the year I was six
was a small hole in my heart, a deaf spot,
so that I might hear
the unsaid more clearly.

Anne Sexton is realizing that her life is mimicking patterns she never wanted to repeat, just as Benjamin is confused and frustrated, trying to make sense 

of what his life will become. He does know that he wants his own life, away from the Southern California lifestyle of his parents. Both Anne and Benjamin are hungry for something more in their life. In Live or Die, Sexton uses hunger as a metaphor for depression. Sexton takes a number of exact images that define her depression and communicates these images from her mind to the page. She externalizes the process of being depressed. Her ability to formulate these images into a dialogue of sorts allows her depression to exist on a new plain and establish itself as its own being (Kendall). In her poem “Flee On Your Donkey” she externalizes her depression into her hunger and her stomach, like the page, is where the depression lies:

This is madness
but a kind of hunger.
What good are my questions
in this hierarchy of death
where the earth and the stones go
Dinn! Dinn! Dinn!
It is hardly a feast.
It is my stomach that makes me suffer.

Sexton’s reflection on her illness resulted in the ability to pinpoint and show the source of the depression as being balanced in the symbol of her stomach. Many different examples could have been used for such a feeling, but she chose the sensation of hunger and the destination of hunger is in the stomach. Sexton extends the metaphor in “Flee On Your Donkey” with the line “Turn, my hungers!” She opens the idea of hunger to include her desires and need for other things on many levels. This feeling is aching inside and she removes the sensation within her mind and isolates it in the stomach as the center of her pain (Kendall).  Among her many hungers was her hunger for death. Her tendency towards death is similar to the need for food. In “Wanting to Die” death is ordinary and natural. She speaks of suicide as having “a special language.” She has gone through life, and though she understands its appeal, she has a desire like hunger towards exploring death:

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnamable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

She is well aware of what life has to offer and she has even enjoyed it, but she is naturally drawn to the idea of death; but not just any death, a suicide. In “Suicide Note” she repeats “Oh my hunger! My hunger!” She writes, “once upon a time my hunger was for Jesus.” These hungers haunt her at every turn and placing them in the stomach renders her 

incapable of escape from them.

Similar to Anne Sexton’s placement of the body is Mike Nichols’ camerawork that causes attention to where Benjamin’s body is placed on screen. The Graduate opens with a close-up shot of Benjamin’s face. The isolation of this shot makes him look alone – almost a disembodied floating head. The camera then pulls back and reveals that he is really on a plane full of people. He sits with an expressionless blank face. He is then seen on the automated walkway as the opening credits roll on the screen. Simon and Garfunkel’s song “The Sounds of Silence” plays:   

And in the naked light I saw,
ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
people hearing without listening.
People writing songs that voices never shared,
no one dared disturb the sound of silence.

These lyrics provide a haunting backdrop to the expressionless face of Benjamin. This song is 

not just there to fill in aural space, but rather to make a statement that cannot be made in any other way. Nichols uses this song three different times in the film. Benjamin then disappears into the crowd of people walking through the terminal. This scene dissolves into the next, revealing Benjamin sitting with the same expression in his room with his head positioned in front of the fish tank. The camera shows a plastic model of a scuba diver at the bottom of the tank, foreshadowing the pool scene. Benjamin is many times seen behind glass or in shots that are framed to isolate (Dirks).

Towards the end of the film when Benjamin is running, he is being shot with a long telephoto lens, which foreshortens distances in relation to the camera. This effect makes him look as if he is getting nowhere. Traditionally in film, things move from the left side of the screen to the right, as not to jar the eye of the viewer 

from the natural order of movement. For example, if a character in a film takes a plane from Los Angeles to New York – the plane must be shown flying from the left to the right of the screen, as it would appear on a map. In several scenes Benjamin is shown walking from the right side of the screen to the left, while everyone else in the scene is moving from left to right. Benjamin is spinning his wheels, getting nowhere, and going the wrong direction in life.

The left to right progression on film is the natural way of viewing images, much like the eye reads words across the page. In Live or Die Sexton is able to utilize this natural progression across the page giving the reader a straightforward visual presentation on the page – an obvious difference between the written word and film. Sexton is able to use this natural left to right progression to allow the subject matter to form in a natural way for the reader. The space 

between stanzas acts as a dissolve from one scene to the next, while keeping the continuity. The page breaks provide the reader with an intermission that is usually not granted in cinema. All this to say that the movement of words across the page are less likely to mislead a reader, while images on film have the aid of soundtrack, dialogue, background noise, and camera movement – which can easily manipulate the eye. Sexton’s words lay naked on the page.

In Live or Die’s opening poem, “And One For My Dame,” Sexton reveals her father as a “born salesman” and “born talker.” She writes of how her father could not separate the business from the personal:

A born salesman,
my father made all his dough
by selling wool to Fieldcrest, Woolrich and Faribo.
A born talker,
he could sell one hundred wet-down bales
of that white stuff. He could clock the miles and sales
and make it pay.
At home each sentence he would utter
had first pleased the buyer who’d paid him off in butter.

These three opening stanzas convey a level of disdain for the way her father speaks and what he does for a living. The poem hints at a struggle to reconcile art and commerce – the need for employment to live and having 

that employment eventually end a life (“He died on the road, / his heart pushed from neck to back, / his white hanky signaling from the window of the Cadillac.”). At this point in the book, Sexton has not yet mentioned the word “hunger” but the hunger for “something other” is present in this opening piece. Her father used his leisure time to plan the next trip (“Each night at home / my father was in love with maps” and “he typed out complex itineraries, packed his trunk, / his matched luggage / and pocketed a confirmed reservation, / his heart already pushing over the red routes of the nation.”). These images of her father provide the reader with a sense of wariness concerning the relationship between Sexton and her father, more so the perception of her father and his work and Sexton’s intentions for her life in the future.

The Graduate has a moment just like this in what has become one of the most memorable lines in film history: “Plastics.” In the graduation party scene, Benjamin is reluctant to becoming attached and affected by the situation. A family friend, Mr. McGuire, then approaches him:

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you – just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: ‘Plastics.’
Ben: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.
    Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That’s a deal.

Benjamin, unable to tolerate any more of the constant pestering and advice, decides to retreat to his room to be alone. He is unable to attach himself to the values of his upper middle class family and the expectations that surround him. As he retreats to his room, the party guests look through his yearbook and list his accomplishments. Without the listing of accomplishments, the audience would not understand Benjamin’s past in college life. He was involved in a variety of clubs and the head of many teams. As far as anyone can tell, Benjamin is burnt out and lost. He has had success in college and felt the pressure of expectations, however the audience is unaware of whether or not he had passion at one point. He moves through his affair with Mrs. Robinson like a robot – emotionless and blank (telling Mr. Robinson at one point, “It didn’t mean anything. We might just as well have been shaking hands”).

Towards the end of the film, we see the first glimpse of his passion, as he breaks up the wedding of Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine. But what is the object of his passion? Elaine? It is merely the pursuit of Elaine. She is something other than what he has. He is not in love with Elaine; he is in love with the idea of Elaine. As Sexton describes in “Man and Wife,” Benjamin and Elaine are simply:

…exiles
soiled by the same sweat and the drunkard’s dream.
As it is they can only hang on,
their red claws wound like bracelets
around the same limb.
Even their song is not a sure thing.
It is not a language;
it is a kind of breathing.
They are two asthmatics
whose breath sobs in and out
through a small fuzzy pipe.

As Benjamin and Elaine board the bus, their excitement begins to dissipate and they are left with faces that show the imminent doom that they will soon one day become just like their parents. Their victory is in vain and they are traveling towards a vague and ominous future. They gather their breath and their breathing becomes less in relief and more about panic and their looks turn to puzzled. The film ends with Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” playing again.

As Anne Sexton wraps up Live or Die with the poem, “Live,” she makes a choice to choose live in an answer to her own “live or die” question. She states, “live or die, but don’t poison everything…” She is saying, “make a choice.” Benjamin never made a real decision; he ran away and was left with slim options. Sexton claims, “death’s been here / for a long time” and it has not only been a part of her life, but also the main focus of her work on the page. As much as she wishes she could die, she just cannot, not at the time of Live or Die anyway. She has tried to “poison everything,” but “the poison just didn’t take.” The end of Live or Die shows readers an optimistic take on melancholy: “I say Live, Live because of the sun, / the dream, the excitable gift.” Anne’s circumstances are different than that of Benjamin’s, but they both had decisions to make. The reader gets the benefit of reading the rest of Sexton’s work after Live or Die to explore the further development of thought after this book; however the audience’s last glimpse of Benjamin Braddock on screen is of him and Elaine, slowly moving, alone on a bus to nowhere.

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Works Cited
Dirks, Tim. “The Graduate (1967).” Greatest Films. 1996. March 12 2008 .
Harris, Mark. “Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson.” Entertainment Weekly February 15 2008: 34-40.
Kendall, Charity. “Anne Sexton-Making More of One's Own Life through the Creation of Metaphor.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 26.1-2 (2005): 87+. Questia. 12 Mar. 2008 .
Nichols, Mike, dir. The Graduate. 1967. Metro Goldwyn Meyer, 1967.
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
---. No Evil Star. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985.
Sexton, Linda Gray and Lois Ames, eds. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977.