The Big Picture

  • Both Shiva Baby and The Graduate accurately capture the social pressure and shared uncertainty experienced by younger generations.
  • Shiva Baby represents a shift in representation through its focus on a bisexual, Jewish woman, breaking away from the traditional white, heterosexual male protagonist.
  • The soundtracks in both films are used to reflect the inner turmoil of their protagonists, with The Graduate relying on carefully selected songs and Shiva Baby using tense and unsettling original music.

Comparing films from different eras is a delicate endeavor. A film from the 1920s and a film from 2016, for example, are born out of uniquely distinct social, political, and economic climates. They’re informed by societies in need of different things. However, there are two films that have accomplished the difficult feat of truthfully illustrating the collective tone of a generation, and it could only have been achieved by the clear and distinct visions of their directors. 65 years apart, they both reflect the social pressure on younger generations, stepped in the context of their respective times: these are 1967's The Graduate and 2021's Shiva Baby.

In 2021, writer-director Emma Seligman marked the start of an auspicious career with her debut feature film, Shiva Baby. A film that began as her graduate short at NYU, it quickly took off at festivals. Eventually, with the help of Robert Schwartzman’s company Utopia Distribution, Shiva Baby found success as a feature. Seligman attached an incredible cast, including the brilliantly funny Rachel Sennott (who starred in the short) as well as Polly Draper, Molly Gordon, and Fred Melamed. In a long line of festival wins, the film even took home the John Cassavetes Award at the 2022 Film Independent Spirit Awards. The dark comedy follows Danielle, a college senior who discovers that her ex-girlfriend Maya (Gordon), her sugar daddy Max (Danny DeFerrari), and his wife Kim (Dianna Agron) are all at the same family funeral service. The film, which was praised for its Jewish and bisexual representation, quickly resonated with young audiences. Released to a world that was still in the fog of a pandemic, and many hitting an inexplicable wall in regard to the future, Danielle is a reflection of the shared uncertainty among many young adults today.

Both 'Shiva Baby' and 'The Graduate' Resonate With Young Audiences in Similar Ways

Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin in The Graduate
Image via Embassy Pictures

Going back a few decades, Mike Nichols’ classic, The Graduate, deeply resonated with a generation of many young Americans in the 1960s. The film follows Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), who, upon graduating college, finds himself completely lost about his future. Within this haze of aimlessness and confusion, he’s torn between an affair with a much older woman Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), and her young daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), who he falls in love with. The Graduate marked a turning point in not only Hollywood, ushering in a new wave of films, but also in the shifting perception of Americans.

Mike Nichols, who had previously directed the acclaimed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? redefined his career after The Graduate’s release, owing to its groundbreaking themes of materialism, youthful anti-establishment rebellion, and the conflict between young and older generations. This film catalyzed the New Hollywood era because it reflected a wave of counterculture in the United States, and created the first rumblings of a movement that was known to have “saved Hollywood”. Young people, who were exhausted by the expectations that older generations had set on them for years, felt seen in Benjamin’s purposeless character.

Because The Graduate was the shining example of disillusioned youth for so many decades, Seligman’s creation of Danielle in Shiva Baby was groundbreaking. Instead of an upper-class California-raised, heterosexual Christian man, Seligman drew on her personal experiences and women she knew during college by centering her film around a bisexual, Jewish woman. In an interview with MUBI, Seligman stated, “I’m interested in exploring stories about coming of age as a sexual woman and the power dynamics and the validation and insecurity that it breeds.” In a world of media that deeply underrepresents minorities, Shiva Baby marks a shift in representation, and in audiences’ understanding that these anxieties don't only exist in white, upper-class, heterosexual, and cisgender men. Danielle and Benjamin might sound like the two most different characters in the world, but they’re both deeply lost protagonists with self-destructive tendencies. Throughout their films, Nichols and Seligman both convey the anxieties of their protagonists in distinct ways, both resulting in painfully funny and emotional films.

Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman as Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin in bed together in The Graduate
Image via Embassy Pictures

Every scene throughout The Graduate is carefully constructed to both heighten and reflect Benjamin’s disillusionment, but one of the key ways that Nichols achieves this is through his unique use of visual metaphors. In the opening scene, Benjamin arrives at the airport to return home for the summer, and as he stands on the moving walkway, Nichols leaves the walkway out of the frame, so it appears as though the world pushes him forward. Being literally and metaphorically moved by the world around him, it’s evident how passive he is. In a scene just shortly after, Benjamin sits in front of a fish tank, a dejected look on his face. Nichols frames him to look like he’s underwater, as though he’s drowning under the pressure to have a clear purpose. Each of these visual metaphors alludes to the greater feeling of meaninglessness and cynicism that young Americans felt amid a climate of deep social, political, and economic tension.

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Similarly, Seligman’s combined use of tight, dizzying tracking shots, as well as her and Director of Photography Maria Rusche’s choice of an anamorphic lens and natural image distortion emphasize the feeling of Danielle’s growing disillusionment. In one scene, Danielle desperately tries to explain her career path (or lack thereof) to her parents and Max, who quickly becomes skeptical of her. Her father chimes in, trying to make sense of his daughter’s expensive yet confusing degree, “She does this fantastic program, where you kind of design your own major.” The effect of the lens choice throughout this scene, as Rusche stated, "helped make it feel like the walls could literally cave in on her." Indeed, the awkwardness of this generational conflict is palpable. In perhaps the moment that best displays their generational differences, Danielle’s father tries to gently tell her, “Feminism isn’t exactly what I call a career.” Danielle responds by yelling, “It’s not my career, it’s a lens!” Throughout this scene, Seligman frames Danielle to look like she’s surrounded by older adults at every corner and entirely outnumbered. Comparably, Nichols frames Benjamin throughout The Graduate to separate him from the older generation.

'Shiva Baby' and 'The Graduate' Both Utilize Excellent Soundtracks

Shiva Baby's Danielle squished between her two parents

The score of both The Graduate and Shiva Baby is vastly different, but both Nichols and Seligman use music to reflect their protagonist’s inner turmoil in subtle ways. Nichols was adamant about using Simon & Garfunkel for the score of the film. In the opening scene, when Benjamin first arrives home after college, the duo’s popular “Sounds of Silence” plays softly. Although the song was not written for the film, it warns of the risks of apathy within conflict. The lyrics in the song “People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening,” parallel Benjamin's growing rejection of the materialistic, older generation. Throughout the film, Benjamin gradually loses trust in their meaningless words.

While Nichols uses carefully selected songs whose lyrics each match Benjamin’s conflict, Seligman uses an originally composed soundtrack to a different effect. The score from Ariel Marx is composed heavily of tense, disjointed string instruments. From the opening scene of the film, Seligman and Marx establish a feeling of discomfort as the fragmented sounds grow louder. As Danielle makes her way to the funeral service, the music grows more and more unnerving. Not only does this music heighten Danielle’s anxiety, it tonally changes the film. The music makes Danielle’s entire day at the funeral service feel straight out of a horror film, which, in a way, is metaphorical. Danielle’s growing uncertainty with her life, as well as the fact that she must so much from her family and others as the events of the day unfold, is petrifying. Comparably, the anxiety that has come out of the pandemic era for young adults everywhere that have yet to figure out their lives, has felt like one panic attack after another.

Both Films Focus on the Disillusionment of Their Protagonists

 Rachel Sennott in 'Shiva Baby'
Image via Utopia

Nichols and Seligman both have a knack for crafting their protagonist’s dialogue on-screen to reflect their protagonists’ disillusionment with society. While Nichols’ directed his writers Buck Henry and Calder Willingham’s dialogue in very clear, theatrical ways, Seligman’s style was grounded in realism. We see this in both Danielle and Benjamin’s interactions with the older generations. In one of the first scenes of The Graduate, Benjamin arrives home where his parents await him with a party. However, the party is entirely full of people his parents’ age, who somehow simultaneously treat him as a child and a grown man. One of his parent’s friends pulls Benjamin aside and starts talking to him like he’s a business partner. He tells Benjamin, “I just wanna say one word to you…plastics.” Benjamin stares at him blankly and asks him to clarify. His friend simply states, “There’s a great future in plastics.” The “plastics” allude to the older generation’s obsession with money, success, and material goods. This extremely brief interaction, and Benjamin’s obvious apprehension about any part of the conversation, reflect the strong separation between Benjamin and his parents’ generation.

While The Graduate focuses on one generational conflict, an interesting element of Shiva Baby is that the conflict doesn’t only lie between Danielle and her parents' generation. It also lies between Danielle and the millennial generation. The tension runs high between Danielle and Max’s wife, Kim, a mid-30s successful entrepreneur, who almost instantly becomes suspicious of Danielle. Throughout Danielle’s entire interaction with Kim, Seligman’s dialogue overlaps, with characters often interrupting or speaking over each other, adding to the feeling of miscommunication between the generations. Danielle’s parents urge Kim to offer Danielle a job. Under pressure, Kim tells Danielle she’s looking for an assistant to help her with organizing and scheduling her day-to-day life. Danielle rejects her instantly. She responds, “I don’t really wanna be like, um, a girl boss.” Her parents look at her, completely perplexed by the words coming out of her mouth. In one line, Seligman managed to capture the Gen Z rejection of the capitalist, “girlboss” hustle culture which has become so prevalent in the past few years. Much like Benjamin, Danielle isn’t driven by the motivation that the older generations have to “succeed;" in fact, it makes her feel more exhausted and frustrated.

It’s rare that a film can capture such a specific type of inner turmoil that is also particular to an era, while still remaining universally resonant and adored. Seligman and Nichols both achieved this in what are two deeply critical pieces of filmmaking. Benjamin and Danielle have both become reflections of a society’s shared discomfort and disillusion, while still feeling uniquely of their own world. With such a remarkable start, it’s exciting to see what Seligman will bring to the cinemas next, and it's safe to say that she could have the same success that Nichols has had.