The Aeronautical Problem of Benjamin Braddock
Featherstone’s later work complicated the Scarborough-centric Hudson Valley Paradigm (see Essay #2) by introducing what he termed aeronautical constraint analysis. Featherstone noted that The Graduate begins not merely aboard an airplane but with an unusually precise datum: a loudspeaker tells us the aircraft is completing a flight of four hours and eighteen minutes. For most critics this is atmospheric chatter. For Featherstone it is evidence.
“A realistic motion picture,” he wrote in Narrative Airspace and the Postwar American Male (2004), “cannot place a character aboard a jet aircraft without simultaneously placing him within the performance envelope of that aircraft.”
This presented a difficulty. Benjamin has conventionally been imagined returning from a prestigious Northeastern college, perhaps Brown, perhaps Williams or Amherst. Yet a four-hour westbound flight does not describe New England to Los Angeles. It points insistently toward the central United States.
Featherstone therefore divided Graduate scholarship into two camps: the Eastern College textualists, who emphasize the facts given in the source novel, and the Four-Eighteen School, of which Featherstone remains the sole member.
The conventional explanation is obvious: Benjamin could simply have changed planes in Chicago. Featherstone devotes eleven pages to this possibility before rejecting it as “the connecting-flight evasion.” His argument is characteristic. Nichols could easily have said nothing about elapsed flight time; having supplied us a number, he cannot subsequently demand that the critic disregard its geographic necessities.
This substantially altered Featherstone’s understanding of Benjamin. The young man no longer simply returns from “the East.” He enters Los Angeles from a perplexing and aeronautically ambiguous interior. Between college and home lies an unseen American middle space—Chicago, St. Louis, perhaps Kansas City—through which the film has passed but which it refuses to represent.
From Benjamin to Bret Easton Ellis
Here Featherstone detects an likely predecessor to Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero: the privileged Los Angeles son returning from an eastern college to a wealthy landscape that feels simultaneously like home and exile. But Nichols, unlike Ellis, inserts four hours and eighteen minutes of aerodynamic evidence between those poles.
For Featherstone, this is not trivia. It is semiotic geopolitics conducted at cruising altitude.
As Featherstone concluded in 2004:
“Before determining what Benjamin Braddock is escaping, scholarship must first determine where his airplane took off.”
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Editor's note - The best joke is that the connection-through-Chicago explanation is overwhelmingly sensible—which would only make Featherstone more irritated, because it threatens to collapse an entire scholarly subdiscipline into a boarding pass.
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Yes—and there is a particularly delicious problem here for Featherstone. The announcement actually says “four hours eighteen minutes,” not 4:15. (Script-O-Rama) Taken literally as the duration of a nonstop leg into Los Angeles, that is much more suggestive of the Chicago/Midwestern aerodynamic basin than New England; even today Chicago–LAX is roughly in that range. (FlightConnections)
Yet the underlying novel explicitly says Benjamin graduated from a “small Eastern college,” and Charles Webb himself had just graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts—making a Williams-like institution a very plausible imaginative model. (Wikipedia) That creates precisely the sort of contradiction Featherstone could spend twenty years worrying at. The obvious explanation—that Benjamin connected through Chicago—would strike Featherstone as vulgar narrative expediency.
I would give him an entire secondary specialty: aeronautical hermeneutics, the reconstruction of fictional geography from flight durations, prevailing winds, aircraft types, rail schedules, and implied connections.
