Musical Persistence Syndrome:
Repetition and the Soundtrack of The Graduate
Chester Featherstone, Ph.D.
Professor of Media Studies
University of New Hampshire
The critical literature on The Graduate is nearly unanimous in praising its soundtrack as one of the most influential in American cinema. I do not dispute this. I also prove there is far more of it than necessary.
During much of the film’s second half, the audience encounters some combination of “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” and “Mrs. Robinson” with such persistence that the distinction between leitmotif and repetition begins to collapse. Nichols varies the material skillfully—vocal, instrumental, foreground, background, romantic, ironic—but the underlying musical vocabulary remains remarkably small. Five repetitions establish a motif. Fifteen establish a habit. By twenty-five one begins to suspect one's solitary confinement in a musical hell.
Critics often describe this as sophisticated thematic integration. Yet there is a point at which musical memory becomes what I have termed Acoustic Narrative Saturation: the moment when a recurring theme ceases merely to accompany the story and begins to engulf it. “Scarborough Fair” eventually functions less like background music than a musical Kleig light blaring in our eyes. One develops the impression that if Benjamin stopped for gasoline, Simon and Garfunkel would pop out from behind the pumps.
This also creates a peculiar narrative problem. For much of the film, the soundtrack repeatedly supplies Benjamin with a perfectly straightforward question: whether Elaine is going to Scarborough Fair. Benjamin never asks her. The music behaves like an increasingly exasperated stage prompter, offering the same line again and again while Benjamin continues driving aimlessly around California.
Had he finally complied, the exchange might have been brief. Elaine, after all, was not going to Scarborough Fair. She was going to Berkeley.
The film’s musical reputation also benefits from retrospective memory. Viewers tend to remember The Graduate as containing a broad Simon and Garfunkel songbook. Rewatching it reveals something stranger: a small number of musical ideas explored from an extraordinary number of angles. The achievement is real, but so is the excess.
Nichols may therefore deserve credit for discovering a principle of film scoring: a musical idea can be both brilliant and overused at the same time. The Graduate does not merely employ recurring themes. It keeps returning to them like an obsessive-compulsive endlessly re-checking whether the stove is turned off..
