The Lost Night When We All Watched The Graduate

Here’s to you, Mrs Algorithm

Image from Wikipedia article on The Graduate (1967)

It was a random Monday morning in 1988. The office where I worked was full of people… yawning. We were all doing jaw-cracking, contagious yawning.

Everyone had stayed up past midnight the night before to watch a screening of The Graduate on BBC2.

Everyone except our colleague Brian, who hadn’t known the famous classic film was going to be on. He had gone to bed at his usual time and now sat among us like a man who’d missed a war. We pitied him a little. We also couldn’t quite forgive him.

What Brian had done by missing The Graduate on TV was considered weird in 1988.

FOMO in the Eighties

Whenever a famous film was broadcast on television — one of only four channels in the UK at the time — you watched it, because when else would you?

Yes, there were VCRs. But not everyone had one, or could work the timers on them. If you had one and knew how to set it, you could “tape” something and watch it back at a later time. But that wasn’t what people did by default.

If a big film was on the telly, you watched the big film. You felt you had to watch it. You knew everyone else would. And if you missed it, you might not get another chance to see it for years.

So you stayed up, and the next day you and your schoolmates or colleagues talked about it: the seduction, the church at the end, the bus, that ambiguous final shot where the elation drains out of two faces in real time. The film entered the shared lexicon.

From then on, whenever “Mrs Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me!” surfaced in some other film, show, sketch, advert or stray remark, you got it. You were inside the joke because you’d been inside the room when it was made.

Noughty times

Fast forward twenty-five years or so. The early 2000s. An episode of The Simpsons or Peep Show or any other comedy could lean on an entire grammar of references to classic films. “We’re going to need a bigger boat” meant something.

They could trust that a sizeable chunk of the audience would land the references. The shared space had thinned, but it was still there. The cultural water table hadn’t yet dropped out of reach. A writer could still assume a common pool of things-everyone-has-seen and bathe in it with confidence.

Now fast forward again…. Twenty-plus more years, to wherever we are today. And the assumption is gone. A writer dropping “Mrs Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me!” into a script today is writing for a slim, aging demographic and a handful of cinephiles, and they know it. The line has become a specialist’s reference, like a Latin quote.

As for scenes like my 1988 Monday-morning office scene — the whole office arriving bleary-eyed and almost fully aligned, having watched the same thing at the same time the night before — this has not merely become rare. It’s become unthinkable.

There is no longer a single screening to stay up late for. There is no “thing that’s on tonight”. Everything is on, all of it, all the time.

We can no longer point at a shared object in the cultural sky and all nod.

The inevitable equivocation

So: is this bad?

In one sense, yes. Of course it is bad. Plainly it is bad. Something real has been lost, and it’s worth mourning.

Shared reference points are not trivial. They are the glue and mortar between people who would otherwise have nothing to say to each other. A shared reference is a handshake. It confirms you belong to the same approximate world and have stood in some of the same rooms.

A culture that can no longer assume any common text loses a low-cost, high-value way of recognizing itself. Comedy gets harder, because so much comedy is recognition.

But there is another sense, in which this is simply change, not decline. The two are easy to confuse when you happen to be standing on the loss side of one of them.

Those who never knew the old world don’t miss it. They can’t miss it.

The commonality we’re mourning was, in no small part, the commonality of having no choice.

What replaced it is genuine abundance and genuine self-determination. You can find the precise, strange, weird, niche thing that speaks to you, and you can find the people who love it too, even if there are only four hundred of you scattered across five continents.

Falling down a well

Our now-dead monoculture produced a wide, shallow lake that everyone waded in.

What we have now is ten thousand deep wells. No, you can’t have a national conversation about any one of them, or even proa workplace conversation, but the conversations you can have are warmer, more specific, less dutiful.

And reference points haven’t vanished. They’ve fragmented and localized. Every subculture, fandom, and group chat now runs on its own dense private lexicon — references as potent in their own right as “Mrs Robinson” ever was, just illegible from outside.

The reference-point handshake still exists. They are simply more secret handshakes, and none opens every door.

Whether you think that’s a fair trade probably depends upon which side of it you were born on. I do miss the lake. But I won’t pretend the wells aren’t deeper.