JUST ONE WORD

By BRUCE HANDY WITH ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JULIE GRACE/CHICAGO

With commencement season having run its course, with The Graduate celebrating the 30th anniversary of its 1967 release, with seemingly the entire plastics industry having convened in Chicago last month for the triennial national plastics exposition--talking point: graffiti-resistant stop signs incorporating innovative plastics technology were only one of more than a thousand new products on display at the exposition--it seems like the perfect time to revisit what is arguably the most famous single-word line of dialogue in movie history, "Rosebud" excepted.

The scene, in case you've forgotten, goes like this: at a party celebrating his graduation from college, Benjamin Braddock, the Dustin Hoffman character, is pulled aside by Mr. Maguire, a friend of his parents who hopes to offer some career advice. "I just want to say one word to you," Mr. Maguire explains, his arm around Benjamin. "Just one word."

"Yes, sir," responds Benjamin.

"Are you listening?"

"Yes, sir, I am."

"Plastics."

In 1967, of course, this was a laugh line. Back then, plastics was the reigning symbol for everything that was ersatz in American life, for the phoniness and stifling conformity of the adult world Benjamin was being asked to join. The word itself was an epithet, as in "Plastic Pat" Nixon or these Jimi Hendrix lyrics from the song If 6 Was 9, talked-sung with a straight face and an up-the-Establishment disregard for grammar: "White collared conservative flashing down the street,/Pointing their plastic finger at me."

Audiences today still get the irony of the Graduate line, although the aesthetic context has been altered now that, thanks to the rise of the postmodern sort of irony, cheesiness has hip cachet and plastic is no longer anathema. Indeed, the movie's mise-en-scene now has unintended resonances. While the filmmakers' intent was to fashion "a scarifying picture of the raw vulgarity of the swimming-pool rich," as Bosley Crowther wrote 30 years ago in the New York Times (this was an era when commentators were concerned with the social pathologies of the rich rather than the poor), today's young audiences may find themselves entranced rather than repelled by the movie's upscale ticky-tacky decor and more likely to respond to the sound track's cha-cha lounge music than to its earnest baby-boom lullabies by Simon and Garfunkel. The generation gap has come full circle. Kids today--they'd rather play Rat Pack in Vegas than run off with Katharine Ross on a bus to self-actualizationland. Plastics won.

Or, as Jack LaCovey, director of communications for the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI), puts it, "We had a bad rap, but that's changed now that people realize you can make plastic products with high precision and high performance." Mr. Maguire's advice, generally speaking, was sound: over the past 30 years, the plastics industry has grown faster than the nation's gross domestic product. "The Graduate got it right," says Allan Cohen, who studies the industry for First Analysis in Chicago. "There's a lot of wisdom in that film."

Perhaps this is why, among people who actually toil in plastics, The Graduate exerts an appeal similar to that which the Godfather movies are said to hold for mobsters, a sort of cultural validation of their rarefied corner of the work world. "The Graduate was a hell of an advertisement for the industry," says John Clark of Brown Plastics Engineering Co. "It's something you always think about," says Larry McCormack of Incoe Corp., who claims to have seen stills of the movie hanging in plastics-company offices all around the country. "It changed my life," says Vince Witherup, who, given his visceral enthusiasm for the ways in which industry R. and D. has benefited society (like supplying airlines with less crack-prone cups), seems to be only half-joking. Witherup, vice president for international sales and marketing at the Conair Group, a manufacturer of auxiliary equipment for the plastics industry, was a recent college graduate in 1967. Back then he already suspected that plastics was an "exciting" field--an impression that seeing The Graduate somehow confirmed for him despite the fact that this is precisely what the film wasn't saying about plastics. It is almost as if one were inspired to smuggle hash from Turkey after seeing Midnight Express.

But the industry is having none of that. "The Graduate has got a great theme," says Larry Thomas, president of the SPI. "But it's not reality. Plastics is a $225 billion industry that directly employs 1.2 million people--people who have tremendous lives because of plastics. That's reality."

America laughed then; Mr. Maguire laughs today. Of course, if any business has come to embody everything that is ersatz about American society, it is the film industry. If you disagree, try to imagine making a mainstream movie today that is as richly and genuinely ironic, as acidly knowing, as ambiguous in its ending and as enduring in its appeal as The Graduate. One word: can't.

--With additional reporting by Julie Grace/Chicago