JUST ONE WORD

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."