Attempted Bloggery: Mrs. Robinson: Joe Dator and Harry Bliss

Sunday, April 2, 2023

Mrs. Robinson: Joe Dator and Harry Bliss

"Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?"
—"The Graduate" (1967)

The line is one of the most famous from "The Graduate," Mike Nichols's celebrated 1967 film starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. The film poster is iconic, showing a staged still photo of the hotel room scene with Mrs. Robinson donning her stockings after she has seduced Benjamin. This is not actually the scene with the famous above quotation, but it's an image everyone remembers, and Mrs. Robinson's stockinged leg stands out in both scenes.

https://beloitfilmfest.org/biff-event/guess-whos-coming-to-din
ner-fnb-classic-film-2017/the-graduate_movie_poster/

Joe Dator gives us his take on the famous scene in a 2014 New Yorker cartoon with a contemporary twist:

Joe Dator
The New Yorker, May 26, 2014, p. 68

Note that Dator gives Benjamin a suit similar to what he wore in the earlier seduction scene, but not in the hotel room scene. On pages 54 to 55 of Inked: Cartoons, Confessions, Rejected Ideas and Secret Sketches from The New Yorker's Joe Dator (2021), he discusses how he had to carefully rework his caption to make it conform not to the actual line from the film but to the way most people seem to remember it.

In February of this year, Harry Bliss co-opted that same scene himself in his syndicated panel cartoon Bliss. He too moves the famous seduction line into the hotel room scene, but his speaker is a dog.