The Graduate!

 Use of water/ fish tank 

When watching The Graduate, what I thought was most interesting was the use of water, swimming pools, and a fish tank to symbolize Benjamin's situation. 

The first time the audience sees water symbolizing Ben's situation is when there is a party at his house and everyone (including his parents) are nagging him about his future after graduating college. Meanwhile, he sits upstairs and watches the fish tank. The fish tank symbolizes his life at the moment - he feels that he was just a small fish lost in a big sea, but since a fish tank does not have an infinite amount of space, he is constrained by boundaries in his life. He knows he has a huge world for him and he has the freedom to do whatever he desires, but at the same time he is fixed within certain frames. Throughout the film we see the fish tank used repeatedly. When he starts having an affair with Mrs. Robinson, he once again sits on his bed at home and watches the fish tank. When Elaine finds out that he slept with her mother, he is seen again looking at the fish tank. All these moments in the movie symbolized his feeling of loss in life at the moment - he is not on track and feels that the entire world is beyond his reach.

In a similar sense, swimming pools were used in the film to convey Ben's helplessness or lack thereof. The first time the audience sees Ben in a swimming pool was when he was forced on his 21st birthday to perform a scuba diving trick for his parents' friends. He was not only pressured to do this, but was also treated like a circus animal by his parents and their friends. He was pushed down by his mom and dad and he just ended up sitting on the bottom of the swimming pool, completely helpless of his situation. However, the second time we see Ben in a swimming pool is actually him floating on top of it after he begins his affair with Mrs. Robinson. By day, he floats on the swimming pool and drinks beer, and by night he meets Mrs. Robinson in the Taft Hotel. His swimming in the surface of the swimming pool shows that he's not below the surface of his actions, but he's dangerously playing on the line between helplessness and confidence. The third time we see him swimming in the swimming pool is when his parents are swimming around him, enclosing him as if they were sharks. Again, we see him floating on the surface but his parents treat him like animals. He is never truly content but pretends to be whenever we see him in a swimming pool. What I also found interesting in this movie was that when we see Ben in the very beginning, looking into the fish tank, there is a mini scuba diver inside the fish tank. We see an exact parallel between a later scene in which he is in the swimming pool with a scuba diving costume, and what he sees in the fish tank. This further comes to symbolize his state of loss and being trapped within the frames of his parents and problems with the Robinson family.