Sounds of Silence

In my last post, I ended with giving myself the right to be silent. Throughout the movie we hear this song over and over again, there´s no way you can miss it. It would really help my case if I knew the exact lyrics, but I´ll just google them later and that will come out on my next post. In the beginning, the song seems to reflect on what´s going on Ben´s mind as he flies home after the end of his fourth year at college. He is scared about the meaning of the word future and you can see it right through his eyes, his face, his movements, though delicately. It´s the silence that overwhelms him because his family is already expecting him to know what his next move is going to be.
He just wants to be left alone for a while, but his family have invited over all of their friends to congratulate him on how well he did in college. Ben desperately tries to escape them, but it is a wild goose chase, wherever he goes someone catches up to him and finally he can´t handle it anymore and runs up to his room. This is when he first see Mrs. Robinson and his helpless. He falls right into her game and then he is silent, except when he starts to get a glimpse of the real situation: she wants to seduce him. Ben tries to keep himself together in that house, and luckily, he escapes without any scars.
Then at his 21st birthday, which I´ve got to say is one of the strangest scenes in the entire movie, I don´t know why on earth does his father takes up all that time to get him to get into the pool with that diving suit. But then it gives another chance for silence, this time as he decides whether or not what he´s doing is really worth something: what will it prove if he can stand up at the bottom of the pool? Nothing apparently, but for him is just another chance to block everyone else from this weight of the future that heavily pushes him into despair and I think that´s why he ends up calling Mrs. Robinson, just to run away from all the big deal they make of his turning of age.
Now the silence is when he gets up the nerve to actually sleep with her. And then Ben starts to drift away from the current, he just lies in the pool all day, enjoying himself waiting for a new night with his lover. His future can wait, no one has to find out that yet, so early in life.
The silence comes up when he meets Elaine Robinson and for once starts to listen to what his heart says and pay less attention to his head. We start to get the image of silence associated with sex and also to hear up your own voice, your own thoughts.
The silence that surrounds us is that time where Ben and Elaine are watching at each other in the chapel. It comes up quite unnoticed at first as we see him calling for her and waiting for her to make up her mind: whether she runs away with him or she stays married to the doctor. We get to experience that in a slow motion as she looks at Ben and suddenly starts to shut down her ears to what everyone is saying to her at that moment, and is sublime as she loses herself into her thoughts and decides that she wants something more of life than a forced marriage, she won´t make the same mistake her mother did. She will be free of all that´s expected of her and runs out to meet him as an eagle dives down to its prey. And again we hear the echoes of silence as they seat beside each other, without talking. It´s all over their faces, their gestures of satisfaction, of finally getting the woman he wanted; of getting rid of what society thinks is right for a young woman to be doing.