Isn’t escaping downward into the self, backwards in time, the last and only resort of a crumbling mind? Not nostalgia, not REWIND, but compression, REPLAY and STOP.

Escape is never enough. Territorially it’s impossible anyway. You have to engage, you have to undertake long-term political reconstruction. That’s the task the feminist & LGBT communities have pursued so forcefully. If, instead of doing hard politics, you buy the escape dream, you end up in an ad for styling clay & get only the freedom to consume.

Loved the clip, by the way: perfect reminder of the complexities that were already apparent in 1968; although to maintain that fragile emotional “truth” The Graduate has to avoid its own paradox, which is that the parents are as trapped by the situation as the children. Dustin Hoffman & Katharine Ross can only act out “escape” as long as Anne Bancroft stays in place as a kind of ghost context, enlisted to make freedom seem free.

2012: now Mrs Robinson has walked away too, the situation looks less than clear cut.

Two days in the wilderness is enough to send the suburbanite scurrying back. Hunger and dirt remind us all that escape is a pleasant myth to distract us from the empty monotony, but not somewhere to live. Now it is just another tatty part of the bread-and-circus system.

Escape… With the new audi / nike / apple / daydream.