Harold & Maude

-For your consideration
To its great detriment, the world of film too often confines itsself to genres much more than it would like to admit. As with any art form, film is best when it reflects the human condition, in all its glory and folly, with honesty. Humanity is, no doubt, in its highest form when it can reflect and ruminate on its deepest philosophical questions with the levity of mindfully employed wit and absurdity. Yet, for whatever reason, films usually fail to attain all three aspects simultaneously and sincerely; films tend to be absurd and profound (e.g. Clockwork Orange), witty and profound (e.g. Juno, The Graduate), or witty and absurd (e.g. Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Granted the aforementioned movies are classics in their own right, movies the world is lucky to have, but one might wonder what it would take to include all three without offsetting any part of their individual presence. One might, that is, until one saw Harold and Maude.
It is the love story of a death obsessed young man, whose main hobbies include staging elaborate suicide scenes in order to traumatize his mother, and going to funerals, and Maude, a free wheeling, car stealing septuagenarian. For those who don’t find that absurd, perhaps their time might be better spent in the company of doctors. But for the rest of us, we will need convincing.
It is at one of these random funerals that Harold meets Maude. He is intrigued by her impulsive lust for life and beauty, and the two quickly become unlikely friends. In the time they share together, Harold and Maude become deeply invested in one another. Harold reveals the sources of his death-centered perception of the world, and Maude opines, rather simply and eloquently, for a life of levity and wonder. With his shallow, aristocratic mother as his only real reference point, Harold embraces death as the only meaningful thing about his otherwise meaningless existence. But through Maude he sees an alternative perspective, one that finds fulfillment in fully experiencing and communicating with a life enriched by awareness.
Cat Stevens got me into the movie. While riding around the springtime New Hampshire hills listening to Cat, my companion asked if I had seen the movie, told me a bit about it, then lost my interest when he started pointing out what kind of cows we were passing. A few months later, half-heartedly flipping through channels, I came across Harold and Maude just as it started. I hadn’t high expectations, or really any at all. Ninety minutes later found me somehow immensely engaged and just as dazed, sure it was the best movie I’d had the pleasure to see. Four years later I hold that assertion just as firmly.
Never has a movie so impeccably matched my own philosophy on life; a philosophy centered on knowledge enriching experience, and rooted in levity informing perspective. How precarious and unrelenting is life. How easily that comes to seem bleak and desperate, and how quickly it does reinforce the thought. If one finds ones self there, in the apathy or rage of self-pity, it is undoubtedly one’s right to remain. But, come on, that’s no fun.
Through Maude, Harold truly comes of age much in the same way I consider myself to have. We both learned that all we should ever want, have or need in our lives is always abundant and usually right in front of us, or as Maude would put it, “After all, we’re given life to find it out.”
Strangely, this lesson in levity is not to be taken lightly. Were wanderers and wonderers the world over to heed this idea in its entirety, I hold no doubt the world would be better off. It may sound idyllic or almost sycophantically grandiose to claim a strange film no one has heard of could lighten and heighten the human condition, but I don’t believe I go too far.
The seemingly simple idea of “lightening up and enjoying life more” has provided a bounty of excuses for the lazy among us. The ideal corrupts quickly when a person allows the embracing of life to mean “only see the positive” or “only sanction my version of pretty”. The fullness of life - its glory, its beauty – lies in its faults and complexity at least as much as its more redeeming qualities. The same can be said of humanity, with the all-important caveat that we can better ourselves. Truly understanding and appreciating that fact requires us to do four important things. Firstly, we must recognize the things in our lives that arrive through luck, and, be they good or bad, deal with them without a sense of entitlement or resentment. Secondly, we must understand the people who share, directly or indirectly, this world we claim to cherish, as well as why or whether they cherish it themselves. In one scene Harold tells Maude that she is “good with people,” to which she responds, “Well, they’re my species.” Thirdly, it inspires us to lust for knowledge, as to better understand and further be enriched by each experience. But, most importantly, at the end of the day it makes us smile that were a part of it.
In all its absurdity, in all its fun and silliness, Harold and Maude never takes the shortcut. It is simultaneously one of the funniest movies you will see, and deeply insightful, without one ever betraying the other. Whether you find it as profound a picture as I, or merely a curiously heart-warming and inspired love story is obviously a matter of taste. But I can report with utmost honesty, of every individual whom I endear a thinking person, each has come to love it and hold it as a personal favorite. Please, for your sake, don’t let that end with you.
-Dave Balson