Originally published in Former People | January 11, 2021
“The earth is my body; my head is in the stars.”
“Pray? No. I Communicate. With Life.”
Despite being a well-loved movie today, Hal Ashby’s 1971 film Harold and Maude was a commercial failure upon its initial release.[1] Ashby himself was not considered an influential director until some years later with his 1979 opus Being There, even though he had cut his teeth as an editor in Hollywood much earlier.[2] Ashby then became eccentric and reclusive, and Harold and Maude did not gain a cult following until the mid-1980s. The studio touted Harold and Maude as just another silly comedy, but many critics found the characters too shallow or the plot too absurd. Variety claimed the film was “marred by a greater preponderance of sophomoric, overdone, and mocking humor,” and Vincent Canby of the New York Times called the characters “creepy and off-putting.”[3] Even Roger Ebert disliked the film at the time, giving it only one and a half stars.[4]
During the 1980s, Ashby suffered from drug addiction and cancer, and his movie career declined in turn.[5] Meanwhile, his contemporaries, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, received widespread recognition, but Ashby’s films were largely forgotten by the general public.[6] Still, arthouses and cult cinema enthusiasts revived interest in Harold and Maude, and with good reason. Rather than a simple black comedy, the movie is arguably one of the best satires to come out of the New Hollywood genre. Ashby’s direction, Colin Higgins’s narrative, and Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon’s acting “weave a gentle spell,” as film critic Matt Zoller Seitz put it, by providing the audience with “a romance, a tragedy, a satire, a paean to eccentricity, a philosophical statement, and a ‘trip’ film whose music montages seem to roll in like waves.”[7] It is in that spirit that Harold and Maude deserves to be revisited, not just as a quirky, low-budget Hollywood offshoot, but as a serious work of cinema.
“I Haven’t Lived. I’ve Died a Few Times.”
Ashby’s crafty use of mise-en-scène can be experienced from the opening scene as he plays a visual trick on the viewer. Harold is introduced in a dark and solemn fashion, and he is seen setting the stage for a suicide by hanging. Everything is carefully planned and orderly, from the turning on of music to the lighting of candles. Ashby does not rush this scene: the audience sees every step in Harold’s process. As Harold steps off the stool, his feet dangle, and the music stops abruptly. The main character has just hung himself in the first four minutes of the film.
The viewer is deceived into thinking that Harold has just committed suicide, but it is revealed throughout the movie that this is but one of many fake suicide attempts by Harold, usually to get a rise out of his mother, who remains coldly unaffected by her son’s drastic pleas for attention. However, Harold’s fake suicide attempts are not just a plot point, but an insight into Harold’s gloomy state of mind. His entire environment—a dusty, enormous mansion—is dark, shadowy, and endlessly empty. As the film progresses and Harold becomes close to Maude, his environment becomes visually sunnier along with his mental outlook. Early on, Harold is portrayed as pale, clean-cut, and strait-laced. As the movie continues, Harold’s appearance becomes more disheveled: his hair becomes messier, he dresses more casually, and his complexion gains color. Over the course of the film, the viewer can see Harold’s death-to-life shift just in his physical appearance alone.
Ashby also illustrates this transition through his use of color. In the scenes where Harold is in his mansion with his mother, Ashby uses subdued, darker tones, giving the setting a sullen feel. However, when Harold is with Maude, colors are used in abundance, and they are bright and vivid. For instance, when Harold and Maude are at one of the same funerals, Maude is the first to leave the gloomy, rainy setting, and she is wearing light colors and carrying a bright yellow umbrella while everyone behind her is dressed in black with black umbrellas. Maude stands out against the drudgery of the everyday crowd. When Harold is shown in locations without Maude, the setting is monochromatic with unsaturated colors, making the scenes feel emotionless, sterile, and oppressive.[8] Take, for example, the scene where Harold is shown with the psychiatrist: not only is the room completely bleak and unwelcoming, but the colors are mostly blacks and greys. In fact, Harold and the psychiatrist are wearing the exact same outfit, creating an aseptic atmosphere of forced order. At one point, Maude even jokes to Harold about the color black’s association with death: “I’ll never understand this mania for black. Nobody sends black flowers to a funeral. Black flowers are dead flowers. Who sends dead flowers to a funeral? It’s absurd!”
In addition to his use of color, Ashby’s shrewd editing expertise adds social commentary in unanticipated places. Using a technique found frequently in the films of Robert Altman (and later championed by directors like Paul Thomas Anderson), Ashby’s scenes often have two events happening in the same shot: one in the foreground that is the main focus of the viewer, and another in the background that adds symbolic value to the main event.[9] Take the scene where Harold and Maude are leaving the funeral held in the church. Harold has just spoken with Maude for the first time, and they are talking by the car. In the foreground, a funeral procession is taking place, clearly signifying sadness and death. However, in the background, a cheerful parade is riding by, obviously signifying happiness and life. By juxtaposing these two events in the same shot, Ashby suggests to the viewer that the act of Harold meeting Maude is synonymous with darkness coming into the light.
In the graveyard scene, Ashby uses a match cut that has become almost iconic for Harold and Maude.[10] Harold tells Maude that he would like to look like one of the small white flowers because “they’re all alike.” Maude corrects him by pointing out how each flower is actually unique, saying, “You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this [points to one flower], yet allow themselves be treated as that [points to the homogenous field of flowers].” As Maude tells this little parable, the camera pans out to show the field of white flowers that eventually turn into a field of white gravestones. The message is clear: conformists who do not recognize their uniqueness might as well be dead.
Ashby’s mise-en-scène comes out in unexpected ways. Many directors often show a character to the side of a shot to convey unbalance. However, in this film, Ashby shows a character in a perfectly symmetrical shot during the scenes where the emotions are at their worst, and he displays an off-balance approach when there are scenes that include both Harold and Maude. By turning this technique on its head, Ashby’s message remains consistent: that Maude represents a sense of chaos, but it is a necessary chaos for Harold since structure and order leaves him empty. So, for Harold, being “off balance” is actually a positive thing, whereas being “in step” with the rest of the world is a negative one.
“Everyone Has the Right to Make an Ass Out of Themselves.”
The visual aspects of Harold and Maude are enhanced by the film’s carefully-placed music. In the scene where Harold fakes drowning in his pool, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” plays in the background as his impervious mother swims next to Harold’s fake corpse. The use of an emotionally-charged composition from the high Romantic period played against this emotionless scene presents the audience with a little auditory joke. Similarly, when Harold and Maude dance, the audience hears Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube.” This choice is appropriate for two reasons: it is a waltz, for one, but more importantly, it is a piece that has become associated with Austria, so it serves as a reminder for Maude’s unhappy Austrian past, something that is revealed as the movie unfolds.
The remainder of the film’s soundtrack is performed by Cat Stevens, and his songs continue the running themes of the movie.[11] Music represents life in Harold and Maude, and the lack of music is associated with death. For instance, in the first scene when Harold pretends to hang himself, the music stops suddenly when Harold makes the jump. However, when Harold is with Maude—who fully represents life herself—she often discusses the importance of music. Maude asks Harold, “Do you sing and dance?” and when he expresses not knowing how to play music, she says, “Everyone should be able to make music—it’s the cosmic dance!”
Of course, Cat Stevens’s lyrics are also important to these scenes as well. The songs “Where Do the Children Play” and “On the Road to Find Out” are played in the early part of the film when Harold is still struggling with his internal angst, and there is usually some kind of chaos occurring in the background.[12] Both songs’ lyrics exhibit a coming-of-age vibe about leaving home and discovering the world outside of one’s childlike existence.[13] Similarly, the songs “Don’t Be Shy” and “If You Want to Sing Out” encourage people to express their emotions, a skill that becomes an important element in Harold’s personal development. Some of Stevens’s songs act as a musical motif. “I Think I See the Light” conveys the theme of realization, and the viewer first hears this song when Harold figures out that he can get away with scaring off his dates. Harold even breaks the fourth wall at this point in the film by looking at the camera with a sly smirk. This song is revisited when Harold and Maude have sex, and the song is superimposed with the visuals of fireworks, symbolizing his loss of virginity.
Probably the saddest Cat Stevens’s song in the film is “Trouble,” which tells the tale of someone pleading with Trouble personified, asking Trouble to be easy on him. The song is played during the most tragic scene—that of Maude’s death. There are multiple layers of irony happening in this scene: Harold fakes his own death many times before finding life in Maude, only for Maude to actually commit suicide, all while the lyrics play, “I’ve seen your eyes and I can see death’s disguise hangin’ on me,” leading Harold to fake one last suicide by driving his car (which is a hearse) over a cliff (playing one final trick on the audience) before choosing life (as represented by him playing the banjo in the final shot). This song combined with Maude’s passing and Harold’s despair culminate in the movie’s ultimate lesson: that life is superior to coldness and emptiness, but with life’s joy also comes heartache. To accept one means to accept the other.
“Oh My, How the World Still Dearly Loves a Cage.”
The interplay between life and death is written into all aspects of Harold and Maude. The most recurring motif is suicide. Harold stages eight deaths or near-death situations in the film (hanging, slitting his wrists, drowning, shooting himself, catching on fire, chopping off his hand, performing seppuku, and a car crash), although he admits to more. Each death is an attempt at shock value, aimed at his mother’s attention, except for the last one, aimed at the viewer. But images of death are often contrasted with symbols of life. Take the forest scene, for example. Maude wants to uproot a tree from a public sidewalk and replant it in the forest. Like Harold, the tree is trapped by the confinements of society, but because of Maude, the tree and Harold are pulled from their restraints and allowed to grow.
Maude is, of course, a catalyst for Harold’s growth from immaturity into adulthood. But a key piece of embracing life means embracing love and sex. This idea is often portrayed visually, such as in the scene when Harold and Maude are in bed together for the first time: instead of the typical post-coitus cigarette, Harold blows bubbles instead of smoke. Interestingly, Ashby himself was confined by societal norms in the making of the film because the studio deemed any mention of sex between Harold and Maude too risky. Even though Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate also had a plot of a younger man with an older woman, the taboo did not push the envelope as far as Harold and Maude. In Nichols’s movie, both figures were conventionally attractive, and the age gap was not as wide as in Ashby’s picture. Unsurprisingly, the studios allowed sex to be an integral piece of the plot with The Graduate but did not allow sex in Harold and Maude, forcing Ashby to insinuate copulation through visual imagery instead.[14]
For Harold to break free from oppressive societal norms, he must challenge the sexual repression that exists all around him, starting with his mother. Film critic Michael Shedlin noted how the film “functions as a sarcastic attack on specific repressive forces. Harold’s mother is shown as a superficial, sexually uptight socialite who alternately babies and ignores her son. She is selfish to the point of not truly recognizing Harold as a separate person.”[15] The mother’s tight grip on her son’s sexuality is comically demonstrated throughout the movie as she tries (and fails) to find him a wife through a dating service, starting by answering the preliminary questions with her own inclinations instead of Harold’s. When Harold announces his intentions to marry Maude—a woman sixty years his senior—he is met with resistance from every institutional angle: the Family, the Church, the University, the State. Ashby displays these domineering institutions by having representative figures speak directly into the camera about the wrongness of the situation, each with an emblematic figure framed behind them: behind the priest is a picture of Pope Paul VI, behind the psychiatrist is a picture of Sigmund Freud, and behind the uncle is a picture of Richard Nixon. Clearly no aspect of society is willing to accept their taboo relationship, but in a Nietzschean fashion, Maude transcends their conventional attitudes: “Aim above morality,” she argues, “If you apply that to life, then you’re bound to live it fully.”
Living life to the fullest becomes the main lesson in Harold and Maude, and Maude is the ultimate embodiment of this existentialist philosophy. Ashby conveys this idea by employing all of Harold’s senses when he is with Maude. Harold’s visit to her home awakens and intensifies all five of his senses: the colorful artwork for sight, the olfactory machine for smell, the music for sound, the erotic wood sculpture for touch, and the ginger pie for taste. Harold’s other surroundings are cold and lifeless—only when he is with Maude are all his senses developed to the fullest.
However, sensory experience is not the only way that Maude represents the existentialist ethos. Embracing one’s feelings, freedom, and authentic Self are important elements, but existentialism also posits that humans are alone in an indifferent universe, existence is absurd, and to give one’s life meaning requires coming to terms with death.[16] As much as Maude represents life in the film, she also knows and has accepted that life is short, thus one must make every moment count. Ashby therefore makes subtle nods to Maude’s inevitable death throughout the movie. In one example, Ashby captures Harold and Maude dancing on the horizon, alluding to the final “dance with Death” scene in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal. In one morbidly funny scene, Ashby references Shakespeare to foreshadow the death of Maude. Harold is with his third date, an actress named Sunshine Doré, and Harold pretends to carry out seppuku. Instead of being weirded out, Sunshine takes the tantō, assuming it is a stage knife, and reenacts the suicide scene from Romeo and Juliet. While it remains unclear, it seems as if Sunshine has actually killed herself, a little ironic twist considering the ending of Shakespeare’s beloved play. Upon discovery of this bloody incident, Harold’s mother, having seen many “suicides” before, expresses her discontent by scolding, “Harold! That was your last date!” The Romeo and Juliet story is then paralleled with the end of the film as Maude does commit suicide on her 80th birthday: two tales of forbidden lovers, both involving faked deaths, both ending in tragedy.
Ashby is careful to give the audience little clues throughout the film that Maude is not simply an eccentric kook, but her existentialist worldview has grown out of a horrible past. The viewer gets a few hints to the fact that Maude is a Holocaust survivor. First, all the picture frames in her home are all blacked out, and she refers to them as “her memories.” Second, she alludes to having been a political prisoner. Third, when Harold holds her hand, he notices a number tattooed on her arm. It is clear that Maude fully comprehends life’s absurdity and has made a conscious effort to embrace the chaos. Maude does crazy things like stealing cars, driving recklessly, watching buildings get destroyed, and being flippant with police. Harold confronts Maude on her frenzied nature by saying to her, “I think you’re upsetting people. I don’t know if that’s right.” But Maude responds by suggesting, “Some people get upset because they think they have a hold on things. I’m merely acting as a general reminder: here today, gone tomorrow, so don’t get attached to things.”
“Go and Love Some More.”
When Harold and Maude was released, the hopes of the counterculture for a spiritual revolution had already come and gone. Even though Maude exemplified the non-conformist and anti-authoritarian outlook of the hippies, she was from an older generation, and her worldview stemmed from a much darker past. One could easily interpret Maude as a necessary prescription for a bleak political climate. Indeed, Higgins’s script includes many mentions of protest, war, police, violence, and various sorts of social oppressions. By 1972, the Vietnam War had already claimed over two million lives, the economy had gone into rapid decline, and socially conservative attitudes were on the rise.
But to read Harold and Maude as merely political commentary sullies its larger vision. For the film not only makes fun of the social mores of its day, but it also presents excessive analyzing and moralizing as ultimately futile. Harold and Maude transcends this small-minded approach to the world, offering instead a solution that is perhaps harder to accept but much more grounded in reality. Accepting the absurd and embracing life to its fullest is all that one can do, or, as Maude puts it: “It’s best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much life.”
Footnotes:
[1] Harold and Maude, dir. Hal Ashby, prod. Colin Higgins (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1971), film.
[2] Christopher Beach, The Films of Hal Ashby (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), viii.
[3] “Harold and Maude Movie Review,” Variety, January 1, 1971, 41; Vincent Canby, “Harold and Maude and Life: Hal Ashby’s Comedy Opens at Coronet; Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort Star as Odd Couple,” The New York Times, December 21, 1971.
[4] Roger Ebert, “Harold and Maude Review,” Chicago Sun Times, January 1, 1972.
[5] Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Touchstone Books, 1999), 169–170.
[6] James Monaco, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 390; John Belton, American Cinema, American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 195.
[7] Matt Zoller Seitz, “Harold and Maude: Life and How to Live It,” The Criterion Collection, June 12, 2012.
[8] Beach, The Films of Hal Ashby, 62.
[9] Monaco, How to Read a Film, 98.
[10] Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies (London: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008), 155.
[11] Harold and Maude, perf. Cat Stevens (Santa Monica: A&M Records, 1092), record.
[12] James A. Davidson, Hal Ashby and the Making of Harold and Maude (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2016), 120.
[13] Beach, The Films of Hal Ashby, 126.
[14] Beach, The Films of Hal Ashby, 56.
[15] Michael Shedlin, “Review: Harold and Maude by Hal Ashby,” Film Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1972): 51.
[16] Marvin Perry, An Intellectual History of Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993), 443–444.
By Shalon van Tine