Protest Film Politics: Revisiting Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude
I saw Harold and Maude the other night for only the second time, and for the first time 
in about 8 years. What an extraordinary piece of work it is: only a handful of mainstream American films have attempted, and carried off, such absolutely pitch black and dangerous humor, tenderness, pathos, and hilarity within the space of one story (and sometimes within moments of each other within that story). Like all enduring works Harold and Maude is expert in revealing new relevancies as you return to it at different ages and in subsequent eras. And I remarked to myself that like other truly subversive American comedies – among their thin numbers Dr. Strangelove and The Producers surely take their rightful place – it is hard to imagine this film being produced for large audiences today.
For those of you still uninitiated, Harold and Maude is one of the most beloved cult films of all time, falling into that elite class of cinematic stories you immediately want to share with others – whether they be friends or lovers or just people you want to piss off. It is the improbable tale of how Harold (Bud Cort), a terribly lonely, wealthy young man obsessed with death and fond of producing elaborate suicide hoaxes, meets and falls in love with Maude (Ruth Gordon), an eccentric, unrepentant Life-Affirmer Extraordinaire who is approaching 80. Maude, despite being outwardly full of charm and gumption, is also in her own interior way as lonely as Harold. Harold was a role the cherubic and sly faced Bud Cort never topped; as for the irrepressible Gordon, it is hard to imagine anyone else doing similar justice or being more sutied to this wonderful character. The proverbial “role she was born to play.”
One of the standout scenes, among a bounty to choose from, is the one in which a demented military uncle tries to recruit Harold into the army, and salutes him with an absurdly flimsy fake arm that has replaced the one he has lost to battle. It is a moment perfectly tuned into the simultaneous pathos and self-destructive ridiculousness of the macho impulse to war and dominance, and still causes uncontrollable laughter. Not a mean feat for a political joke made 40 years ago. But I have to wonder: could it barely survive in today’s climate of the unquestioning refrain “support the troops?” Ironically, that maxim is a result of the era in which Harold and Maude arrived: because vets were treated so miserably and unfairly upon return from Vietnam by a public consumed by the bitter clash of idealism and disillusionment, when the Iraq War eventually slouched toward Bethlehem, out American consciousness tried to correct that
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that old vicious error by overcompensating in its idealization of today’s American troops. (An idealization that ultimately was misused in an attempt to quiet dissent and resulted in creating a different but just as destructive conceptual disservice to the nature of military service.) Back in 1971, a year in which the independently produced, anti-war hippies vs. white racists protest film Billy Jack was the box-office champ – derision toward the political Hawks was so potent and curdled and unrepentant that it knew no fear. Rather than succumb to the absolutes of black and white, good and evil, the fevered collective imagination then at work knew all too well that heroism and suicide, passion and nihilism, love and lust bled into each other in frightening and exhilarating ways.
Hal Ashby infuses that spirit into this film, and as history repeats itself today, it packs amazing power, relevance, and rapprochement. His film contains some comic set-pieces aimed at military madness and absurdity that openly mock the armed forces, in a way that would be harder, if not impossible, for most to swallow today. No matter that the attacks are incisive, honest about human self-delusion, and brutally funny. In the era of Kent State (which had happened the year before the film’s release) and leftist extremists such as The Weather Underground (itself the subject of a skillful documentary), sincerity bled into a form of outrage, and filmmakers were not shy about directly attacking the war and the military mindset fighting it.
Ashby’s film was made in a time more painfully alive to injustice and violence and sex and insanity; fittingly, the most important theme of Harold and Maude is the struggle to not merely survive an American existence but remain to remain “alive” and live with gusto and embrace. Maude espouses a Buddhist-like philosophy of non-attachment and radical acceptance of change – and in lesser hands the constant “life-affirming” jazz might become pushy; matched with Ruth Gordon’s skill and natural effervescent, it becomes a wonder (and hard to fake – Gordon would host “Saturday Night Live” about five years later and brought the same charm and gumption to her monologue, so that we get the sense that Maude, and her Oscar-winning turn three years before Harold and Maude in Rosemary’s Baby, are clever variations on her own personality). The scenes in which a rebellious Maude leads the charge to steal a tree planted in a city street and return it to the forest are funny and beautiful in a kind of breathtaking way – we wonder at how something could be so full of laughter at the same time pointing to such loss – of nature, of possibility, of laughter itself.
Watching Harold and Maude fall in love and then “do it” – to dust off an old phrase – is still shocking in the best and most human way. And when Maude’s past and her own struggle with surrender and despair is revealed, we are asked to ask ourselves: is she giving up, or simply, like the Native American tribal leader who would just wander off into the woods when it was “time to die,” demonstrating a brand of spiritual advancement… Whatever the answer, the laughter soaks into a feeling that is like the famous poetic line, “too deep for tears.”
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Posted by Lights! Editorial Staff
on Feb 25 2010 Filed under Home Library, Our Feature Presentation.
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