One night, probably close to a year ago at this point, during the height of the COVID lockdown measures, I had just finished watching my third movie of the day, and my third review (all of which you can find on my Letterboxd profile), but my thirst for film remained unquenched. I had just recently seen Annihilation, it may even have been one of the films I watched that day, but I had completely fallen in love with the film. This led me to stumble upon something that I now consider to be the most influential film-related video I've ever seen. An excellent video essayist, Dan Olson, aka, Folding Ideas, posted this video: 'Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor'.
I will not spoil the video, because the video spoils the film, but Dan, in just under 20 minutes, performs a systemic takedown of the anti-intellectual YouTubers like Cinema Sins and Looper that demand plot to be understood and thought of in a linear sense and looking at just the events of any given film, while also eloquently laying out the film's metaphor -- the events of the film mirroring the processes of grief and coping with loss.
Why am I talking about this video when the title of this piece is in reference to Harold and Maude? A key aspect of Olson's emphasis on Annihilation is that the film is the bluntness of the messaging within the text. Annihilation presents its thematic ideas within the dialogue of its characters and through their actions without a significant amount of subtlety, however, the talking point of the ending of the film makes these thematic discussions fall to the backburner among casual film discourse, especially amongst reviewers/critics, and even amongst titans of the industry like (a very young) Roger Ebert in his review of Harold and Maude in 1972.
And this is where Harold and Maude and the timeframe in which it was released come in. Harold and Maude was released in December of 1971 and directed by Hal Ashby. The timing of this release puts Harold and Maude firmly in the camp of being a 'New Hollywood'-era film. The New Hollywood period of filmmaking saw an emphasis on young filmmakers performing their craft with more creative license, a different brand of marketing, and, most vital to our analysis of Harold and Maude, an emphasis on young people questioning their place in the world. The screenwriter of this film is Colin Higgins, who initially wrote this as his thesis project at UCLA's film school, almost a perfect example of that sort of youth in producing/writing films in this era. Other films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider, and The Last Picture Show are just a few of the classics of this time period that was kickstarted with the former two films' releases in 1967, before jumping the shark and falling out of fashion by about 1980.
Knowing this is important because, at first glance of a plot summary, you might be hesitant to place Harold and Maude alongside some of those films. And this, my dear reader, is exactly my point. Harold and Maude is not only about a young person obsessed with death finding the meaning of life through an 80-year-old, but rather it's a tale of the disenfranchised youth of the time period finding meaning within their lives, and how it's the previous generation's responsibility to make the next one better than them.
The film is blunt about this through an indirect source: Harold's exuberant faux-suicide attempts. Our cold open is, in fact, one of these attempts.
Cold opens, or opening scenes with opening credits running on top of them, can often reveal something vitally important about a film. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise and Mulholland Drive both open with a pair of long driving sequences down a winding round. This symbolizes the twists and turns that we are about to see unfold in front of our eyes in both of those films. Midsommar introduces us to our core of characters while delivering a forceable gut punch to the viewer to immediately make Dani the object of our sympathy, setting the entire rest of the film in motion.
This scene is no different. As we watch careful preparations for something by someone, we really don't know what to expect. This is also the first of multiple faux-suicides, each seemingly more outlandish than the next. The careful thought put behind this shows how important it is for Harold, and our reaction to the shocking reveal of Harold hanging himself is exactly the desired reaction he wants from his mother. But, as we see, he doesn't get anything resembling it, and now the rest of the film can branch from there.
Introducing the cold open, and the thematic ideas of the cold open is vital because, from this, we can see what the rest of the film's intentions are, and attempt to make meaning from there. For example, as Harold's suicides get more and more outlandish, and less shocking to us, like to his mother, we can see not only just that they are a regular occurrence, but that they are not as elaborate as the film would like us to believe. One way this can also be done is through directing, specifically framing. The swimming pool/drowning scene is the best example of this, and a perfect opportunity to show what I mean by these suicide scenes serving as a metaphor.
Harold is supposedly drowning in the pool, holding his breath for an unfathomably long amount of time, as his mother completely ignores him. Note the shot starting at 21 seconds in the above video. This holds for almost 30 unbroken seconds as Harold's mother takes her time getting her robe off and stepping into the pool before finally the camera moves and we see that Harold has been attempting his drowning for this entire time, but the forced perspective of the camera demanded us to look at his mother, ignoring Harold just as she does.
This is such an important sequence because through cinematic techniques alone, we are told a significant amount of information and we can view the heart of the film. Harold is underwater, a motif that is incredibly common and was used in The Graduate, another film of the 'New Hollywood' era, to great effect to convey a similar emotion. Harold, like Ben, is being forced underwater by his parents. The Graduate shows that in a very literal, physical, sense, as Ben's parents shove him into the pool, but Harold's need to shove himself into the water is very much psychological. He is doing this to get the attention that he craves and that he only felt incidental when witnessing his mother's outburst of emotion when she thought she had legitimately died when he was young. The tone of this scene, and these suicides in general, also clues us into the fact that there is no real danger. No matter how long he is pretending to drown for, or just how much blood there may seem to be in the bathtub, Harold will be fine, because, like any work of fiction, we are not meant to view events as they literally happen, but rather as images that convey to us something about the story being told.
I mentioned that the messaging was fairly blunt in this film, and I want to touch upon that bluntness of the messaging and give another example -- the scene where Harold tells Maude about that first time Harold's mother thinks, or hears, that he's dead.
The most important thing to think about in this scene is the matter of Harold's age. Harold remains stuck in his youth by a controlling mother who refuses to love him as he needs. These suicide attempts are the equivalent of Wyatt and Billy's cocaine smuggling in Easy Rider or Ben's sexual relationship with Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. They are the actions of a young person who feels jaded from his life's experiences and unloved by his family. This revelation changes the entire meaning of the film into something that makes more sense for what to expect from a New Hollywood film. Harold is not the child he feels to be sometimes to the viewer and his mother, but rather one of those disenfranchised youth of the time period.
This also falls in line with the prominence of war within the film. Harold's uncle is General Victor Bell, a man who lost his arm in the war. Bell is the perfect metaphorical foil for Harold, a goofy character with blind loyalty to the United States during the height of the Vietnam War. He represents both family and society as he is uncaring of Harold's wishes and serves as a physical embodiment of conflict. With the Vietnam War raging, and a Richard Nixon portrait framed dead center in the middle of the scenes in Bell's office, Bell is not an uncle but rather the representation of everything holding young people back during this time.
The reflection of war and societal problems also makes this fall squarely in the camp of being a New Hollywood picture. The angry youth raging against the war machine makes this feel very much a product of its time, like anything created in this era.
To end this piece, I want to loop back around to that Folding Ideas video and talk about the ambiguous ending. Olson says in the video, "The purpose of ambiguity is to frustrate the audience, to deny a clean sense of diegetic closure and thusly force engagement with the metaphorical."
In this final scene, Harold drives his car off the cliff, seemingly no longer willing to just "act out" his suicides, but intent on doing one himself. Instead, we see him post-crash, unscathed, at the bottom of the cliff, strumming the banjo that Maude gave him. The core outward tension of the film, Harold's relationship with his mother, goes unanswered. We can speculate, like the YouTubers that Olson highlights in his video, about what Harold is going to do next. But the film ending with some lack of closure makes sense because the film was never truly about Harold's relationship with his mother, or what will come of Harold. It's about a youth finding his inner peace. It is almost a reversal of the ending of The Graduate where an outwardly happy moment gives way to a bitter feeling, as Maude's death is outwardly sad, but the inner peace that Harold finds is what he has been searching for since the first scene of the film.
Comments
Post a Comment