Deja Viewed: Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude feels like a movie made on Opposite Day.

It’s a May-December romance, but in the reverse order of most Hollywood love stories. The stars look as un-cinematic as stars get (read: like normal people). It features one of the greatest movie soundtracks ever produced — which was never commercially released.

From the opening scene, in which we see a young man methodically hang himself while his unconcerned mother bustles past his swinging body, it’s clear: We aren’t in regular romcom territory.

The very-much-alive body belongs to Harold (Bud Cort), a college-aged kid obsessed with death, fake suicides and getting under the skin of his unflappable mother (VivianPickles).

During one of his routine drop-ins of a stranger’s funeral, Harold meets Maude (Ruth Gordon) a 79-year-old also intrigued with the macabre. But where Harold sees funerals as suicide dry-runs, Maude sees them as life’s lily pads, springing her into seize-the-day adventures. 

Director Hal Ashby balances fairy tale absurdities with a sincere love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history: Maude is a fiesty Holocaust survivor who inhabits a gentle universe that abides her casual car thefts; Harold is a lonely teen who drives a modded hearse.

Ashby jolts the film with overlapping sound, oversaturated color and an underrated soundtrack — a Graduate-level gem by Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam. Unlike The Graduate, (which this film subtly subverts), the soundtrack was never released. Thankfully, the nine-song, 29-minute playlist is eminently streamable.

As we bound from bad date to good, from death to life, from privileged suburbia to Vietnam-era nihilism, it’s easy to forget that the film, now more than 50 years old, was as far ahead of its time as his other cult hit, 1979’s Being There.

Here, Harold is lost in the computer dating world. Maude practices mindful meditation. Ashby wields Lynchian absurdities before that was a term. And were it not for its cult-film bonafides, Harold and Maude features a twist ending that would be called Shyamalan-ian today.

Make no mistake: this is an oddball movie that lives on eccentricities and an outsider worldview. The symbolism of Harold’s “deaths” have divided diehards for more than a half century over whether the film is a counter-culture statement or poem urging viewers to make every breath count.

Either way, the viewer wins. It may pose as a comedy about staging death, but Harold and Maude ultimately says something profound about rehearsing life.

Befriending The Voice in the Back of Your Head

I don’t know about yours, but the voice in the back of my head can be a real asshole.

You should eat eat better, it scolds.
You could exercise more, it reminds.
You blew that, it laments.
They’re not gonna like you — or it, it predicts.
Are you going to take that personal affront? it demands to know (it also has an ego, temper and pettiness).

The Voice In The Back Of Your Head is always chanting a variation of a one-note tune: You could do better. It taunts me for my fears and weaknesses — with my fears and weaknesses.

Ask yourself: If your VITBOYH were a person, would you be friends on Facebook with that person? Befriend that person? Would you advise a relative to?

I’m not sure I would, which is a problem. Because there is no evicting a VITBOYH. Consider it your Dark Matter Twin, with permanent squatters right. A roommate who has read all your emails, talked shit about you, but can never be ratted out to the landlord because YOUR name is on the lease.

So I’m taking a new approach. I’m trying to befriend the voice in the back of my head. After all, it may be an incessant nag, but it says it to my face and truly wants what is best for me. All VITBOYHs deserve at least that much benefit of the doubt.

The first step of the Internal Witness Protection Program is choosing a pseudonym. I keep landing on Wilbur. I think of an impulsive, frightened, judgmental soul when I think of a Wilbur, which photocopies my darkest insecurities. Plus I like the “will burr” imagery.

That first step is important. It takes the voice from inside your skull and places it into an external headspace, if you will. It’s a lot easier to say “Wilbur is being an insufferable ass today” than concede that I am. But any name works, including “Vit Boy.”

Next is giving it a face. This, too, is important. I recommend positive imagery for this one, because here is where we begin to change the tenor of the narrative. Perhaps a child or parent. I picture Jadie.

Finally, the voice. This is the critical part.

Listen to what your Vit Boy is saying. Picture the words coming coming from your beloved’s mouth. What is the tone of that message?

When I do it right, Wilbur is a lot more patient with me than I am. Supportive, too. He’s more likely to say You tried your damndest before Your best didn’t do.

Funny what putting a kind face does to a thing.

More importantly, I’m finding a Wilbur to be honest — in a constructive way. He admits there are only two things that a Voice In The Back Of Your Head can tell you: What you know to be true; and what you want to be true.

When I do it right, I can tell that difference, too.

Now if he’d just quit telling me to buy so many goddamned magic tricks.

Open Letter to a Puppy, Chapter IV: The Wheels on the Bus


My sumkinda,

You are hardly a teen, yet already you are sassing back, wagging ass in front of boys and running with a boisterous, occasionally aggressive gang.

I could not be prouder.

I see you and think: Were you ever young? If so, when? Your granny met you for the first time and exclaimed “SHE’S a puppy?” You seemed to take no offense: You slept outside her door nightly, and licked her toes like Jesus with a foot fetish.

When she and your Aunt Caroline returned home, you reclaimed your throne as Jadie, Queen of Rubio, matron of House Bowles. Your voice has already settled into a deep baritone, and you patrol these grounds as if you are fierce. A stranger looking in would see you as trouble, a fetching look I hope you never lose.

Of course, any semblance of aggression is out the door the moment you are, and the glow of being new overtakes you. Your tail, as powerful as Indy’s whip, cannot help but shake your ass as if you are spasming a samba, undertowing any visage of menace.

We have settled into a walk routine in our double cul-de-sac neighborhood. The stroll within the parenthesis is brief, but you literally force me to stop and smell the roses. And turds. You have found your favorite shrubbery, which you check religiously for updates: Max got fixed and says it’s great!; Bella had octuplets and says it’s great! and she’ll do better next time; Daisy has the runs and says it’s great!

But there’s nothing about your puppyhood I enjoy more than watching you lose your shit over your thrice-weekly dog run. Every morning, you stare out the front window, awaiting The Woofpack, your delirious gang of canine pals who trample the Victory Dog Park.

They arrive in a minivan, a carpool of slobber and fur and hooting and whooping that joyously announce their arrival. If you’re not awake by the time The Woofpack arrive, you will be by the time they leave.

That’s because you, sweet girl, must double the decibel level with your booming good morning bellow. Bouncing off plaster and hardwood, your school day seems to rattle the windows and test my home’s tensile strengths. But it is glorious thunder, and in truth I envy your mile-long ride to the park.

What a joyous commute that must be! I can only imagine the conversations. Yay, traffic! Yay, congestion! Yay, farting! I smile every time I think about it.

Which would include my own occasional commute. All I need do is think of you if I find myself on the bumper grind, and imagine what you would remind: Why are you anxious? You’re sitting in a recliner, listening to your favorite music, sipping your favorite drink, trying to get home to do the same thing. And it will settle me.

I’m even flirting with the idea of taking you by bike to Lake Balboa, though I’m pretty sure you’d have me dunked within minutes of seeing the swans. Still, it’s tempting.

See what you’ve done? You’ve turned me into a selective hitchhiker, child: Only your outlook on life moves my wheels forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl9bvuAV-Ao