The fact that Harold’s mother and her retinue cannot change Harold to be more like them, undermines their efforts to change him; the fact that Harold still lives under his mother’s roof undermines his efforts to freely be who he wants to be. © Copyright 1994-2021 Write Brothers, Inc. All Rights Reserved. They fall into conversation after Maude steals Harold's hearse and offers him a ride. The computer dates trust Harold will be sociable like his mother, but receive a surprise; Mrs. Chasen trusts the dating service because it “screens out the fat and ugly”; Harold trusts in Maude enough to share the new experiences she recommends; the motorcycle cop trusts that Maude will act like a stereotypical “little old lady”; etc. (Higgins, p. 97), Maude has determined that the best years of her life are behind her, while Harold’s are yet to come: Maude and Harold enjoy the days together, living in the moment. from his bogus suicide attempts to his “offing” of Maude. Based on theories and materials developed by Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley. Maude engages Harold in freedom-related activities, encouraging him to dance, perform cartwheels, and yodel. Justice. Having experienced everything from royal society to a concentration camp, Maude tries to get Harold to take a more active part in life before hers comes to the end she’s planned for. Initially, Harold has so little lust for life that he preoccupies himself with funerals and fake suicides; Maude awakens in him the desire to experience the joys of life and the capacity for love; At story’s end, Harold embraces life and is able to let go of Maude. Harold’s desire to marry Maude is stronger than his ability to satisfy the needs of Mrs. Chasen and her cronies, though he’s not skilled enough to prevent Maude from fulfilling her desire to end it all. MAUDE: [I’m] Eighty. Of course not. MAUDE: . The end to the beginning and the beginning to the end - the great circle of life. Maude’s character is strongly committed to change and growth, following in the footsteps of her namesake, philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, “known for [his] theory that man is presently evolving, mentally and socially, toward a final spiritual unity.” (Webster’s, p. 975) As she tells Harold at a funeral: He sort of peels off the latex blood and walks over to his bedroom chair where a headless dummy sits. With the other she reached out, as if groping for support. Harold needs to figure out, as Maude tells him in her dying words, that what he really needs is not to marry her but to embrace life and: Pickles, who played Haroldâs detached, socialite mother, flew in her own costumes for the character. Maude has endured the trials of life, including time in a concentration camp, and now tests Harold’s mettle and his senses: she queries his approval of her nudity before showing him her rape paintings; she provokes him into getting physically involved with the sculpture; she involves him in the tree-stealing caper, defying an armed cop. [...] I put a lot of effort into these things. Maude decides to end her life, bringing the story to an end. Go - and love some more. Maude regales Harold with tales of her experiences in her younger days; he seeks her help when about to be drafted: HAROLD: ... which I hope will make you very happy.” Because of his one-time success at making his mother believe him dead, Harold is fascinated by the world of death and decay: funerals, junkyards, house demolitions, driving a hearse, faking suicide. His only way of getting his mother’s attention is to pretend he’s dead. Uncle Victor envisions the Army as the solution to Harold’s problems; With Maude’s help, Harold puts into action their plan to avoid his being drafted. âHe was spot-on ⦠He kindly raided his motherâs jewelry box to borrow antique jewelry for Mrs. Chasen.â. Maude encourages Harold to explore the positives of life. Hereâs a fun fact separate from the production of the film: According to The Criterion Collection cut, Colin Higgins employed Harrison Ford, then working as a carpenter, to build a hot tub and deck for his backyard. They meet because they're both funeral freaks, and one day their eyes lock over a grave. UNCLE VICTOR: I’d put him in the Army, Helen. âI had brought some of my own clothes over from England, which we had altered, and, in the week before shooting began, I shopped endlessly for the rest with the costume designer, Bill Theiss,â wrote Pickles for The Criterion Collection. Harold considers Maude’s parting words as he drives his hearse around crazily, contemplates suicide, and thinks better of it. Maude helps Harold escape the clutches of Victor’s Army, and in her arms he experiences the true meaning of love. You've reached the "hub" for any and all Dramatica analysis of Harold and Maude. (Higgins, p. 13), While liberating a tree, Maude fondly remembers the issues she fought for in her youth, while exhorting Harold to think of the future: (Higgins, p. 17-19). Here are 10 things you might not know about the film that pushed the boundaries of May-December romances. MAUDE: I knew we were going to be good friends the moment I saw you. At their first meeting, Maude offers to give Harold a ride in the hearse she’s taken from him; later, she shows him all the things she’s collected over her life, and gives him a banjo; at story’s end, Maude takes her own life and gives Harold a new-found freedom. Maude instructs Harold to seize the day: âAnd suddenly we became the characters pretty much that we were in the film. (Higgins, p. 13) Harold’s desire for death is demonstrated by his conversion of the Jaguar sports car into a mini-hearse; After Maude’s suicide, Harold drives his coffin-on-wheels recklessly along the clifftop, seemingly wanting to join Maude in death. For Harold, it’s part of his milieu of death: funerals, fake suicide, junkyards, house demolitions. Harold expresses his basic desires by buying Maude a bracelet and making love with her—and proposing marriage. MAUDE: Go - and love some more. Dismayed by the Psychiatrist’s inability to change Harold’s focus on death, Mrs. Chasen thinks of other ways to make Harold grow up. (Higgins, p. 99). Don’t die. (Higgins, p. 61). Unlike his psychiatrist, Maude is able to discern the reasons behind Harold’s suicide game, and suggest an alternative: MAUDE: No. I love you. At first, Higgins was going to direct the film, but screen tests proved to the studio that he wasnât ready. He puts a tiny ring box on the table. (Higgins, p. 99); prompted by Maude ending her life, he destroys the hearse. MRS. CHASEN: Of course, Harold’s father had a similar sense of the absurd. According to The Criterion Collection version of the film, producer Charles Mulvehill initially approached Elton John to write the music for the movie, as Ashby was a fan of the pop star. âDuring the making of the film, [Ruth] was very standoffish. Harold, now fascinated with life not death, carries on her spirit. Doing Relationship Story Concern. (Higgins, p. 16) MRS. CHASEN: It seems to me that as you do not get along with the daughters of my friends this is the best way for you to find a prospective wife. In the April 2001 issue of Vanity Fair, Cort revisited the cult classic and reminisced on his chemistry with his co-star. Harold’s incapable of enjoying a date with the superficial women his mother selects for him; Harold likes playing dead, but—unlike Uncle Victor—has no talent for killing people for his country. I love you! Uncle Victor thinks Harold goes a tad too far in his enthusiasm for killing; the psychiatrist’s dismayed at Harold’s lack of progress; Mrs. Chasen’s dating game doesn’t turn out as planned; Harold gives up his infantile preoccupation with shocking others and loses his hearse on the way to growing as a human being. "A hand comes in and removes the cover and there, on a little bed of parsley, is Harold's head. MRS. CHASEN: I only have a few minutes, Harold, but I do want to inform you of my decision. (Higgins, p. 21) I can still see the sunshine, the parasols, and the flashing uniforms of the young officers. HAROLD: But when you take these cars don’t you think you are wronging the owners? Mortified by Maude’s choice of death over marriage, Harold deliberates over his own future without her. Harold’s proficiency at play-acting enables him to outwit Uncle Victor by pretending to be psychotic and killing Maude; Maude’s expertise at stealing cars amazes Harold, while he’s less impressed with her driving skills; she dazzles him with her adeptness at singing, dancing, playing music, sculpting, painting, etc. Harold must lose his fear of change, and stop alienating those who try to get close to him by faking suicide. Harold has led a sheltered life on the family estate, wishing he remembered his father. When Mrs. Chasen takes away his hearse and give him an E-type Jaguar, Harold reacts by converting it to a “sports hearse” with his welding equipment. He attends funerals, visits automobile graveyards, watches buildings come down, and shocks his domineering mother with his fake suicides. (Higgins, p. 76). Through Maude’s influence, Harold loses his obsession with death and destruction and embraces life—driving his hearse (without him inside of it) over a cliff. It’s change. Everyone wants Harold to live his life in the way they recommend: Mrs. Chasen wants him to marry a nice young woman and drive a nice sports car; Uncle Victor wants him to “take on a man’s job” in the Army and die for his country “like Nathan Hale”; the priest wants Harold to marry someone who can give him children; the psychiatrist thinks Harold’s “alienation from the regular social interaction” can be isolated and coped with; Maude encourages Harold to embrace life and growth and love, like her. According to ⦠MAUDE: Oh, Big Issues. Because there are a million things to be, you know that there are.”, Maude intuits that Harold probably doesn’t sing and dance, but also: (Higgins, p. 6-7). Oddly enough, he died waiting for me to show up on This is Your Life, Ruth Gordon.â. Maude’s accentuating of the positive causes Harold to give up his staging of fake suicides; she’s such an influence on young Harold that he falls in love with her, laboring under the illusion that she’ll want to marry him just as he does her. John passedâbut not before suggesting his friend, Cat Stevens, for the job. Mrs. Chasen decides the answers to the dating questionnaire herself; Confronting Maude in the nude, Harold starts to make his own decisions: I’m well into autumn. MAUDE: Exactly. No. Kings died and kingdoms fell. According to Being Hal Ashby, Lewisâ wife loved the script so much that she got her husband to give it to Stanley Jaffe at Paramount. When that fails, she likes Victor’s proposal for making a man of Harold: (Higgins, p. 100) She helps him dodge the draft, but also dodges his plans to marry her by committing suicide. Frustrated by Harold’s invention of new ways of committing suicide for his dates, Mrs. Chasen implements her plans to control him by replacing his hearse with a new sports car. MAUDE: (she wants the truth) Really. Harold and Maude meet at one of their mutual activities, attending funerals, though with differing motivations: heâs fascinated by death and destruction, sheâs interested in change and the possibilities of rebirth. The 1971 box office failure, directed by Hal Ashby and written by Colin Higgins, has become a Hollywood classic since its rocky debut. Maude tells Harold of her good old days as a political activist, fighting for: For Maude however, it’s one aspect of her interest in growth: funerals, new experiences, dabbling in different artistic endeavors, nature, actual suicide. Having fallen in love with the lively Maude, Harold has built up his expectations of a life together with her, even though she’s never encouraged that: Ruth Gordon is poor but spunky Maude, the wizened 79-year-old woman who’s like a cheerleader for Life. In Maude, Harold meets another person who disrespects traditional values, someone who favors spiritual enrichment instead. After the Chemistry lab explosion, Harold decided he liked being dead, and took up faking suicide; Mrs. Chasen tells Harold what she’s decided to do with his life: Co-Founded the LLC by Mami Nagase and Ryoma Hashimoto in 2013. after selling their own vintage collections at pop up shops in nyc. Harold has a few well-developed skills, but little experience. [...] Is the subject of sex being over-exploited by our mass media? This also means it has been incorporated into the Dramatica Story Expert application itself as an easily referenced contextual example. . Mrs. Chasen gets the idea of marriage as a way to change Harold, and sets him up with a dating service. MAUDE: I took the pills an hour ago. Maude loves trying something new, like driving Harold’s hearse: . MRS. CHASEN: There is no doubt that it is time for you to settle down and begin thinking about your future. Ashby furiously objected, saying, âThatâs sort of what the whole movie is about, a boy falling in love with an old woman; the sexual aspect doesnât have to be distasteful.â About the less-than-explicit scene, Being Hal Ashby author Nick Dawson wrote, âAshby wanted to show the beauty of young and old flesh together, something that he knew the younger generation, the hippies, the heads, the open-minded masses would dig, but Evans said it would repulse most audiences, so it had to go.â In the end, Ashby won by sneaking the footage into the filmâs trailer. Largely ignored by his mother, Harold lacks feelings of self-worth. It is Maude again.” MRS. CHASEN: Really, Harold, you are no longer a child. Maude sets about changing Harold, overwhelming him with the joys of life. Do you think it’s wrong? Youâd be hard-pressed to find a true cinephile who doesnât own a copy of Harold and Maude. (Higgins, p. 9) But play as well as you can. When Mrs. Chasen hears of Maude’s age she demands that bridegroom-to-be Harold “Be reasonable” (Higgins, p. 95); Harold acts like he really is suicidal, driving recklessly along the clifftop in the Jaguar. As his proposal to Maude shows, he’s not opposed to the institution of marriage—it’s just that her values and beliefs mean more to him than those that are generally accepted by society. It’s part of life. Harold repeatedly changes his appearance to resemble a corpse; Mrs. Chasen tries to change his ways by sending him to the Psychiatrist for treatment. What is so strange about death? I should be gone by midnight. When Harold sees the effect his supposed death has on his mother, he causes it to happen again and again in a bid to get her attention; to avoid being drafted, he causes his uncle to think he has psychotic tendencies. (Higgins, p. 3) I believe much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who know they are this—(she holds out the daisy) yet let themselves be treated—(she looks out at the field) as that. Harold exhausts the potential marriage partners his mother supplies, holding out for Maude; Maude feels that she’s lived her life to the fullest, and that the options life has left for her are not worth living for, and so she finally chooses death. [...] I took the pills an hour ago. It’s time for you to settle down and stop flitting away your talents on these amateur theatrics [...] MAUDE: I like to keep a variety. Obsessed with the trappings of death, Harold freaks out his blind dates, modifies his new sports car to look like a mini-hearse, and attends funerals, where he meets the spirited Maude (Ruth Gordon). (Higgins, p. 37) Maude rescues a tree and transplants it so that it may have a better life in the future; She has planned her own death to occur on Saturday, and moves confidently towards her date with death; Maude consigns Harold’s gift to a watery grave, so “I’ll always know where it is.” Finally, Maude advances Harold’s appreciation of life and living so that he’ll enjoy life once she’s gone. All revolving. Maude has mastered many skills and gone onto others, and has accumulated a wealth of experience. Harold’s social life revolves around rituals of death. . Take a chance! I couldn’t bear it. Mrs. Chasen sees marriage as a way to get Harold to change his lifestyle, employing the dating service for this purpose: Harold and Maude spoil the plans of Mrs. Chasen and Uncle Victor by faking Maude’s death by drowning. HAROLD: But we can’t just dig it up! A lively 79-year-old who’s done just about everything worth experiencing, Maude (aka Dame Marjorie Chardin) has firm plans to end her life on her 80th birthday. Long before Amelie was relocating garden gnomes and Helena Bonham Carter was liberating laundry, there was the unbeatable free spirit prototype, Maude. PSYCHIATRIST: Does that worry you? HAROLD: Don’t you understand? MAUDE: . MAUDE: With your skill and my experience… I think we can come up with something. Get hurt maybe. Harold and Maude’s lifestyles intersect through funeral-going, which they both enjoy. Harold drives a hearse, by the way, because he is fascinated by death, particularly his own. âIt opened up with a shot of a large, silver-plated serving dish," Colin Higgins told Film Quarterly in 1972. Harold and Maudeâs lifestyles intersect through funeral-going, which they both enjoy. She wants him to open up to all the world has to offer, develop the zeal for it that she has. HAROLD: Yes. When he sees his mother’s responsiveness to his untimely death in the Chemistry lab, he feels more valuable dead—and continues to re-enact his death to gain her attention. This direction is further emphasized by the Cat Stevens’ lyrics that play: I don’t regret the kingdoms - what sense in borders and nations and patriotism - but I do miss the kings. Harold accelerates the staging of his fake suicide attempts to include the “murder” of Maude. MAUDE: But, Harold, we begin to die as soon as we are born. Preparing for her future by visiting funerals, she takes the repressed Harold under her wing and transfers her lust for life to him before expiring. HAROLD: But this is public property. Harold pours his heart out to the dying Maude: MAUDE: They grow and bloom, and fade, and die, and change into something else. Harold reacts to his mother’s domineering ways by pretending to be dead, instead of fighting her or leaving home; when Maude steals his hearse, he passively lets her drive him home; he modifies his new sports car into a hearse like his old one; etc. MAUDE: Greet the dawn with the Breath of Fire! I thought then I would marry a soldier. But they are not dead really. (pause) I decided then I enjoyed being dead. HAROLD: Me! [...] “Seventeen - Do you believe churches have a strong influence to upgrade the general morality?” - yes, again. Harold learns to love and be loved—to embrace the new (playing the banjo) and to end his fascination with death—finally driving his hearse over the cliff, destroying it. Realizing that she’s not growing any more, she’s taken steps toward change: If Harold was able to find qualities in the young women he dates that held some personal value to him, he might well marry one of them and make everyone happy. Frustrated with several issues he was having with the studio, including not being able to hire cinematographer Gordon Willis, Ashby considered leaving the picture altogether. Under the Psychiatrist’s probing, Harold regrets that he’s not getting through to his mother with his shocking “suicide” attempts like he used to. Harold attends funerals, drives a hearse, visits junkyards, watches buildings come down; he repeatedly pretends to end his own life; he pleads with the dying Maude not to leave him: Rights. The qualities valued by the older generation around him—conformity, serving one’s country, marrying one’s own kind, etc.—hold little meaning for Harold. HAROLD: Maude, please. . MAUDE: (a little perturbed) Why do you say that? Maude understands this: Mrs. Chasen, Uncle Victor, the priest, and the psychiatrist all want Harold to live a lifestyle that’s, well, more like theirs. On the Harold and Maude set, Bud Cort was infamous for his Method acting. Two men rushed to her side and then - with a long, low sigh - she collapsed in their arms. If only he’d marry, preferably to someone capable of procreation, or sacrifice himself for his country—both of which are anathema to Harold. Harold tests people’s sense of humor and gullibility by faking suicide; Mrs. Chasen gets pre-screened dates from the dating agency for Harold; she fills in the dating questionnaire herself, to get Harold a date suitable to her; the psychiatrist examines Harold’s feelings; Harold tests Uncle Victor’s limits by “killing” Maude. Exactly as she pleases, with avid collecting and nude modeling among many... Of thinking vintage pieces are their hand picked everywhere in USA and Japan she encourages Harold to recognize own! A grave Harold around to their way of getting his mother, psychiatrist, etc. pie oat! Seems to have and reminisced on his chemistry with his self-assisted suicides, getting the knee-jerk reactions enjoys. Find any additional analysis or media related to the Storyform for Harold and Maudeâs lifestyles intersect through,! Overwhelming him with the joys of new experiences like ginger pie and straw. 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