Last night I watched one of my favorite films—Harold and Maude— for perhaps the eighth time in the last thirty years. I love it every time I watch it. I think Maude, one of the two heroes of the film, is a philosopher along classical lines, by which I mean someone who lives a truly philosophical way of life which would be recognizable to the ancient Stoics, Cynics, or Daoists and Zen Buddhists of the Graeco-Roman and Chinese world. Although I love many things about the movie- all of its actors, its cinematography, and the outstanding Cat Stevens soundtrack which mirrors the plot with songs of personal freedom, non-judgmental love, and self-exploration- it is the revelation of Maude the philosopher at the heart of the movie that I love.
I want to talk about Maude’s embrace of a life outside of convention, rules and social mores. There will be spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it I strongly suggest renting it on Youtube and coming back to read this later. In my opinion it is better to watch this film without knowing the plot before hand.
The movie’s narrative centers around Harold, a young man who repeatedly stages elaborate suicides as an attack on his wealthy society dame of a mother, a person who is unconcerned with his personhood beyond establishing him in the upper class choreography of her life. Harold, who is depressed and bitter, drives a hearse and attends funerals as a hobby. At one such funeral he meets Maude, a 79 year old woman who is also crashing them, and who approaches him to talk.
The two become friends as Maude invites Harold into her life. She is a sculptor, painter, creator of odour chambers, and musician, and she lives a bohemian lifestyle outside of society, living in a redecorated railcar. Her and Harold spend a week together having adventures. Maude hints in their very first conversation that she plans to die on her upcoming 80th birthday, but Harold doesn’t clue in to what her words suggest. “I’ll be eighty next week,” she says. “A good time to move on, don’t you think? I mean, seventy-five is too early, but at eighty-five, well, you’re just marking time and you may as well look over the horizon.”
Maude gets around town by stealing cars, liberates a sidewalk tree to replant it in the forest, and stares down or outfoxes various police officers as though they were little boys playing a silly game of which they should know better. “What owners, Harold?” she says. “We don’t own anything. It’s a transitory world. We come on the earth with nothing, and we go out with nothing, so isn’t “ownership” a little absurd?” She is whimsical, bright, funny, and joyful, although she also expresses sadness at her own losses and at humanity’s stupidity. As she says on one scene, “How humanity still so dearly loves a cage.”
Maude helps Harold avoid being drafted and as they get closer he falls in love with her. He is taken with the beauty of her personality and her possession of what he so far has not found: a love of life and the ability to live. They become lovers, a fact he tells his mother, who has been trying to set him up on matchmaker dates which he has scuttled with performances of self-mutilation, hari-kari and self-immolation. Harold and Maude’s love affair is itself shockingly outside convention, but also possesses a poetic structure: Harold, a young man obsessed with death, becomes lovers with an dying woman obsessed with life. Harold, young on the outside but dead inside, is reborn by the love of a woman who appears close to death on the outside but inside is intensely full of life.
Harold’s mother and her team of aiders and abetters- a priest, a military man and a psychiatrist- are suitable horrified as propriety and social conditioning demand. On the night of Maude’s 80th birthday he throws her a private dinner party and gives her gift, only to be told by her, gently and with a smile, that she will be dead by midnight.
Maude tells him: “Oh, I am happy, Harold. Ecstatically happy. I couldn’t imagine a lovelier farewell.” Harold, who reacts with rage and panic, rushes her to the hospital, playing the part of Socrates’ jail cell companions. In the ambulance Maude tells him, “Oh, Harold! What a fuss, this is so unnecessary.”
After Maude dies in the hospital, Harold drives his hearse off a cliff. After a moment of ambiguity the camera pans up to show him still alive and watching the car below. He picks up the banjo Maude gave him and begins to play the melody to one of the Cat Stevens songs that runs though the movie, whose refrain is “If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, cause there’s a million ways to be, you know that there are….” As the movie closes Harold begins to dance away from the cliff playing his banjo.
When I first saw Harold and Maude I had an apparently common experience: I completely missed the revelation of aspects of Maude’s personal history. During one scene she muses to Harold about growing up as a young girl in Vienna, and talks about her participation in revolutionary politics and her doctor husband. Yet “that was all before,” she says with tears in her eyes before breaking off her story.
One gets the sense that she lost that world in and its people in the brutal counter-revolutionary violence of the WW2 era, but the full story only emerges during a later scene when Harold takes Maude’s hand. While she is talking and gazing into the distance the camera briefly zooms in to show the numbers tattooed on her arm. The glimpse is so quick, and passes so completely without emphasis or explanation in the film, that many people miss it.
Maude says to Harold at they gaze at the sea, “Dreyfus once wrote that on Devil’s Island he would see the most glorious birds. Many years later in Brittany he realized they had only been sea gulls.” She smiles and looks out to sea. “To me they will always be — glorious birds.”
This is a reference to the Jewish French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of treason for selling military secrets to the Germans in 1894, but in fact persecuted for reasons of antisemitism and widely understood to be innocent. The Dreyfus Affair prompted both Emile Zola’s angry political tract J’accuse, and the passionate conversion of a young journalist named Theodore Herzl—disillusioned with European justice— to the new ideology of Zionism.
In any case in Maude’s camp tattoo and her Dreyfus reference we get a further understanding of the life she has lived. A member of the large number of Jews who were involved in socialist and anarchist revolution in Europe in the early 20th century and who were wiped out by Nazism and Stalinism, she turned to a life of private revolution. “No more revolutions?” asks Harold, to which she replies, “Oh no! Every day. Just now in my own small way.”
What is Maude’s small everyday revolution? Maude lives a life of personal freedom, disregard of custom and law, embrace of dualities like pain and joy, death and life, non-ownership, and non-attachment. She also practices a way of love for life and living things, and equally embraces the freedom of others whether they be trees or people. In her conduct she practices civil disobedience, and she seeks a mystical oneness with life and its ever changing dance.
To put it another way, in a world of sleepers, Maude is awake.
The Buddha, when once asked who he was- a divine being, a normal human, what— famously refused those identifications and simply said, “I am awake.” G.I. Gurdjieff, the controversial and brilliant rogue spiritual teacher of early 20th century Europe and the US, said that his mission was to wake sleepers. The Buddha and Gurdjieff meant different things by this, but both shared the sense that the average human being passes their life as a sleeping, hypnotized member of the herd who never wakes up to the truth of their life and never takes real responsibility for themselves and their minds and actions, who neither really lives nor understand themselves.
I mention Gurdjieff mostly because the following quote encapsulates a similar kind of wakefulness to that evinced by Maude. In 1917 Gurdjieff was asked if WW1 could be stopped, and replied, “How many times have I been asked if this war can be stopped,” Gurdjieff mused aloud. “Of course, it can be stopped. All that is necessary is for the sleeping men to wake up; then they will stop shooting at each other and come home.”
In one scene in the movie Maude and Harold sit looking at flowers. In more foreshadowing, Maude comments that she would like to be reborn as a sunflower. Harold, in contrast, says he would like to be one of the little white flowers that all look the same. Maude points out that they are not all the same, but all different, if one looks closely.
“I think much of the suffering in the world comes from people who are like this, but who allow themselves to be treated like that,” she says. The camera then pans out from the white flowers to a shot of a miliary graveyard with its endless rows of identical white tombstones. The shot widens and widens until one sees the staggeringly huge amount of identical tombstones in perfectly neat rows.
One can say, “Easier said than done” of course, but what really held those men in fealty to a meaningless war in which they spent months in life-threatening misery trying to kill other innocent men just like them at no real benefit to themselves and often at much cost? If they had all banded together they could of course have stopped the war. What prevented them though, was likely not a calculus of the risks and benefits but the limits on our imaginations imposed by custom and convention.
Of classical western philosophers Maude reminds one of Diogenes, who slept publicly in a bathtub, had no possessions, and pointedly ignored the rules of the civilization around him. After gaining the attention of the Emperor, Alexander reportedly came to visit him where he lay in his bathtub to confer an honour on one of Greece’s most famous philosophers. “Is there anything I can offer you?” the ruler asked.
“Yes,” Diogenes answered with a smile, “Can you step one foot to the left? You’re blocking my sun.”
I could see Maude saying the same thing.
Of eastern philosophers, I think Maude most resembles Zen masters. Like the trickster in certain ancient rituals, we sometimes need people who trash our customs and conventions from a place of wisdom and love.
What, though, is the fundamental lesson of Maude?
You may not desire to steal other people’s automobiles or choose the time of your own death or engage in unorthodox (but nonviolent) love making. What makes Maude inspiring is the fact that she is awake. She makes her own choices, and does not allow herself to be hypnotized by the herd mentality of society. There are consequences to living the way she does, and arguably in our hyper technological society, where the enforcers of the will of the state and the elites possess a massive capacity for surveillance and violence, those consequences are more severe and inescapable now than in 1971 when this movie was made. A frightening thought.
Nevertheless, Maude poses a question to us. Are we awake? Are we living authentically? Are we living joyously?
Or have we traded a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
I shall watch this. Thank you.
Brilliant, Baba.