Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Harold and Maude
1971 · Hal Ashby · Harold and Maude on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Harold stage another death for his mother to find. (staging)
Harold hangs, drowns, and sets himself on fire in a running series of staged suicides, each one performed with total commitment for an audience of one bored relative.
Payoff: Each performance is really aimed at the people around him, not at doing himself any real harm. In the reading: the gest (cinema of the body). The reading calls this a gest: a bodily performance that exposes a relationship instead of advancing a plot.
Notice how still and symmetrical Harold's own scenes look. (camera)
Alonzo frames Harold's world in static, boxed compositions inside large empty rooms, then lets Maude's scenes move with looser, handheld energy.
Payoff: The camera shows you rigidity and vitality before either character ever names them. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). The reading calls Harold's held, unreadable stillness a qualisign: a face holding one quality that has not yet turned into action.
Notice the mansion's dark wood against Maude's cluttered railway car. (setting)
Harold's family home is a cavernous, mausoleum-like house of antiques and oppressive order, while Maude lives in a converted railway carriage crowded with sculpture and life.
Payoff: The two homes tell you everything about what each of them believes life is for.
Listen for Cat Stevens singing under nearly every scene. (sound)
His voice and acoustic guitar run almost continuously through the film, sometimes playing ironic against the morbid action and sometimes carrying real feeling straight.
Payoff: The songs do the emotional narration the dry dialogue refuses to spell out.
Watch Ruth Gordon's face stay warm through anything she says. (performance)
Gordon plays Maude as voluble, mercurial, and warm against Bud Cort's watchful near silence, an unsentimental energy that keeps her from turning into mere whimsy.
Payoff: Her conviction is what makes Harold's slow thaw believable instead of sentimental.
Once you have seen it
Watch Harold mostly watch while Maude does things. (structure)
She dances, models, steals cars, and liberates trees, while Harold stays mostly absorbed and still, the world moving around him more than he moves through it.
Payoff: The romance works by redirecting what he watches, not by giving him a plan to chase. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the figure stays still while the world moves through and around him.
Watch what Harold does with the hearse at the very end. (structure)
After Maude's death, Harold sends his hearse, the same death machine he built and drove all film, off a cliff, then walks away carrying her banjo.
Payoff: For once he performs no death at all, which is the film's only unironic act of living.
Watch how differently Harold's face moves after Maude is gone. (performance)
Bud Cort keeps the same watchful stillness he has held all film, but for the first time it breaks into open grief instead of a performed gag.
Payoff: The stillness that was a running joke becomes, once, an actual feeling with nowhere left to hide.
Carry this in: Watch each staged death as a performance aimed at whoever is in the room with him.