Harold and Maude · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The first thing Harold does is hang himself. We watch his polished loafers come down the staircase, then the legs, then the rope and the kicked-away stool, the body turning slowly in the cavernous hall. His mother walks in, glances up, and crosses to the phone to fret about her dinner guests. The gag is the whole film in miniature: a death staged with total commitment, met by a world too bored to look twice.

Stay on that staging, because it tells you what kind of cinema this is. Harold never acts on his situation. He performs his death — the hanging, the drowning in the pool, the self-immolation on the lawn, the hara-kiri laid on for a horrified blind date. These are not attempts. They are routines, cut and timed by Ashby (the Oscar-winning editor) to land as gags precisely because nothing follows from them. Here is where Deleuze becomes a useful companion. The classical cinema he calls the movement-image runs on a simple circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cut serves that chain. After the war a different cinema surfaces, full of people who see their world with terrible clarity and can no longer respond to it adequately — Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image. Harold is its deadpan comic specimen. He perceives the deadness of his mother's mausoleum-mansion with perfect accuracy. He just can't act on it. So he stages acts instead.

Those staged suicides are best read through what Deleuze, writing on the cinema of the body, calls the gest: a bodily attitude that exposes a social relation rather than advancing a plot. Harold's hangings are gests aimed at an audience — the indifferent mother, the unflappable psychiatrist, the militarist Uncle Victor, the computer-dating brides paraded before him. Each performance theatricalizes his refusal of the order they stand for. The body says what the near-mute Harold won't.

And the body is fixated downward. Deleuze's impulse-image names a world of raw compulsions sliding toward exhaustion and death — drives erupting beneath a polished social surface. Harold's morbidity is exactly that slope: the hearse he drives, the gleaming Jaguar E-Type his mother buys him that he promptly welds back into a hearse, the funerals he crashes for pleasure. The mansion of dark wood and antiques is the respectable face; the cemetery is the originary world it secretly belongs to, and Harold keeps wandering back to it.

Alonzo's camera knows this. He boxes Harold into symmetrical, static frames inside large empty rooms — spaces drained of any action they might host, what Deleuze calls the any-space-whatever, a setting that has stopped being a setting. Against those voids Bud Cort gives a performance almost entirely of stillness: a pale, watchful, immobile face registering feeling that never discharges into deed. That reflecting face holding a single quality is what Deleuze names the qualisign, the purest form of the affection-image. Harold doesn't do; he registers. He is a seer — a voyant — long before he is a lover.

Then Maude arrives, and she is the motion Harold lacks. She dances, models, liberates trees, steals cars with cheerful impunity, and Harold mostly watches, absorbed. Deleuze has a phrase for this too: the movement of world, where the figure grows still while the world moves around and through him. The romance doesn't work by handing Harold a goal and a plot to chase. It works by keeping him a watcher and redirecting the watching — from death toward life. Cat Stevens's voice does the rest of the steering, an almost continuous sung commentary that carries the carpe-diem argument the dialogue is too dry to state. That marriage of singer-songwriter catalog to comic montage is the film's real technical invention, and it is pure cutting-room craft.

It is also a borrowed one, honestly repaid. The Graduate had shown that a pop catalog (Simon and Garfunkel) could replace orchestral underscore as ironic emotional narration; Ashby swaps Cat Stevens in function-for-function. The two-hander engine — frozen young man thawed by an exuberant life-force elder — comes straight from Zorba the Greek. Ruth Gordon brings the blithely amoral, scene-dominating older woman she'd minted in Rosemary's Baby, warmed here past whimsy into wisdom. The mortuary-as-farce register descends from The Loved One, and the gentle anti-authority cult fable, carried for years on campus and repertory screens, was charted by King of Hearts. What Ashby seeds in turn is enormous and specific: the quirky, music-scored, life-affirming comedy of sensibility in which an emotionally frozen person is unlocked by an eccentric — a sub-genre Wes Anderson would build a career inside, deadpan symmetry and melancholy pop and all.

The significance is this. Ashby took the protagonist who can only watch — the art-cinema casualty of Deleuze's crisis — and made him the hero of a comedy that ends in affirmation. Watch the final move. Maude keeps her vow and dies for real on her eightieth birthday. Harold, for once, does not stage a death. He sends the hearse — the death-machine itself — off the cliff, and walks away with a banjo. The slope reverses. The gest becomes, at last, a real act, the film's single un-ironic gesture toward living. Next time, watch the suicides not as gags but as a stilled body trying to speak, and the ending as the moment it finally does.