My initial instinct is to just bitch, bitch, bitch about Harold and Maude. Just really tear into it. It’s a badly made movie and it’s a stupid one. But somehow, I kind of like it. My recommendation is somewhat guarded and cautious, but it’s strong. It really comes down to one word: conviction. Movies like this never seem to have any conviction. In the painful, patronizing Oscar bait Dead Poets Society, the Robin Williams character is a free-spirited English teacher at a swanky prep school in the '50s. He apparently teaches his students to act independently, and as individuals. Nobody in Dead Poets Society ever comes off as individuals. Williams tells them that you can’t learn poetry from a book. He has them tear out the pages, explaining how to quantifiably evaluate the worth of a poem. At the end of the film, it looks like Williams will be fired. His students don’t like this. They get up in front of their new teacher, as a class, stand on their desks and tear out the offending pages from their books. This is not individualism. It cements the fact that none of the students are individuals; they are simply Robin Williams’ students. One of the students goes against the will of the group and wishes to turn Williams in. They beat him up for it. The common comeback from the admirers of the film is that they chose as individuals to stand up on their desks and tear pages out of their books. This is a poor rebuttal, as the fact that they chose to protest in the same way shows that they are not creative entities. The choice they have made isn’t to react to this system in a way specific to themselves, but join a group that is greater than the sum of its parts. I’d even argue that the power in the scene comes in their solidarity, solidarity of course being antagonistic towards individualism.

What makes me angry about Dead Poets Society, what I find so repugnant about it, is that it is a pro-conformity film that purports to be a pro-individual film. Despite its problems, and we’ll get to them in a moment, Harold and Maude is a pro-individual film. There is only ONE person that comes of age in the movie. It has ONE central character. It doesn’t have several young men coming of age and finding their identities. (How insulting is that?) It seems quite impossible, indeed, to make a film about several young men finding their voice without giving them a sense of commonality, which is ultimately dehumanizing and thus antagonistic towards individualism. Harold and Maude sticks to being a one-character study. The film is about a rich 20-year-old boy who is in love with death. He fakes suicides to torment his mother, and he loves going to funerals. He sees death as the only time that his “people,” rich WASPs, ever come out of their shells. The suicides are the only time that he feels that he can get into contact with his dim, self-absorbed mother. At all. At one of the funerals he sees Maude, an 80-year-old free spirit. She teaches him about the joys of living, and he learns to love himself. He falls in love with Maude, but before he gets a chance to propose marriage to her, Maude takes some poison and gets ready to die. Harold is the central character of the film. The one character that is being studied. Yes, it is called Harold and Maude, but Maude doesn’t change from her experiences with Harold and she doesn’t learn from him. Harold does, and Harold proves to be the one active figure in the film.

Harold comes off as the most emotionally complex as well. In a famous scene, Maude asks him what kind of flower he would like to be. He points to a field and says that he would like to be one of those because they are all the same. Maude tells him that they are not the same and that they are all different. She says that she believes that much of the misery in the world is caused by people who are singular and unique flowers, letting themselves be treated like a flower in a field. They are allowing themselves to be grouped and labeled. Early in the film, Harold can be labeled in simple terms as being spoiled or gloomy. We eventually see that this is a facade that Harold has developed. A defense mechanism. At the end of the film, we detect that there is something deeper and more chemical going on upstairs. He’s grown from being a boy to a man, and he has developed into some sort of human being. I doubt that he is really a fully developed character by the end of the movie, but we get a feeling of his youth and we get a feeling that he is growing. Accordingly, the only really impressive performance in the film is Bud Cort as Harold. It’s difficult to see him in any other role, and it’s difficult to see anybody else in this role. There is a very deep voice coming out of his chubby baby face that gives the impression of a perpetual man-child. The contrast gives his fake suicides a sort of winking humor and makes his romance of Maude quite hilariously overwrought. The nature of the part requires him to underplay it, and everybody else in the film flatly overdoes their part. The expressiveness of everybody else in the movie feeds into our perceptions of the Cort performance, and Harold grows even more complex in our eyes. It’s with Cort that I believe the audience most identifies with, and he’s the one that they SHOULD identify with.

In arguably the best sequence of the film, three authority figures look into the camera and lecture Harold about his romance with Maude. An army recruiter, with only one arm, has a framed picture of Richard Nixon behind him at his desk. He tells Harold that while he doesn’t have anything against marriage he doesn’t think that what Harold is doing is normal. Harold’s therapist has a framed picture of Sigmund Freud behind him at his desk. He tells Harold that it is common for boys to fantasize about having sex with their mothers. He’s concerned about the fact that that Harold seems to want to have sex with his grandmother. Harold’s priest has a framed picture of the Pope behind him at his desk. He describes an imagined sexual encounter with Harold and Maude in graphic detail, barely able to contain himself. He then tells Harold that such a thought makes him want to vomit. All three of these speeches are shown in similar shots. They are being grouped together, showing that they are essentially variations of the same theme. The film is making fun of the military culture, psychiatry and organized religion as being stifling to individuality and the pursuit to live. The recruiter, therapist and priest are caricatures, but the caricature is the point. The caricature is one step above the zombie. These people are caricatures because they can be made into caricatures. They can easily be used to represent the idea of the institution. Further more, none of these three are really able to provide a good reason why Harold and Maude should not be together. The most that they can offer is that it’s just weird. They have this vague feeling that there is something here that just goes against their group norms. The film doesn’t hate these people; rather, it sees them as sort of frightened and defensive. They don’t get it, and so they shun it. There is a very brief shot in the film that complicates the character of Maude greatly. I did not notice it when I first saw the film, but I caught it after Danny Peary pointed it out in his invaluable collection “Cult Movies," and most Harold and Maude fans seem to be familiar with it. Harold is holding Maude’s hand and he looks down to see a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. The movie isn’t quite so crass as to say that the priest, the recruiter and the therapist are Nazis. The film makes them out to be more silly than dangerous. But there is a connection that needs to be made here. The evil of the Nazis is purely a product of institutional groupthink. Both those who ran the Holocaust and those who were killed in it were individuals degraded into objects. They were able to kill because they were devalued as individual moral entities, and they were able to BE killed because they were devalued as individual living entities. The film is arguing that the priest, the recruiter and the therapist are products of the same dysfunction that produced the Holocaust.

Ultimately, Harold and Maude is so pro-individual that it does eventually come apart. Maude’s philosophy, Maudeism as it’s called by the fans of the picture, basically says that “if you want to be free be free," and “there are a million things to be, you know that there are." Because it’s anti-conformity, it’s very hard to establish any real rules at all; as a rule it would be something that everybody would follow and would thus conform them into group norms and destroy their individuality. And thus once you are free, where do you go? The problems with contra-philosophies like Maudeism and feminism is that they are only concerned with liberation. Once liberated it is unable to create any sort of ethical system to replace the one that has been destroyed. Maudeism would say that all ethics would depend upon the outlook of the individual. Thought through, this would lend support toward an ethical anarchy that I have a difficult time believing that Maude would really support. In the most obvious sense, saying that all philosophies are meaningless would mean that the philosophy of “all philosophies are meaningless” would be meaningless as well. Maudeism isn’t Sophistry exactly, but it sure lends itself to Sophistry, doesn’t it? If the Maude fans offer Maudism as a joke, then it’s the sort of joke that is satirizing the idea of –isms as a whole. In which case, we may very well find ourselves right back to where we started from. In terms of the film itself, I detect that Maude is a humane and loving person, which are values antagonistic to Maudeism. Or at least the founding principle of Maudeism: “If you want to be free, be free, because there are a million things to be. You know that there are.” Maude steals cars and trees all the time, she breaks the law. I don’t think that she is saying that all laws are meaningless, just that these laws are. In the selection of which laws are breakable, Maude seems to be using some sort of fundamental ethical system, which suggests that she isn’t entirely free of institutionalized groupthink. True individual freedom would be the absence of all ideology. It wouldn’t be to select which groups that you want to belong to.

An even bigger problem comes with the nature of Maude herself. The 80-year-old free spirit thing, well, it seems to be like a joke and a cliché. And this is greatly detrimental to the idea that people are individuals and should be regarded as such. It’s difficult to view Maude that way, because we have basically seen something like her before. It’s not even an original Ruth Gordon performance. I think that she does fine, but it’s certainly typecasting. Again it makes dramatic sense to portray Maude this way, to accentuate the focus on the individuality of Harold, but it hurts the thematic content of the picture. I’ve been wondering if the theme of the picture is in itself impossible to fully actualize. Saying that people should be treated as unique individuals is not in itself a unique proposition. Do you see the problem here?

In a very real sense, Harold and Maude comes off as populist rabble-rousing. I’m reminded of how Paul Feig, the creator of “Freaks and Geeks,” described how a beautiful woman walked up to him and told him how much the show meant to her and how strongly she related to it. (With all due respect to “Freaks and Geeks,” I think that it is a fine show, but the Freaks and Geeks really didn’t seem to have that much trouble getting laid.) I sort of feel that Harold and Maude can be sold as an outsider movie that can appeal to beautiful people. Mary from There's Something About Mary named it as her favorite movie, and it seemed to be a quirky but logical choice. The film seems curiously free of shadows and darkness. It’s pretty much all good news. Yeah, we see that Maude has a concentration camp tattoo on her arm, and yeah, she tearfully remembers her husband, but it just isn’t quite enough. When I first saw the movie, I thought that it was a rather arbitrary and forced conclusion to have her commit suicide. Now I think that I can believe it, and I can buy that Maude sees it as just another part of life. But as seen by the movie, it’s not dark or even really bittersweet. If you were to cry at the end of the movie it would be more out of joy on behalf of Harold than out of grief. You would cry because he has finally found some sort of self-actualization. There is something tidy and overly conclusive about the movie. I’d put it in the same ball park as subsequent outsider films like Taxi Driver, Martin, Ghost World and Punch-Drunk Love, but it’s not on the same level. Part of the reason that it registers as so thematically shallow is that it offers to preach us a lesson and give us an answer. It says that being an individual is wonderful and it’s the identity that we should all take (which as I have said is a nonsense philosophy). Those other four films that I mentioned say that it’s a lot more complicated than that, and individuality is full of loneliness and contradictory emotions of loving and hating the society that you are not a part of. And none of those four films ever sit us down and tell us the punchline.

I won’t and I can’t accept Harold and Maude as a movie of my own heart, but it’s hard not to get high off it in a similar way that its fans have. The real stand-up-and-cheer moment for me came near the end of the film when Harold tells his mother that he has found the woman that he wants to marry. He gives her the picture and it’s a picture of a sunflower (the flower that Maude said she would want to be). His mother says that he is very funny, but then Harold turns over the picture to show one of Maude and his mother’s face drops. She says something like “You can’t be serious,” or “you must be joking." This is the first time that Harold is serious, however. His suicides were never able to hurt her or threaten her, but this does. And it hurts and threatens her in a way that she deserves to be hurt and threatened. Harold’s therapist describes the suicides as being performed for his mother’s benefit. This protest is done out of Harold’s benefit, and it is only then that his mother really registers concern or anger. This is a useful rebellion and all the evidence that we need to recognize Harold’s self-actualization and maturity.

I have problems with the filmmaking. It’s bad and I actually think that I can do better. The transitions between scenes are sort of sloppy, seeming to cut as soon as the punchline is delivered. Danny Peary describes a swimming pool suicide where we see Harold’s body floating in the pool BEFORE we see his mother jump in for a swim and ignore him. The director, Hal Ashby, should have removed the shot of Harold lying in the pool altogether and just show the mother go in the pool and swim around. Maybe he could linger on Harold’s corpse. That would be funnier and would get to the morbid surreal humor of the scene quicker and more subtly. The last shot of the film starts off as a freeze frame, and then shows the car that Harold had been driving, falling off a cliff. Then we go up to see that Harold wasn’t in it. We are distanced from the car falling because Ashby employs such an obviously cinematic effect. The twist at the end lacks as much of a punch as it would otherwise. The famous soundtrack is by Cat Stevens, and it produces the exact same effect no matter where it is. In the beginning of the film it works splendidly and at the end it only works somewhat. The music is sort of melancholy and sort of syrupy, but mostly it’s just bittersweet. It sounds the same during the sad moments as it does during the happier moments and seems to disregard Harold’s spiritual growth. You find that the produced effect often confuses the emotional clarity of the moment. There doesn’t seem to be a conductor at work here. The movie doesn’t flow. There seems to be something clogging the pipes. Some of the problems come in the script. Harold gets out of volunteering for the Army by acting like he is TOO bloodthirsty for the service. He shows this by taking out a scalp and shaking it at the recruiter. The sequence is unspeakably embarrassing to watch. I also have to wonder how Maude is able to steal cars so easily. She doesn’t seem to hotwire them, she just takes them. And why does she do donuts while driving them? Mostly though, I’d blame the director who should have figured some of this stuff out in the filmmaking process. Harold and Maude is not a slick movie.

And yet the movie is just lumpy as opposed to slow. I have to admit that it’s a very brisk ninety minutes. Ashby seems to know his faults and he is often able to work them to his advantage. The preachiness of Harold and Maude makes it sort of a stupid movie, but it’s never really a condescending one. Ashby is able to underplay things. He never really rubs our face into it. There is a shot in the film that I can’t help but find impressive. Harold and Maude are kneeling in a graveyard full of tombstones, and Ashby fairly slowly and sort of sloppily zooms out, losing both Harold and Maude. I don’t think that the image makes a whole lot of sense symbolically. Maybe it would have worked better in a harder outsider picture as it seems to be suggesting something alien from the rest of the film. Ditto for a brief static shot of some naked trees. There is something pessimistic about these images. But I enjoy these shots in themselves; they're interesting and aesthetic on a purer level. An infamously causal director, a stoner who never fired or yelled at a crew member or actor, Ashby manages to give the film a pleasing “let it all hang out” feeling. The amateurishness of the direction is only annoying in the traditional sense; it usually works fine for this specific film. Ashby shows how self-knowledge can compensate for a lack of talent. And as a metaphor for Harold and Maude as a whole, how imperfections both great and small can’t really dilute the power of the big picture.