Movies of Hope: Harold and Maude

Harold and Maude is one of my all-time favorite movies. For many reasons. The fantastic music was all written for the film by Cat Stevens. The theme song is If You Want To Sing Out (listen on YouTube), and the song exemplifies the theme of the movie: Live, Live your particular and wild life, even and especially when there are so many who want you to live someone else's life!

I won't give anything away because I know you're going to see the movie soon! Hal Ashby, of Being There fame, directed the film. The images in the movie are fantastic and the soundtrack, though most definitely dated, is perfect. Maude is an over-the-top free spirit who knows pain deeper than most, and yet is alive. She's about to turn 80 and has never been more alive. She steals trees that are choking on the pollution of the city and transplants them back in the forest. She "borrows" priests' cars and cops' motorcycles. Ironically, she likes funerals, which she attends with her yellow umbrella. Harold has no friends, but likes funerals as well. They bump into each other at funerals of people neither of them know. In one of several all-is-not-what-it-seems elements, Harold and Maude, who appear to be most morbid, are in fact the only people in the film who have any sense of life at all.

Harold is primed to come to life, and he meets his guide in Maude. Their friendship mentor-mentee relationship invigorates Harold and sustains Maude. They live wonderfully odd lives. I think more that the truly odd might have something vital to teach me about really living. Because they are not constrained by fear, by embarrassment and shame, but what is "normal" or "respectable." These categories are all fictions at best, prisons at worst. Corporations and other snake-oil salesmen can't sell you plastic surgeries or the "right car" or a soul-less job or celebrity gossip if you are alive, are yourself, and don't give a shit about what other people want you to be. Sorry to swear, but the truth's the truth.

Here's the point: It is the freaks who are free, the freaks who can live beyond fear. It is the freaks who are in touch with what Mary Oliver calls their "wild and precious life." Watch Harold and Maude, or watch it again. See if you are re-invigorated to live wildly, to love, to be yourself--which is no small feat!