Harold and Maude: A personal barometer

I’m in love with Maude again.

Do people still know about ‘Harold and Maude‘? I hope so. It’s a movie that I come back to every once in a while. Let me give you the rundown.

Harold is a dour and lugubrious young man. If he were around today, he’d be a goth or some kind of proto-emo, but in his time his gloom didn’t have the benefit of a social group. He’s obsessed with death. He performs elaborate mock suicides to alarm his domineering mother, and he attends funerals for fun.

At one such funeral he meets Maude, a sprightly and unconventional near-octogenarian, and the two form an unlikely friendship. She loves funerals, too, not because she treasures death, but because death is a part of life, which she also treasures. Yet she doesn’t cling to life — or indeed anything. When Harold gives her a keepsake, she throws it into the river (“So I’ll always know where it is,” she says). She blithely (and somehow innocently) steals cars if she needs a lift, and digs up a public tree to replant in the forest. She ‘replants’ Harold, too, helping him to grow outside of his sterile and affluent home. She’s a nurturer, a revolutionary, an artist at living.

I’ve found that Maude is a barometer for where I am in my life. At times, I’ve thought she’s great — a free spirit who has some wonderful insights about how to live. At other times, her character has grated on me — she’s a silly person who ought to know better. And I’ve noticed that the times when I’ve been least able to tolerate Maude are the times when I’ve been the most uptight, the most ‘churchy’. It’s all very well, I’ve thought, for her to talk about life and death and the cosmic dance, but she doesn’t have a knowledge of the Gospel! Or: She has insights about life, but seems so unserious about living. Or: That’s the kind of thing people get over after their teens. Or even: New age hippy fruit basket. And other such unkind things, depending on how eager I was to conform to adult conventions, which Maude of course isn’t.

Now I think she’s great again. She’s successfully carved out a meaning to her life, which is, after all, the big business of one’s life. And while her way of being seems unusual and contradictory, it’s a way that wouldn’t occur to most people, and I respect that. So I guess that means I’m less uptight, and more of a free spirit myself. Having deconverted from a religion (and thereby defying a major convention in my former society), I can now see the value in colouring outside the lines, as Maude does. As the soundtrack says, there’s a million ways to be. You know that there are.