A Million Things: The Uncertain Eternities in Harold and Maude

(This essay is best read while listening to the soundtrack of the film Harold and Maude.)

As a kid I could never quite explain what it was I liked about the arts. I still find it difficult, but at least I’m able to point to the things living a life with art has given me, least of all something I feel I can belong to. At first all I knew was that I loved painting, the feeling of creating something with my hands. Later I loved books, slowly beginning to create my own stories, pulling life from thin air and pitting it against paper. I was miserable at playing an instrument, but I attended concerts and consumed albums rapidly. However, before taking a film studies course my senior year, I had never fallen in love with a movie.

I had made movies before, but only as assignments. It’s difficult for me to conceptualize a whole film from start to finish - choosing shots, taking weeks to edit, re-filming, and re-editing. The more I learned, the more I found how delicate creating a film can be. It becomes an art the same way musical composition is art, the same way writing is art, using a new medium to arrange a multitude of parts into something whole.

I always found it relatively easy to draw meaning from individual images. This became especially true once I delved into contemporary art, which enchanted me not only because of its stark contrast to the classics I grew up with, but also because of the freedom placed in the hands of the viewer. I found that I liked art that encouraged me to create my own meaning and draw my own conclusions. To me, the act of being viscerally involved with the art I created was nothing short of a revolution. Dating an aspiring art history major during my sophomore year only further opened my eyes when it came to looking at the world artistically, and I enjoyed not only my own beauty but seeing beauty in the same things she did. I felt connected to her in a way I’ve never felt connected to another human being, trying to think of what she might think if she was looking at the same thing I was. I projected her into my life like an installation piece where the figures walk but never touch, passing through each other endlessly. Like ghosts. Like a hand rippling through water.

It was only later that I decided to study English. Looking at how different narratives were presented was already a focal point of my day, the art of it, the rightness, convincing me of my own need to feel like I belonged. Soon, studying film was just another way at looking at that narrative. That delicate thing unfolding just as beautifully as an Austen novel or my favorite Romantic poetry.

You see, 93% of all communication is nonverbal. As a writer and an artist I know this, I’ve known this, and oftentimes I still struggle with finding more competent methods of communication. To me, cinema has the most potential of bridging that 93%. A lot of it has to do with cinematography (you’d be amazed at how much you see and understand before you’ve realized you understood it), but so much more of it has to do with everything else. Making a film is undoubtedly painstaking. As a writer I tend to make words and allow readers to fill in the gaps, imagining their own people, their own places, creating sense rather than scene. As an artist I realize that film operates under different parameters. Film is art coupled with the fact that every object in frame is intentional, the dialogue filled with real people, speaking real voices and emphasizing tangible, visible emotions. As an audience member you should be able to feel that, breathe that, be that.

Even after the course has ended I still find myself going back to visit my professor from time to time. He recommends me things, we continue our months-long conversation about dreams, he brings tea, we talk for hours. Recently he lent me a DVD version of the 1971 cult classic Harold and Maude, telling me I reminded him of Harold. Curious, I took it home and watched it in my basement, curled up in the corner of the L shaped sofa as the windows went from light to dark.

The opening scene is designed to shock. Two feet descending the staircase, walking across the hardwood, rhythmically tapping. Two small hands put on a record and Cat Stevens begins to fill the room. Trying once or twice, Harold strikes a match before gently lighting candles. He ghosts his breath over the flame and the light transforms into smoke. The music is still playing up until the point when Harold climbs onto a stool and tips the stool over with a small crash, leaving his feet hanging scarcely an inch above the floor. This is when the music stops. The immediate lack of noise allows all the other noises to crowd in, attempting to fill the silence. The ceiling creaks. The door opens.

MAUDE: A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They're just backing away from life.

Over the course of the film, Harold fakes his death eight times and tells his psychiatrist there have been a dozen other staged times we’ll never see. One shot shows Harold facedown in his family’s swimming pool while his mother calmly climbs in to swim laps. A cheery score plays Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Just like everything about Harold, it’s morbidly ironic. It’s at this point that I remember thinking: maybe he’s trying to remind us that death exists all around us. Maybe just like the rest of us, he’s trying not to be so afraid.

All of this happens before Harold meets Maude. Harold visits funerals because he likes the mourning. Maude visits funerals because she likes to celebrate the life. The match and the flame. Harold is awestruck by Maude, immediately filled with a strange and impulsive desire to know her. He follows her where he wouldn’t follow anyone else, devoting time that could be spent dying trying to get to know the living. Maude drives like a thief, and she is one. She transplants trees from the city to their homes in the forest. She makes found art, and her bright, carefree demeanor becomes juxtaposed clearly against Harold’s inexplicable desire to die.

What I appreciate about Maude is that she never asks Harold to stop dying. Instead, she asks him to learn how to play an instrument. Harold chooses the banjo. They visit parks and pastures together. Harold makes Maude a plastic medallion at the county fair inscribed with the words Harold Loves Maude. Maude accepts it happily before tossing the medallion far out into the marina.

MAUDE: I should like to change into a sunflower most of all. They're so tall and simple. And you Harold, what flower would you like to be?

HAROLD: I don't know. Just one of those.

HAROLD gestures to a field of wild daisies.

MAUDE: Why do you say that?

HAROLD: Because they're all alike.

MAUDE: Ooh, but they're not. Look. See, some are smaller, some are fatter, some grow to the left, some to the right, some even have lost some petals. All kinds of observable differences. You see, Harold, I feel that much of the world's sorrow comes from people who are this,  yet allow themselves be treated as that.

We see the field of daisies again. The camera cuts to a field of gravestones, the white stones all uniform. A sea of daisies set against a city for the dead.

This is why Harold falls in love with Maude, and why, in the end, he clings so desperately to her life despite his own ironic hobby and her understandable wish to control not only the general circumstances of her life, but the circumstances of her final act of living. Maude wrested the whole of the world in her own two hands. Harold drew from her a kind of strength he never knew he had. He found things in her that he never knew he wanted. The movie almost ends as a tragedy, and if not for the final scene I’m certain I would have walked away thinking: if only he had let her go the way she wanted. They had so much time, and Harold wasted it worrying.

No part of the movie more perfectly encapsulates the joys, sorrows, and lessons that Harold and Maude learn than Maude’s scratchy voice, singing Cat Stevens’ lyrics to the song "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out." It begins like this:

Well, if you want to sing out, sing out And if you want to be free, be free 'Cause there's a million things to be You know that there are

And if you want to live high, live high And if you want to live low, live low 'Cause there's a million ways to go You know that there are

There are so many things I’ve grown to love about this song, least of all the idea of a million things. There are times in life where everything seems to narrow down into finite set of subsequent points. At the moment mine seems fairly decided, and to say that I’ve been chafing under the finality of those decisions and the realizations that go with them would be a severe understatement.

I am going to graduate from high school. I am going to go to college. I will most likely be in debt for many, many years, but hopefully I’ll find a way to make a living doing something I enjoy and with people I enjoy living with. I will grow older. The list goes on. This will continue until eventually I die and someone is forced to make arrangements for my body. There is little else to fill in the gaps that exist between living and dying. The future is either uncertain or too certain to think about.

PSYCHIATRIST: Oh. Well, how do you spend your day?

HAROLD: You mean, when I'm not working on a...

PSYCHIATRIST: Yes. What kind of things do you do?

Cranes, auto smashers, bulldozers, mountains of rusting cars, and other junk. A very noisy and very fast cut. HAROLD looks on in rapture.

PSYCHIATRIST: I see. Junkyards. What is the fascination there?

HAROLD: I don't know.

PSYCHIATRIST:  Is it the machines? The noise? The people?

HAROLD: No. It's the junk. I like to look at junk.

PSYCHIATRIST: What else do you like?

A giant steel ball crashes into a building. We watch it fall noisily into dust and rubble.

I think there are certain parts of life we’re all taught to idealize, everything from the sun shining to the next great adventure. I’m not saying there aren’t still experiences to be had, or that joy doesn’t exist - but as eclectic as life is, we can always draw a line back from A to B, moment to moment, and as I look forward I recognize that many of these future moments will be unbearably heartbreaking. People will leave unexpectedly. I will move to different cities. Life will change me and the people I care about. In no time at all my life has the possibility to be drastically different. I am still trying to decide whether this is a blessing or a curse.

But even in this sort of existential half-despair, I find that only the people I make a living with, my coworkers, my friends, and my family, are the people who make both menial and essential tasks worth doing. I wash my hair for the first time this week because I know I’ll have work the next day. I eat for the first time all day because I watch a movie one of my teachers lent me. I drink water because I remember that my father doesn’t. I look forward to my birthday for the first time in years because I have people I want to share it with. And even then, these people will leave me, are leaving, or will be left by me. Nothing is permanent.

I haven’t exactly been dealing with the uglier part of this realization well. The longer I sit with it the easier it becomes to vocalize, but acknowledgement is still four steps away from acceptance. Being alone isn’t romantic, it isn’t comforting, and it isn’t making living with myself any easier - let alone relearning how to live with others.

But I also have a desire to know people, to live my life with them, and enjoy growing old. Knowing that the people I love now may not be the ones I end up growing old with leaves my heart longing, but if I can grow to enjoy these people while I have them then maybe my grief will be short, my days can be longer, and the people I love will live on in me long after we have left each other.

I say this because every once in awhile I meet someone who reminds me that life is full of possibilities. They’re my Maudes. I meet them in the oddest places, but I always find myself grateful for the chance to know them, even for the barest of seconds. They’re my million things. Even as these people leave and I move away from them in turn, the least I can do is honor their memories by embodying the traits I love so much about them and living the ways they’ve taught me to live.

MAUDE: The earth is my body; my head is in the stars.Who said that, Harold?

HAROLD: I don't know.

MAUDE: Well, I suppose I did, then.

One day maybe someone lost will look at me the same I’ve looked at Reed, Braden, Ciana, Emma, Allison, Dalton, Isabella, Mallory, Gwen, Daisjah, Inaya, Pem, Melisa, Perry, Jennifer, Derek, Liv, Matt, Alia, Heather, Allie, Jason, Ethan, Henry, AJ, Shelbi, Kelly, Jimmy, and so many others. We all experience ecstasy, pain, suffering, love, and loss, but on some level I think the most important thing is that we experience those things together. We are the reason we experience all those things, why we want to experience all those things, and I could never deny the ways these people have enhanced my life.

Many other people have left me, and I have left them. But at the same time, my life continues to intersect with the lives of others. Even if I remain the only constant, I have never found reaching out for others to be in vain. I love these people, sometimes more than I have ever loved myself, and in them I find every million thing, every reason to live, and every motivation to keep on living.

My mother plays me her favorite songs. So does Braden. And Emma. And Isabella. Three of us see a movie at midnight and eat hash browns at 2 AM. After a day I have never wanted to live, Gwen calls me and takes me out to dinner. Another night she crawls into my bed and falls asleep. Another night I fall asleep next to her. Reed tells me how he and his boyfriend are going to start keeping bees. Dalton paints slowly and methodically and I am glad to know him, because for half an hour that anxious feeling dissipates.

I am living with them. Because of them. Because of them.