So I finally watched “Harold and Maude” for the first time ever last night. (It’s one of those cult movies I’ve had on a mental checklist to some day watch for many years.) I liked it, but not quite loved it - I find early 70s movies and all their drab brown earth-tones a little grating to look at for an hour and a half. But Ruth Gordon is certainly fun to watch.
Anyway, what got me was all Harold’s suicide “stunts.” I always had heard that Harold engages in ‘fake’ suicides: staging things to make it look as if he had killed himself. But in watching the movie, it struck me that the some of those ‘fake’ suicides looked like they were meant to be ‘real’, as in magical realism. I don’t see how Harold could have truly held his breath underwater for the length of time he supposedly did; or how he could have ‘faked’ shooting himself when he is clearly depicted loading bullets into the revolver immediately beforehand.
For that matter, how does Maude - a 79 year old woman - survive pluging through a hole in the Sutro Baths floor and falling into the waters below? Fiesty as she is, that would be one hell of a bruising stunt.
So what do you think? Is there a bit of magical realism on display? Does Harold actually kill himself several times, only to inexplicably survive it, or are these just elaborate stunts?
It’s been a while since I saw that movie, so my memory may be faulty. But I certainly don’t recall Maude “pluging” thru a hole in the Sutro Baths. Are we talking about the same movie?
As far as the “magic” acts – you have heard of switching a prop, haven’t you? It’s incredibly easy to do when the camera is not on you. I’m pretty sure Harold planned each one to look real, but used some kind of gimmick. That was the whole point.
You don’t really think he poured gasoline on himself and set it afire, chopped off his real hand, or jumped off the chair without some kind of neck protector? Did you see the girl who caught on showing, on camera, that the blade in the knife was retractable, before she tried the same Hara-Kiri stunt?
Maude falls through the hole during the confrontation with Harold’s uncle, when they are sabotaging his mother’s plans to send him to military academy. Harold, pretending to be a psychopath, “assaults” Maude who is carrying a ‘stop the war’ sign. The scene ends with her goings “shoop” down what looks like a chute in the ground, and disappearing. The scene ends with Harold and his horrified uncle staring at the hole.
Yes, I am aware that there is such a thing as sleight of hand, but my point is that the movie itself does not demonstrate that Harold is pulling a fake-out. We don’t see, for example, Harold post-hanging, remove his suitcoat and reveal that a harness was holding him up, not the noose (sort of like Wynona Ryder in “Heathers” did), nor do we see Harold eventually stick his head out of the pool and gasp for breath.
In fact, we do get a shot of Harold floating face-down in the pool and he is not depicted as holding his breath. He is also very clearly shown loading all the cylinders of his revolver with bullets (and nothing indicates these are blanks) before shooting himself. That’s what led me to think that these were supposed to be - in the context of the moie - ‘real’ suicide attempts that Harold carried out, but inexplicably survived.
Chopping off his arm indeed looked fake, but it wasn’t clear to me that that was intended to look fake, or was just a film-making fail.
Here’s the scene in which Maude plunges through the hole. the youtube video cuts out before it actually happens, but in the very last shot you can clearly see the hole in the ground she tumbles eventually tumbled through.
Yeah, I always took it like the OP, although I never thought to apply the ‘magical realism’ label to it.
We’re just supposed to take it as it’s presented. He kills himself, but he doesn’t. Like the road runner being fine in the next scene, or Daffy Duck having his face blown off.
I always assumed that they’re supposed to be tricks. Not showing how he pulls them off is a writers cheat to show that Harold is very clever, without the writer having to be clever enough to figure out how the trick works himself.
I don’t see how the story holds together if it’s based on magical realism. The whole point is that Harold hates his mother, is fixated on the idea of death, and routinely acts out fake suicides to drive his mother nuts. It’s only Maude’s death that leads him to send his jag-hearse over the cliff and discover life. Magically surviving real suicides kinda ruins the whole idea.
Now you’ve done it – I’m going to have to watch it again to see that scene.
I always thought it obvious that, since he survived each “attempt” – which fooled the audience, too, at least at first – that he was having fun, not trying to actually kill himself. It would have destroyed the illusion if the movie had shown, that early, how he was going to survive.
By that time, the audience was in on the joke, and was beginning to anticipate a trick, IMHO.
I would argue that it being magical realism actually does work because of the situation you describe - Harold’s chief problem is that he is viewed by his mother and the other adults in the story as extensions of themselves. They don’t even consider that he is an autonomous individual who may have opinions or thoughts outside what they impose upon him. Harold can’t end his own life because he has no life of his own to end. It’s only after meeting and becoming friends (and more) that Harold breaks away from the controlling influence of his mother, uncle, psychiatrist and priest.
That’s the way I saw it. I actually did wonder about the swimming pool scene, but just shrugged it off as dramatic license.
The movie was able to compress time and make scene cuts that a kid in real life can’t do, but the intent of the scenes, as I saw it, was that he was just coming up with clever special effects to simulate suicides. A nascent stunt coordinator! Kid’s got a future!
The book author of Harold & Maude was Colin Higgins.
Ca. 1971, I was reading a book by Higgins, whose title I cannot find with a quick search. It was a novel about a bunch of misfits, not unlike One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who, when called to perform, used their special talents to advantage.
The legless guy was able to fit in small spaces. The deaf guy was immune to loud noises. The blind guy had super-acute hearing. Each “disability” had a corresponding “talent” under certain circumstances. I’m probably making the details up, but you get the picture.
I told my then-girlfriend about the clever story, and she said, “That’s Colin Higgins…you gotta see Harold and Maude!”
Right. If this were magic realism, then the psychiatrist would be saying, “How many times have you killed yourself.” He would not be using the term perform. Magic realism isn’t about “tricking” the audience.
It was quite clearly shown in the movie that Harold owned a simple scuba-like apparatus that allowed him to appear to float face down in the pool without drowning. He only removed it for the shot from under the water. Ditto Maude down the hole. She explicitly mentioned it afterwards.
This guy was prepared. The only one that involved significant trickery would have been the self-immolation one.
Fun fact: Bud Cort, G. Wood (the shrink) and Tom Skerritt (the motorcycle cop) were all in the MASH movie the previous year. And Wood would later appear on the MASH TV show several times. But I repeat myself.
Just for comparison, an example of magical realism in movies might be the three girls who sing as an unseen chorus in the 1986 version of Little Shop of Horrors. We see them as ordinary schoolgirls once, but more often in showgirl costumes on rooftops, witnessing things that no one could have witnessed.
It’s a lovely surreal touch! (I always wonder, in the play version where Audrey II takes over the world, if they got taken over, or if they were the last people left undevoured.)
If I recall correctly, we can still see his “body” burning just outside the window when he walks into the foreground, perfectly fine. It never occurred to me that these were anything but tricks.