94. Morning Has Broken &....

Lyrics

Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word

Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from Heaven
Like the first dewfall on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day

Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word

I am feeling mostly indifferent towards Cat Stevens, but if any song of his should be this high, it should be Father and Son. I linked this song in a rather obvious manner to a movie that's full of Cat Stevens songs (though it features neither Morning Has Broken nor Father and Son), and that's, like this song, ostensibly about hope after bad times. 

The Movie: Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)

I'll give Harold and Maude this: it has the courage of its convictions, and it clings to its ideas all the way to the end. It's just that I think that its convictions/ideas are deeply idiotic. They are also not expressed in a very interesting/fun way. I had not seen this movie before. If I had I probably wouldn't have discussed it now. As that would imply that I would have seen it for the second time. I have no such desire. This is an awful film. 

I love films about mavericks who break the rules, but they usually break these rules because of a greater good, or because they want to achieve something great, or for some other interesting reason Harold and Maude just break the rules because they are a bunch of egoistical assholes who are bored with normal life. They really don't do anything interesting. The movie is full of empty platitudes about how you should embrace life and live it. It literally has an on-the-nose quote such as this: A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They're just backing away from life. Reachout. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can. Go team, go! Give me an "L". Give me an "I". Give me a "V". Give me an "E". L-I-V-E. LIVE! Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room. Much of the dialogue is basically a variation of this. And the movie's idea of 'living the life man' is the same as that of a 10-year old boy. They steal a car and pass through a pay toll without paying! Yipiee! They look at flowers and come to the conclusion that they are all secretly very different! So people should be too! 

This is all pretty boring, but it wouldn't be that problematic if the movie didn't so desperately try to make us care for Harold and Maude, or represent them as good people. And even worse is the fact that it wants to present their behavior as a genuine necessity in an oppressive society. The movie really wants us to believe that they are fighting for freedom and human rights. It doesn't care how low it has to stoop to achieve this. It, for example, makes Maude a holocaust survivor and connects Harold and Maude's current 'fight' to World War 2. And funerals mostly serve here for Harold and Maude's entertainment. There have been many great radical 70's movies that criticized American (western) society for very good reasons. What the movie doesn't get at all is that Harold and Maude can only do what they do here, because they are privileged members of that society they apparently fight. They use this privilege only for their own good and the movie wants to congratulate them for it, and pretend that they are doing revolutionary stuff. The film could have been maybe better if it at least had the guts to make Harold black, or poor. 

Harold is an enormously rich kid, who lives alone with his mother in a huge mansion. He has his own car and can do whatever he wants. He can lead a truly interesting life, but chooses mostly to moan, stage suicides to annoy his mother, and visit funerals. There is no real reason given for his disenchantment, beyond a short scene wherein it is implicated that his mother doesn't love him. It's just that his mother does love him. Harold is just an arrogant kid who ignores this. In every single scene Harold's mum is in, we see her trying to give him a better life to activate him. She tries to find him a girl, get him out of the house in some way. A better movie would absolutely have the right to criticize the mother for this and present her as an over bearing woman, who tries to control her son too much, instead of letting him make his own decisions. But in this case the mother is absolutely right. Harold doesn't do anything but moan around the house. Never has the term deadwood been a more right description of a person. I am deeply uncomfortable with the army, and I think that the abolishment of conscription is one of the most important changes to occur in the 20th century. Yet I completely agreed with Harold's mother and Harold's uncle that enlistment in the army would be good for Harold. He'll do something at least.

Harold and Maude made me appreciate Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite movies even more.  If Gus Van Sant had made Good Will Hunting like Harold and Maude he would have made caricatures out of the characters of Robin Williams, Minnie Driver and Stellan Skarsgard. And he would have posited that Will should not change; that his behavior at the beginning of the movie is right, and that his fucking around with his buddies was some sort of valuable resistance against mainstream society. I love Good Will Hunting much more than most film critics these days. I certainly get why people may dislike that film, but it is honest and fair in how it sees Will Hunting, what it wants for him, and how it wants him to achieve it. That cannot be said for Ashby's treatment of Harold in this movie. And it certainly cannot be said for Ashby's treatment of Maude. She is not a real person, just a collection of stereotypes whose sole function in the movie is to help Harold. Old Hollywood movies have been criticized for using African-Americans like this, in relationship to white people. These stereotypical characters are now called Magical Negroes. You could call Maude a Magical Granny here.    
   

Because of the pretty horrendous screenplay, Harold and Maude would have never been a great film. But it could have quite easily be better than it is. It's quite possible to make a movie about characters exactly like Harold and Maude, and even make the audience care about them. Ashby should have simply let the audience make up its own mind about these characters, He should not have tried at all costs to turn these characters into some sort of redemptive, misunderstood heroes, which they clearly aren't. I would have probably enjoyed the movie much more if Ashby simply had gotten rid of the Cat Stevens soundtrack, All these songs do here is spell out that Harold is a very dear misunderstood boy for whom we should feel deeply. We would feel more for him probably, if the songs didn't tell us this. I think that audiences will feel more sympathy for characters if the movie doesn't force them to.

The movie would have been even better if Ashby simply embraced Harold's vileness, and explored it. I think Bud Cort, who plays Harold, actually gets this. He seems to understand at his core Harold is a deeply troubled young man. Anytime he gets the opportunity to show us the psychopathic traits of Harold, he does this, only to be undercut by the screenplay or Ashby's direction. A good example of this is the scene when, after another staged suicide attempt, Cort breaks the fourth wall and winks to the audience. Or the scene where he flips his mother. The best example of this comes in what was for me the only truly honest scene of the movie. To avoid the army Harold gives a speech, supported by a very theatrical performance in which he talks about how much he enjoys killing in all kinds of different ways, and how much he enjoys seeing blood. The movie presents this ironically. Harold only makes these claims to scare off the officer, so he doesn't have to join the army. But I thought Harold, as written in the movie, is actually the kind of character that genuinely believes these things, and because of Cort's great performance in that scene this is the only scene in the movie that feels genuinely provocative and irreverent.          

I don't even think that the movie should be excused for being made during a time when counter cultural ideas were popular, because I don't think that this movie understood the counter cultural ideas it ostensibly believed in. The politics of this movie are far-right. In fact, I have never seen a movie probably that embodies so much Margaret Thatcher's famous saying "There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and families" For Harold and Maude, there aren't even families, let alone society. The movie has no regard whatsoever for the good of society. I think this is the worst movie I've yet discussed on this blog, even worse than Sweet November. It's full of shit, yet pedantic and arrogant about it. It's just no fun at all.