A Little Revolution

It's been more than a year that I've neglected Serenity Now, and with good reason; the majority of my artistic life has been spent making progress on the most ambitious creative project of my life so far, a novel called Stuart Delaney.  Now that I've managed to make it a quarter of the way through that literary behemoth, I felt like there was a little room to breathe and take a day or two to share some of the thoughts that have drifted through my mind since the recent Criterion blu-ray release of the 1971 dark comedy and downright epically unassuming cinematic treasure Harold and Maude, which is more than a little apropos since many of its themes run through my own opus, not the least of which include a wayward vocational vector, rejection of social mores, and youthful disillusionment.

While initially a flop at the box office, like so many cult classics, the film gained its following over a period of years, and as such, came to the attention of my family in that first decade following its release, when the VHS recorder was first becoming a household appliance.  And in fact, I believe our first "copy" was taken directly from a TV broadcast, commercials and all, until it became more commonplace to own original home video releases on VHS, at which point, a Paramount Home Video copy of Harold and Maude graced our shelf for many years.  Now, I've seen this movie at least 25 times in my life, mostly as a teenager, especially because my older brother Anthony had such an abiding admiration for it.  I imagine it appealed to his dry sense of humor, in addition to his trenchant political sensibilities.  Needless to say, the film has an inescapable tone of homage to the cultural disillusionment of Vietnam-era liberalism.  However, while it would certainly have been easy for writer Colin Higgins and director Hal Ashby to wax political, they manage to avoid the tritely activist in this life-embracing little comedy, which tells the story of Harold Chasen, a young man on the verge of choosing a life path, but dwelling instead on his obsession with death and striving to lather his decadent, overbearing mother in humiliation through his several increasingly elaborate suicides.  These endeavors come to a screeching halt, however, when he finds himself drawn into an unlikely romance with a 79-year-old woman named Maude, played with wonderful caprice by Ruth Gordon at the height of her golden charm.  In many ways, the most vivacious character in the film, Maude, and in particular Gordon's portrayal, is a perfect example of what's come to be known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a stock character of a somewhat shallow, bubbly, and eccentric female lead whose sole purpose is to propel the broodingly soulful young male lead to grow up and face the mysteries of life.  Classic examples in film include Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's and, even further back, the character Susan Vance played by Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby.  More recent examples include the characters portrayed by Kirsten Dunst, Natalie Portman, and Zooey Deschanel in Elizabethtown, Garden State, and (500) Days of Summer, respectively.

Without giving too much away for those who've not seen the film, its quality lies primarily in allowing you to feel the quirky desperation of Harold's probing identity, something to which just about anyone might relate.  And amid this understated charm of youthful and oddly-comical angst, the inimitable Cat Stevens provides perhaps the most uplifting soundtrack ever to carry a film.  In fact, the songs that accompany the narrative may be, I believe, single-handedly responsible for revealing the nuances of its ironic character and its degree of accessibility as a masterpiece of unresolved self-awareness.

Upon the recent home video release by Criterion, seeing the film with a fresh set of eyes, and presented in a luminous new digital transfer to boot, I was left with renewed reverence for the existential reflections it inspired, and continues to inspire.  For me, the film doesn't solve any mysteries of life, or even come close to providing answers to age-old riddles.  Those strides and revelations are different for each of us, it seems, and mine didn't crystallize till the cauldron of disappointment came along to test and further hew my Christian faith at the "tender" age of 26.  To a certain extent, I've done quite a bit of growing up since my brother and I first discovered Harold and Maude as adolescents, and yet something of that romantic isolationist yearning still moves me occasionally to step forward in a vigilant, and occasionally daft, effort to reinvent myself, leave behind the shackles of a stagnant identity, and embrace a wiser and better sense of purpose and being.  In many ways, this constitutes a simple recommitment to whatever sent you spirited and spiraling as a young adult toward some imagined goal or self-paragon, including the realization, startling as it is to many young people, that the tumult of adolescence never ends, but that you simply learn to live with the noise, and do your best not to be diverted from those goals that defined you in the first place, nor prevented from actualizing new ones in light of what you learn and gain in the intervening years between childhood and death.  As a wise man once said, a little revolution every now and then is a healthy thing.  For me, life still feels like a great deal to take on, a great deal to absorb and process.  But maturity began to a large extent with a heartache I earned at 26, the significance of that journey affirmed by Harold's plight and brought vividly to life—or so I should hope—in what I now endeavor to craft as a writer.  Okay.  Back to work.