"Harold & Maude" A GREAT MOVIE !

I enjoyed "Harold & Maude" very much, and I think Hal Ashby is a great director, I loved his little touches like focusing in on the casket where it says "permalife" and making Harold look like he was eating out the statue/woman, and showing Maude’s concentration camp id, but never discussing it. Also keeping you on the edge, not always knowing exactly when someone has died or not, like Harold's date the actress or when Harold drove the car over the cliff.

Harold seems to use death in his family as a way to receive attention, he seems isolated within his own family even though he has all money could buy him. He is the black sheep in his family and uses acting out suicides as his way to communicate this. I think that Harold is depressed and wants to die; he states that when he was dead he was happy. Yet with Maude he learns that you cannot avoid life with death because there is nothing afterwards you simply die. So Harold learns to live and find ways of playing the emotions of his heart and finding connections with his life and that of others.

Maude loves life and death for her is seen as the inevitable cycle. She has accepted that things are here today and gone tomorrow so try and live life to the fullest and do what makes you happy. Her belief that things disintegrate and then form other life reinforces the way she lives because she states, " the earth is my body, and my head is in the stars". She has a deep physical connection with life but also lets the depth of her thoughts wander. Maude kills herself because though she understands things just flow she does like to have control, having seen many deaths in her life (assuming not so pleasant) she wants to die when she feels great.

Harold's mother does not seem to find great significance in death and does not take it seriously. She is too consumed by her outfits, hair, and social gatherings to look for the spiritual meaning and what it means to want to die. Or she is so afraid of death and its prospects that she tries to fill her life with meaningless activities to ignore it. She is overwhelmed by death and does not know how to relate to her son instead she tries to make of him what he does not want, when he is not ready for them.