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+--- Thread: Harold & Maude (/showthread.php?tid=3190)
Harold & Maude - Ashley - 07-30-2018
Edited 7/31: tl/dr is that this thread is a blatant honeypot because I was paranoid about an abnormal number of views on a different fun silly thread I posted. The issue has been resolved and it's still a review of a movie, but it's a movie about suicide that was kind of a cult favourite in the 1970s so you might want to skip it. Scroll down if you're still interested.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_and_Maude
I'm not sure if it's an existentialism thing or an aging thing but this movie is why my approximate age is a relevant piece of info that I wanted to put in my profile.
This was a very influential movie for me and many of my agemates during our teens. A lot of us wanted to grow up to be Maude, and not just for the "xtreme cougar" aspect of it, either, since the movie came out long before the book "How Stella got her Groove Back", which started the whole "cougar" thing in the first place.
It was only the last time I watched it that I saw Ruth Gordon for what she actually was during the filming: not some super-cool well-preserved 79 year old who could still be sexy in an odd, existential sort of way but an actress several years my junior doing the best she could with the tools she had available to play a part she couldn't possibly understand well enough to pull off convincingly.
In other words, a caricature. A symbol. An embodiment of an idea that may be of questionable taste to post on a chronic suicide support forum, but which shouldn't make me feel suicidal any more than Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty or any other artist's representation of political entities or concepts such as "freedom".
I am much older than Ruth Gordon was when she created the character of Maude, but I still feel frozen in time as Harold, unheard, unloved, unnoticed, and completely powerless to determine the course of my own life.
Maude isn't going to show up and rescue me. I'm going to have to push that hearse over the cliff myself if I want to dance off into the sun playing a banjo, aren't I?
Anyway, this is a public post. If a guest takes offense at a movie review on a peer support forum for people who are feeling glum enough to not want to take it out on their close friends, family members, coworkers, and fellow posters on hobby, leisure, and/or educational and political discussion fora, then I think they probably should reconsider the way they are using the internet.