Harold and Maude and the Theatre of the Absurd
Matthew Melia
Introduction: The Theatre of the Absurd in the US
The first performance of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, in the USA, took place at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in South Florida, 1956 – one year after the first production of Jean Genet’s play The Maids at the Tempo playhouse in New York. It was was directed by Alan Schneider, the pioneer of Beckett’s work in the US. He would go on to become the writers trusted interpreter there.i These two productions marked the arrival of the Theatre of the Absurd in America, opening the door to the experimental, existential (post) modernist theatre of the European post war avant garde and to a set of distinct theatrical ‘absurdist’ visions.
US audiences, however, where unprepared for the play’s impact, Rocio Paola Yaffar reflects on how the play was billed as ‘the laugh hit of two continents’ with the result that the first performance saw a large number of number of walkouts – demonstrating a set of conflicting cultural attitudes to comedy, one of which had been informed by the experience of war, resistance and occupation.ii While most Theatre of the Absurd productions in the US ran off-Broadway, playing to niche audiences they had limited success. Jean Genet’s 1958 play The Blacks,iii however, was a notable success opening at the St Mark’s Theatre in New York 1961 and becoming the longest running off-Broadway production of the decade (and chiming with the cultural climate of the emerging Civil rights movement) closing in 1964 – the exception that proves the rule. It was the second of Genet’s plays to be performed in Manhattan after The Balcony ran (in a truncated form) at the Circle in the Square Theatre (directed by Jose Quintero) from March 1960 to December 1961.
Image: https://www.betweenthecovers.com/pages/books/343514/samuel-beckett/program-for-waiting-for-godot
Image: https://www.abaa.org/book/1285194483
The title ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ was coined by the writer and critic Martin Esslin in 1960, four years after its introduction in America. Esslin wrote in the Tulane Drama Review that
“The Theatre of the Absurd shows the world as an incomprehensible place. The spectators see the happenings on the stage entirely from the outside, without ever understanding the full meaning of these strange patterns of events, as newly arrived visitors might watch life in a country of which they have not yet mastered the language […] If the dialogue in these plays consists of meaningless cliches and the mechanical, circular repetition of stereotyped phrases-how many meaningless cliches and stereotyped phrases do we use in our day-to-day conversation? If the characters change their personality halfway through the action, how consistent and truly integrated are the people we meet in our real life? And if people in these plays appear as mere marionettes, helpless puppets without any will of their own, passively at the mercy of blind fate and meaningless circumstance, do we, in fact, in our overorganized world, still possess any genuine initiative or power to decide our own destiny? The spectators of the Theatre of the Absurd are thus confronted with a grotesquely heightened picture of their own world: a world without faith, meaning, and genuine freedom of will. In this sense, the Theatre of the Absurd is the true theatre of our time”.iv
His 1961 book, The Theatre of the Absurd, was the first critical text to engage fully with a new theatrical post war European zeitgeist: a form of theatre that responded to the conditions, traumas and lived experiences of the Second World War, a ‘Total war’; and which emerged out of a leftist, post war Parisian intellectual milieu. Esslin’s text was the first to canonise a set of writers who included Genet, Harold Pinter, Antonin Artaud, the American playwright Edward Albee, the Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco and, leading the charge, the Francophile Irish writer and dramatist Samuel Beckett (who had spent part of the war working for a French resistance cell and the remainder in hiding in the South during which time he began work on Waiting for Godot). Esslin is careful to stipulate however that this was not a ‘movement’ unified by a shared aesthetic or philosophical vision but a set of writers responding to the collective and individual experience of war and its aftermath (as I have explored elsewhere, the violent catharsis of the liberation of France underscores the work of writers like Beckett, Genet and Artaud).v
The Theatre of the Absurd challenged bourgeois pre-conceptions of narrative theatre in favour of abstraction, anti-narrative and existential isolation – the term absurd extending out-with its original definition to encompass the total breakdown of reason, and Enlightenment values in the 20th Century, negotiating its historical traumas.
However, in his 2006 thesis, Christopher Hilton asserts that the European Theatre of the Absurd ultimately never really “caught hold” in the US because of “cultural difference”. American post war theatre was increasingly attached to a left wing, realist agenda exemplified most prominently by the work of the playwright Arthur Miller rather, than to European surrealist and existential abstraction. He notes,
While the European and American theatres represent two distinct schools of drama, their intentions after World War II are essentially the same, namely the recognition of the structures that imprison the individual. While Europe produced well known absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Jean Genet and Eugene Ionesco, critics believed that America wrestled with dramatic, realist theatre, producing playwrights like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill.
One key reason that it failed to take hold was, of course, that the Theatre of the Absurd spoke directly to the traumatic ‘total’ European experience of the second world war and its political, cultural and lived reality and legacy. But that is not to say that American audiences did not find any meaning in these dramatic works, indeed certain demographics found their own meaning and absurd conditions of existence reflected back at them – particularly as from the late 1950s through to the 1970s American society became politically, philosophically and culturally divided around both Vietnam and the issue of Civil Rights.
It was through differing approaches to the representation of the imprisoned individual, imprisoning social systemsvi and the experience of imprisonment that these two distinct modes of theatre overlap. They overlap directly in the 1957 production of Waiting for Godot, by the San Francisco Actors Workshop, which took place in San Quentin Prison and was directed by Herbert Blau. The performance took place in front of 1400 prisoners whose own experience of incarceration resonated with that of Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon and their interminable wait for the elusive Godot on a barren heath, unable to ever leave, and the absurd, cruel and ultimately inverted master and servant relationship of Pozzo and Lucky; as well as in the play’s own rumination on the Sisyphean and existential task of waiting and of the circularity of time.vii The play was also staged in the prison dining room, a space once used for executing prisoners by hanging:
Those who were not allowed out of their cells listened to it over loudspeakers, or heard about it from their fellow cellmates […] In the words of Rick Cluchey, one of the inmates who heard the play from his cell, it ‘caused [a] stirring’; ‘My cellmate returned [and] told glowing stories’. He has said that, ‘The thing that everyone in San Quentin understood about Beckett, while the rest of the world had trouble catching up, was what it meant to be in the face of it’.viii
In a 1962 article for the New York Times, ‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One?’ Edward Albee, author of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the US playwright most associated with the Theatre of the Absurd (thanks largely to Martin Esslin’s inclusion of him in his seminal study) wrote
A theatre person of my acquaintance–a man whose judgement must be respected, though more for the infallibility of his intuition than for his reasoning–remarked just the other week, “The Theatre of the Absurd has had it; it’s on its way out; it’s through.” […] Now this, on the surface of it, seems to be a pretty funny attitude to be taking toward a theatre movement which has, only in the past couple of years, been impressing itself on the American public consciousness. Or is it? Must we judge that a theatre of such plays as Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Jean Genet’s “The Balcony” (both long, long runners off-Broadway) and Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”–which, albeit in a hoked-up production, had a substantial season on Broadway–has been judged by the theatre public and found wanting?
He continues
“And shall we have to assume that The Theatre of the Absurd Repertory Company, currently playing at New York’s off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre–presenting works by Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Arrabal, Jack Richardson, Kenneth Koch and myself–being the first such collective representation of the movement in the United States, is also a kind of farewell to the movement? “
Albee therefore challenges the accepted narrative that the Theatre of the Absurd’s American experiment had failed and was over before it had really begun and that by 1962 it was running out of steam. Rather it was thriving off-Broadway and in fact was permeating the cultural consciousness of the era.
So to what extent then did the philosophical conditions and mechanics of the absurd seep into into wider American culture and, especially, into cinema? In this chapter I will consider how Hal Ashby’s 1971 film comedy Harold and Maude, it may be argued, may not only to be seen to be an absurdist text, overlap thematically and philosophically with The Theatre of the absurd – especially with the work of Samuel Beckett but perhaps the film text that is most demonstrative of the wider cultural influence of the absurd. I will argue, as well, that in Ashby’s depiction of the eponymous Harold (Bud Cort) and Maude (Ruth Gordon) that the film anticipates modern and contemporary critical debate around the philosophy of the Theatre of the absurd.
The Theatre of the Absurd and American Film Culture
In literature, American writers and poets of the 1950s had already begun to express and articulate similar post war existential angst and absurdist experience. JD Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye (1951) offers, perhaps, the pre-eminent depiction of post war dissolute and affluent youth in Holden Caulfield’s picaresque and existential journey through the urban landscape of Manhattan. He Wei filters a discussion of Salinger’s novel through the lens of Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, an existential ur-Text and framework for understanding this mode of theatre ( an argument and critical and philosophical framework developed by Esslin).ix Furthermore Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956) manifests as an Artaudian (a la the founder of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud) scream for the post war, counterculture generation.x Both are indicative of a move into a new era of American modernism, already signalled in painting by Abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko (himself an Eastern European immigrant from Latvia). Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye offers useful thematic comparison with Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971), the subject of this discussion, in their mutual presentation of the characters Holden Caudfield and Harold Parker Chasen – two young white men who are isolated and adrift at least in part via their lived economic and social privilege and inability to connect with it.
Turning now to film, as I have discussed elsewhere, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s existential ‘Acid Western’ El Topo (1971), also indicates a seepage of the European absurd into American film culture. It was informed by his own theatrical experience in Europe after World War II on the fringes of the Theatre of the Absurd and by his experience of working with the (Spanish) absurdist playwright Fernando Arrabal but also by his time spent on the fringes of the ‘movement’ amongst the post war Parisian left wing intellectual and cultural milieu of the early 1950s. El Topo collapses together the countercultural world of the post war European Avant Garde with modes of American and European Genre cinema (specifically the Western) incorporating within its iconography a range of directly quoted Beckettian imagery. The film, which opened at the Elgin theatre in New York in 1971, went on to define the terms ‘cult film’ and ‘midnight movie , running from December 1970 to June 1971.
This was however a cinema on the fringes or as Jeffrey Sconce termed it ‘Paracinema’: a cinema on the margins (and comparable to the off-Broadway position of the Theatre of the Absurd in the US). So what of the presence of the absurd in the newly emerging post-studio mainstream? The mid to late 1950s saw a drawing to an end of the dominance of the studios and the ‘genius of the system’ (to quote Andrew Bazin), and the emergence of a new realist ‘auteur’ driven cinema. This was a period in film history which was in part defined by the emergence of left leaning film makers and screenwriters writers like Nicholas Ray and Dalton Trumbo whose work and historical lived experience is bound to the threat of McCarthyism, HUAC and the Hollywood blacklist. This was to be a new cinematic world of existentially isolated characters, out of time and out of place such as that of Kirk Douglas’s tragic cowboy, Jack Burns, in the revisionist Western, Lonely Are The Brave [David Miller, 1962].
This cinematic milieu would intersect with the milieu of the world of absurdist theatre perhaps most directly in the collaboration between director-in-exile Joseph Losey (who had fled the blacklist to work in the UK) and British playwright Harold Pinter. It is important to note here that both Ray and Losey made the transition from radical left-wing radical theatre to film and Losey’s working partnership with Pinter (Losey had come to work in the UK to escape the communist witch hunts) on films such as The Servant (1963); Accident (1967) and The Go Between (1971) provide a both meeting between these two apparently distinct (transatlantic) theatrical and cinematic worlds as well as a shared political vision and pre-occupation with leftist class politics.xi
The New Hollywood or American New Wave would evolve from the end of the 1950s over the next decade, providing a cinematic landscape of isolated, existential figures. The American New Wave cinema, or as Robert Kolker has described it, the ‘Cinema of Loneliness’xii nevertheless offered a range of iconic and sometimes comic ‘absurdist’ images and iconography: Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) finding isolated solace at the bottom of a swimming pool dressed in his graduation present: a set of scuba gear from his overbearing parents, or (less comically) ‘God’s lonely man’ – the isolated and traumatised Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver (Scorcese, 1976) . Films such as these shared similar thematic and philosophical concerns despite the disparity in their aesthetics. Just as Martin Esslin notes of the Theatre of the Absurd, the Hollywood New Wave cannot be considered a single ‘movement’ unified by a shared aesthetic vision, rather differently authored (or ‘auteur’d’) and individual filmic expressions all engaging with a contemporary era of isolating historical change and experience.
Kolker’s reference to a cinema of loneliness is, of course, not simply a reference to films which deal with existentially isolated characters but to a range of directors (e.g. Robert Altman or Stanley Kubrick) or “Film makers of imagination” who due to the collapse of the studio system no longer had “a centralized community of administrators and craftsmen who can be drawn upon to support them from production to production” (REF) and who “were able to take brief advantage of the transitional state of the studios, using their talents in critical, self conscious ways, examining the assumptions and forms of commercial and narrative cinema” (IBID). It was of coursed the milieu out of which Hal Ashby emerged, as well as the director most associated with the New Wave comedy, Woody Allen whose own work is outwardly informed my the writing and art of European modernism and post modernism as well as demonstrating a compulsion towards the early 20th century Mittel-European milieu of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In his discussion of the new wave of ‘Dark’ American film comedy from the early 1960s Wes D. Gehring has noted the pervasive presence of Samuel Beckett in the work of his chosen directors, not least in both Arthur Penn and Mike Nicols. He notes that ‘Penn, like Nicols was a fan of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd and recognised that life is a bittersweet blend of buffoonery and gallows humour’.xiii However, it is not my intention to suggest that Ashby’s film Harold and Maude was a direct response to Beckett’s work or that it was directly inspired by its directors experience of viewing the work of the playwright (research, as yet, has not uncovered such a direct connection). Beckett’s name does not crop up in any contemporary critical review of the film, nor is he mentioned by Ashby (or screenwriter Colin Higgins) in any interview surrounding the film.
Beckett however was, himself, making in-roads into American film during the period. Anthony Paraskeva has written in detail in his book Samuel Beckett and Cinema about Beckett’s overlooked relationship with film, his
“Complex, informed, ambivalent relations with both first and second wave modernist cinema” and his “own dramaturgical and cinematic methods […] show […] Beckett’s engagement with silent cinema including German expressionism, Hollywood comedy, Soviet cinema and French Impressionism” as well as later figures of the European post war avant garde like “Alain Resnais, Jean Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras and Robert Bresson.”xiv
The point at which Beckett most urgently intersects with the American post-Studio film industry is with his own experimental film, Film (1965) commissioned by publisher Barney Rossett, and featuring the final performance the foremost star of early silent comedy Buster Keaton. Sidhartha Mahanta noted in 2016 in the New Yorker that this was to be part of a triptych of films – the other two based on works by both Pinter and Romanian ‘absurd’ dramatist Ionesco never came to fruition:
“Beckett, by the mid-nineteen-sixties, had cemented his global reputation with the successes of “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” and he and Rosset marshalled a remarkable collection of talent for their movie: celebrated theater director Alan Schneider; cinematographer Boris Kaufman, who had worked on “12 Angry Men” and “On the Waterfront,” among other films; and, most notably, the silent-screen legend Buster Keaton.”xv
Early Hollywood comedy and Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardyxvi in particular had been a direct influence on Beckett’s dramatic writing, as Paraskeva has noted, as it was on the Theatre of Cruelty writings of Antonin Artaudxvii. It’s worth noting here that early Hollywood comedy was as in touch with the philosophical foundations of existentialism as The Theatre of the Absurd was nearly 20 years later as demonstrated by Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box (1932) in which the pair attempt the Sisyphean task of pushing a piano up a flight of stairs only for it to clatter inevitably and repeatedly down them again.
Harold and Maude…and Samuel Beckett
All this, however, is a rather extended way of demonstrating how the European Theatre of the Absurd had, despite its peripheral status in American theatreland, nevertheless permeated and occupied part of the American zeitgeist and cultural consciousness of the era. In this section I will turn to a more in depth reading and critical examination of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude.
Ashby’s film anticipates, expresses and articulates a more recent tension in critical thinking around the absurd: in the challenge to Martin Esslin’s canonised (and canonising) text The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) by the more contemporary critical writing of Michael Bennet in his 2011 book Re-Assessing the Theatre of the Absurd. These two distinct and opposing sets of critical voices which are, perhaps, reconciled in Ashby’s film through the two lead characters of Harold Chasen and Dame Marjorie ‘Maude’ Chardin (whose name and history I will presently return to). Bennet notes that
“In 1961, a landmark book—Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd—codified this avant-garde movement and demystified the structure and subject matter of these plays by arguing that the reader or audience member must judge these plays not by the standards of traditional theatre, but by the standards Esslin set forth for what he called the Theatre of the Absurd.”xviii
Bennet offers a stringent critique of Esslin’s approach, and proposes a re-definition of the term ‘absurd’ itself. Going back to Esslin’s anchor point of Camus’s take on the Sisyphus myth , Bennet argues that Esslin’s ‘codification’ of the absurd is a misinterpretation of Camus that undermines his understanding of the work of his chosen writers. Esslin, as Bennet notes, espouses the idea that the writers of the absurd sought to dramatize and embrace the meaningless of existence (Esslin’s understanding of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity is based on this principle) . Benett notes
“Now it is exactly 50 years after the publication of Esslin’s book and it is time for the Theatre of the Absurd to receive a thorough re-working […] Since 1960, with Esslin’s introduction of the term in an article by the same name—the Theatre of the Absurd—the prominent idea of absurdity expressed in these plays has been largely accepted as a given when understanding these plays […] I argue that Esslin based his understanding of the plays he characterized as absurd on two significant misreadings: 1) Esslin mistranslates and miscontextualizes a quote by Eugene Ionesco, which Esslin uses to define the absurd and 2) Esslin misread Albert Camus as an existentialist. As such, Esslin posits that the Theatre of the Absurd contemplates the “metaphysical anguish of the absurdity of the human condition.” I will suggest, instead, that these texts, rather, revolt against existentialism and are ethical parables that force the audience to make life meaningful. Ultimately, I argue that the limiting thematic label of Theatre of the Absurd can be replaced with an alternative, more structural term, “parabolic drama.””xix
Bennet views the Theatre of the Absurd as a ‘Parabolic theatre’ and in his challenge to Esslin sees in this collection of writers an effort to encourage the viewer to find meaning in existence rather than embrace its emptiness. These are conflicting world views which are apposite to those of both the characters of Harold and Maude respectively – exemplified in the way that Ashby first establishes their relationship – via their mutual hobby of attending funerals of which there are three throughout the film (including the one in which 21 year old Harold first meets the septuagenarian Maude). Christopher Beach proposes that these ceremonies are part of the parabolic structure of the narrative: ‘there are three dates (each corresponding with a fake suicide), three funerals that Harold and Maude attend and three authority figures (Priest, General and psychiatrist) who attempt to advise Harold about his relations with Maude in three successive scenes’.xx We may also note here a particular similarity to Jean Genet’s dramatic writing, notably The Balcony, in which representatives of authoritarian and establishment structures, a Bishop, General, Judge and Police chief are satirised and turned into performative grotesques.xxi As Gehring notes in relation to Harold and Maude, the film
“Systematically skewers societies’ monstrosities. This methodical approach involves Harold’s periodic forced interactions with high profile branches of the establishment: General Victor Hall (Charles Tyner), a priest (Eric Christmas, a psychiatrist (George Wood) and most damning a luxuriously wealthy mother, Mrs Chasen (Vivian Pickles) […] By pummelling the military, the church, the medical complex, and family, Harold and Maude arguably remains the most comprehensive investigation of dark comedy in the canon”xxii
For Harold these funerals re-enforce a world view of existential meaninglessness (he is a young man, who would rather drive a hearse than the sportster bought for him by his mother). For Maude, these funerals have the opposite affect – they re-enforce and encourage a belief that life is for living and filling with meaning – she is a Sisyphus giving meaning to the meaninglessness of his uphill task. She tells Harold at one point, “A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can’.
As Beach notes,
2‘
The film uses parallels and oppositions as a primary structuring principle. Harold is obsessed with death and destruction and spends his time attending funerals, faking suicides and watching buildings be demolished. Like Harold, Maude enjoys funerals; however she is drawn to them no for their evocation of death but as part of the “great circle of life”.
There is of course a stark irony here, despite their initial oppositional positions, it is Maude who has the most reason to embrace the meaninglessness of existence. She is a Holocaust survivor (although never explicitly mentioned we know this from her numerical tattoo and from hints given in her dialogue), her full name (Dame Marjorie Chardin) hints perhaps at old European aristocracy. Maude has experienced the wartime trauma of Europe that catalysed the writers of the Theatre of the Absurd yet she is also an embodiment of 1960s counter-cultural liberal attitudes (Gehring points out that ‘Maude never plans to be the anti-heros lover […] she is his lifestyle mistress’ – a sort of guru) Broadly speaking we can connect Harold and Maude’s to Beckett through their mordantly comic world views where repetition, inevitability, resistance and suicide form key components in the textual structure. As Gehring notes, upon its release Harold and Maude was savaged by the critics (notably by industry bible Variety) for similar reasons to those with which Godot had initially been received in the US (and in fact on its European debut as well where it was famously described in the press as a ‘Play where nothing happens – twice’). They share a commonality of theme through their mutual concern with performance, suicide, ageing, death and evanescence. Beckett’s two tramps Vladimir and Estragon spend the play by marking time as they wait for the never-to-appear Godot, suicide is one of the ways in which the pair pass the time – for them as for Harold, suicide is performative, it is way of filling their time/ existence with meaning:
Vladimir: What do we do now?
Estragon: Wait.
Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows.
Where it falls mandrakes grow.
That’s why they shriek when you pull them up.
Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!
Harold’s own attempts at performed suicide provide a similar function: they are provocatively staged for his domineering, socially climbing mother Mrs Chasen and are, potentially, a way of disrupting the ennui of his existence. Gehring observes that unlike other contemporary films such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H whose own ‘gallows’ humour was ameliorated by its genre framework, Ashby’s film immediately confronts the viewer with the apparent death-by-hanging suicide of the film’s protagonist, Harold Chasen. The film opens with Harold’s performing (rather than committing) suicide, to the sound of Cat Stevens, in the gothic and evanescing space of the mansion where he lives with his mother
Its worth here commenting on the dialectic between the two(at one point around a formal meal at their mansion, she ‘chastens’ Harold for not eating his beets and accuses him of being ‘absurd’ – throughout the film is self-referentially absurd). This dominant/subservient relationship echoes a set of Beckettian relationships: both Pozzo and Lucky in Godot, and most particularly, the blind domineering Hamm and the subservient Clov in Endgame. Hamm is a blind, wheelchair bound tyrant whose aged parents Nagg and Nell are consigned to dustbins at the back of the stage, and who exists with Clov, his servant within a ‘Shelter’ .The play takes place after a potentially apocalyptic event (for Beckett ,read the Second World War). While this seems, aesthetically very different to Ashby’s mise-en-scene Harold’s isolated existence with a tyrannical figure, alone together in their gothic mansion allows some superficial similarities. However, Harold’s ‘suicides’ are also mini acts of resistance, such acts are central to understanding Beckett’s characters who perform mini acts of resistance against the conditions of the conditions of their own existence – Clov’s final abandonment of Hamm and the breaking of their interdependence, the reversal of the power dynamics between Pozzo and the servile Lucky in act 2 of Godot; the final raise of the head in the later shorter play Catastrophe , a show of bodily and psychological autonomy on behalf of ‘The Protagonist’ whose body has been under the control of ‘The Director’ and ‘The Assistant’. As I have previously noted these actions may be small but their implications are enourmous. Harold’s suicides are similar acts of resistance and when the psychiatrist suggests these are for the benefit of his mother, a way of seeking her maternal attention, Harold responds ‘I would not say benefit.’ Gehring (briefly) also views Harold’s ‘suicides’ through a Beckettian lens, noting that
Another initial response to suicide-staging Harold is to return the viewer to the absurdist world of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Harold is essentially playing a waiting game. But because his existentialistic figure has anticipated that God/Godot is never coming, and that the only inevitable given is death, Harold quite literally “kills time” by producing mini sketches of self destruction. He is a walking metaphor for the disillusionment of the late 1960s
Aaron Hunter notes that the marginalised outsider is a trope of Ashby’s auteurist style and that the suicides which Harold stages throughout the film also “seem to have an element of marginality […] Whether he really wants to die but lacks the nerve or where it is solely for the attention that Harold acts out his suicidal fantasies is never made completely clear”xxiii. Hence this ambiguity allows us more freedom for interpretation and elucidation. Hunter describes the first sequence:
“The first action the viewer encounters is Harold, alone and wordless, putting on a Cat Stevens record, standing on a chair in an elegant old fashioned room and hanging himself. It is a shocking opening moment until, moments later, Harold is revealed to be still alive (if somewhat disappointed that his mother has not fallen for his gag).” xxiv
These suicides are theatrical, performative staged events, and as the film progresses become more so as he slashes his wrists in the bath, drowns himself in the pool his mother is swimming in, self immolates when his mother brings home a young lady of his own age with whom she hopes to match him (he subsequently stages cutting of his own arm in front her) . As Hunter notes
“Regardless of his direct motivation [..] the suicides represent another marginal experiential space for Harold. In addition to being somewhat dangerous, they also constitute a space where, to the unfamiliar, Harold is neither dead nor alive.”xxv
This limbo space is one which again we find in Beckett – whether waiting on blasted heath by a dead tree in Godot, the enclosed shelter in Endgame, or the void of the stage space where the disembodied ‘Mouth’ hangs in the darkness in Not I (1973). Characters, like Schrodinger’s Cat are neither dead nor alive, they exist within the limits of their condition either acquiescing to it and evanescing into nothingness or resisting and attempting the break these limits.
Here we may draw contrasts with Maude, if Harold’s attempts at suicide are ambiguously either acts of resistance or acquiescence then Maude’s plan to kill herself on her 80th birthday firmly falls into the former category. Beckett’s work obsesses around the bodily processes of ageing, and of the decay of memory. Both Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Rockaby (for instance) foreground these issues. In the former, the old man Krapp, alone and approaching death listen’s to the spools of recorded memories he has recorded each year on his birthday; in the latter an old (?) woman ‘W’ (‘”Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face.’) rock’s her self gently towards death in a chair. The play concludes with the lines (spoken by a disembodied voice)
saying to herself
no
done with that
the rocker
those arms at last
saying to the rocker
rock her off
stop her eyes
fuck life
stop her eyes
rock her off
rock her off
The ageing body itself becomes a prison and as Pedro Querido notes
Old age can hardly be dissociated from the body – ‘Ageing is – if nothing else – an embodied experience’ (Barry, 2015, 136) – and the ageing person’s increasing awareness of this fact is described by Drew Leder as the ‘dys-appearance’ of the body, that is, its salience through what is commonly perceived to be mere dysfunction (1990, 89–90). However, reactions to the ‘dys-appearing’ body tend to be defined by rejection, which materialises into perceptions of the body as ‘other’, as a ‘bad self’, or as a ‘betrayer of the self’ (Gilleard and Higgs, 2018, 7–8)
Maude’s plan to commit suicide stems from her attachment to want to live, to find meaning. At one point in the film she hijacks a care and rescues a tree from certain doom – being placed in the concrete of a side walk. A Tree plays a significant and similar role in Godot too. Waiting on the lonely road, by the tree. At the start of act 1 Vladimir describes the scene ‘It’s like nothing. There’s nothing. There’s a tree’. The tree, however is both dead and alive, in act 1 it is seemingly dead (they also consider hanging themselves from it) and in act 2 it has started to sprout leaves – it demonstrates the potential for life, for meaning. As Linda Buckley observes
In Act 2, the tree has drawn Didi’s attention by miraculously sprouting leaves. In Act 1, Didi spends little time thinking about the tree; in the second Act it drives him into frenzied activity. In the opening scene of Act 2, we realize that Didi’s actual role is to defend and protect Gogo. This recognition of his interconnectedness with both Gogo and the tree makes Didi happy […] For Gogo, the tree is the way out of his life. For Didi, in contrast, the tree is the mirror that forces him to face his life; he knows that suicide will not bring them what they desire..xxvi
For Maude the claiming of her tree is an acknowledgement of life, and the potential for rebirth and renewal. Furthermore Krapp’s Last Tape ends with Krapp’s final recording and the lines ‘Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back’ This feels also like an apt epitaph for Maude, whose decision to take her own life is an act of revolution against her ageing body, a rejection of it and is predicated on retaining her youthful, resistant spirit. The film ends with Harold, alone after Maude’s death, playing the banjo (that she has taught him) in a deserted landscape. however despite the Beckettian nature of this image it is now imbued with hopefulness and meaning
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