Reflecting on the movie, I could not help but imagine how I might have reacted to the movie if I had seen it as a boy, young man or college student. It is more difficult to look forward and imagine how I might have understood it or found it, had I watched it later. My imagination thus skips to imagining others seeing the movie: the most natural placeholders are my parents and grandparents, but I also imagine others--particularly members of other familiar groups.
As I watch (Steven Demetre Georgiou --> Cat Stevens -->) Yusuf Islam, over and again, graybearded with eyes intent as ever, playing "Father and Son", I am struck with one particular feeling: how much easier it is to imagine Yusuf as the Father than the Son, whereas every other time I had heard the song, Cat (in the original recording) sounded ineluctably more real--more palpable--when singing as the Son.
Father and Son
Father:
It's not time to make a change,
Just relax, take it easy.
You're still young, that's your fault,
Theres so much you have to know.
Find a girl, settle down,
If you want you can marry.
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.
I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,
To be calm when you've found something going on.
But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you've got.
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.
Son:
How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again.
It's always been the same, same old story.
From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen.
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.
I know I have to go.
Father:
It's not time to make a change,
Just sit down, take it slowly.
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to go through.
Find a girl, settle down,
If you want you can marry.
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.
(Son: -- away away away, I know I have to
Make this decision alone - no)
Son:
All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside,
It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it.
If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me.
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.
I know I have to go.
(Father: -- stay stay stay, why must you go and
Make this decision alone?)
One connection between movie and song may be obvious: Cat Stevens (as Cat Stevens) scored Harold and Maude. "Father and Son", however, was not in the score. Nor were a Father and Son written into the script: Harold's father is dead. Maud's presumably died in a concentration camp, something that is hinted at in the movie. The only ersatz Father figures are a Priest, a Shrink and a military Uncle. But the idea of Father-Son in the movie gives me pause nonetheless--fatherhood or paternalism being a deafening vacuum in the movie's metaphor. Each of those individuals represents a pillar of perceived paternalism.
Let me leave, for a moment, any connection to Steven/Cat/Yusuf's own changing perspective and perception. [As a sidenote, though, the shots of the sleeping baby really add something to the presentation that words and music cannot.]
As to watching Harold and Maude, I purchased the movie, sight-unseen because movie rental chains hardly exist anymore here; they seem to be fading off like 8-tracks, soda-shop dates and silent movies--once omnipresent cultural foci that defined their few decades in a way that generations before and after may hardly understand.
Touching on a previous post, the mournful dirge "the outlaws of our time are not like Jesse" presents a seam, sewn through the fabric of human history since story-telling began, that nonetheless yawns into a generational gap. While the longing for romantic outlaws transcends generations (i.e. romantic rogues are not new: Robin Hood, Rob Roy, William Wallace, Bonnie and Clyde, the Assasins tradition in Chinese literature, even Samson), some elements of the longing for Jesse James himself cannot and will not transcend to modern consciousness (e.g. the train and stage bandits era, Confederate longing, bleeding Kansas, frontier tribalism). Or at least, they do not transcend immediately; one must understand much about the past before understanding how Jesse James became a folk hero.
The latter type of Zeitgeists pass eternally into mere Geists, no longer tastbar to any extant collective feeling; in a word, they move beyond our touch. That generational gap arises from a difference of perspective, to be sure, but also from a difference in perception, the faculty itself, between young and old--or even between contemporary groups.
Being personally on the heels of an odd stand-off--some awkward inability to dialogue, or even approach opening some playing field for dialogue, in my own life ostensibly regarding some sense of propriety that I still cannot grasp--battling, all the while, my own urge to stay within my own sense of propriety--maybe I stand in need of some understanding about such gaps.
The interplay between Harold and Maude inform that need of mine (if not any gap itself) nicely--but in a medium that reminds me that such informing and such information may not have been available to young, college-aged me or even to any distant future me. I can imagine myself or others discarding, once upon a time, the film as scandlous, offensive, dull, overly dry, morbid or various other things that may obviate participation in its metaphor. But now, I believe the metaphor is worthy (read here to get some idea; watch the movie to get a better idea).
Speaking of myself, I find the the movie and, perhaps even more so this song, poignant--a window to the divine perhaps. As one Jewish tradition goes, anything--person, poem, image, landscape, foe, etc.--can be a window to the divine. Thus, after watching this movie, at a barely bearable juncture, amid major tumult and personal angst, I for a second time have happened upon the song, quite by accident, and found it ineffably poignant, even divine--however, with a poignance sublimely different than that earlier divinity I felt from it. That is, the poignance itself has changed with my changing perspective and perhaps also with my changed perception.
Though this be but one bit of an epiphany, Harold and Maude shows well that in failing to understand a previous generation, a succeeding generation does not (necessarily) so much set aside, ignore, claim a moral high ground over, move on from or forget the previous generation. And for this reason, we cannot and should not leap to condemnation based on any such accusations. Rather, succeeding generations experience their common threads in a dynamic fabric whose changing colors and patterns may make predecessors' treasured artifacts (e.g. their own Jesse James) forever unable to stir the same feelings of melancholy, allegiance, fervor or nostalgia.
Indeed, nostalgia is an apt word here: the preceding generation envisions nost-algia ("our" "feelings / pain") as being "ours" universally, or at least for a group that includes the succeeding generation. The succeeding generation, though, has never felt and often cannot feel their predecessors "-algia" at all. Alienation results. (This mistaking the universal for the subjective, of course, also happens in reverse with succeeding generations misinterpreting preceeding one. Consider, for an example, the phenomenon of pejoration.) Said this way, we can imagine rifts where, without any blasphemy, objectively speaking, one generation may legitimately and properly set at naught the 'sacred' of another, replacing it with a 'sacred' unintelligible or even subjectively blasphemous to that other generation. So, Maude's generation and Harold's--and so too mine and each of theirs.
Lest one miss the blunt contrasts of the movie, many similar contrasts can be found in the singer of "Father and Son" himself. First, as the son of Greek immigrants in London, then a raucous emblem of 70s counter-culture, later parading under an assumed name (cloaked to capture partially his Greek given name), later still as a second individual--renamed after a near death experience--an ascetic religious zealot abandoning fame and the public eye, and, then, latest as an individual striving to re-emerge into that same public eye, but while embracing his new and evolving identity.
We may ask: How might that one man, at each stage, differently perceive his own song--presented first and fervently by an intransigent and impenetrable youth, but here again, in older age, outwardly as some knowing paternal figure constrasted against a sleeping baby and an audience of head-covered women. The song was originally written as a dialogue between a young Russian man, intent on joining the Revolution, and his Father, intent on keeping him home.
I do not believe Steven Demetre Georgiou, Cat Stevens or Yusuf Islam could represent or be neatly boxed into any characacture or surrounding group. Neither could Harold or Maud, for that matter. Perhaps the audiences of the movie, on the one hand, or the song, on the other, could also each individually be so dynamic that none, when regarded as to their audience reaction, should be considered merely as a part of the group. But, like Father or Son, it is very easy for me to imagine how young or old, members of various groups may react to this movie and this song. The movie it seems, will strike a rare few as genius (who is to say I am right?, only me) and most as something else: evil, mediocre, boring, contrived, trite(?), perhaps droll at best. The song? Most will be drawn to it, others will find it too soft and slow. More importantly, I think anyone (or at least any man) is forced to take sides in the evenhanded song. And the sides one takes, may change as his own circumstances do. Most can understand the other side's pleas, have heard (of) them before--but, in end, individuals will inevitably, I believe, identify with one of the voices--and, after hearing the song, may begin his own words to better explain the point-of-view of Father or Son, as the case may be.
