HAROLD AND MAUDE and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Who doesn’t love a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? You know, that incredibly attractive, inspired and lively young woman who’s inexplicably but incredibly attracted to a dull, depressed male protagonist? She’s so cute, right? But in like, a totally nonsexual, awkward, supplementary kind of way.

I’ve loved a couple of them, myself. Garden State and Almost Famous, maybe the most common examples of the MPDG, are two of my favorite movies. I also recently saw Harold and Maude, which is arguably a simple variation on the trope; but also, arguably, not. 

Maude (Ruth Gordon) clearly introduces deep meaning (not to mention sexuality) into Harold’s (Bud Cort) boring and, literally, lifeless existence. You could certainly argue that the whole point of her character is to take care of her man, and once she does that, she no longer has a reason to live. You could also, and rightly so, point out that it makes no sense for her spend her last week on Earth with this boring little boy. Wouldn’t a more realistic, more liberated, and less male-dependent woman want to hang with her friends in her last few days of life? But I think these characters are more complicated than that, and the film certainly has more to say than some reiterated message about finding inspiration in the mundane. While Harold and Maude’s relationship could have easily unfolded along this conventional plotline, the actors’ brilliant performances saved this film from becoming a just-another-romantic-comedy.

First of all, Maude is old. She turns eighty towards the end of the film, and while we never learn Harold’s age, he basically looks like a kid. The 60+ year difference between the two characterizes their relationship as at least somewhat unorthodox from the get-go, even when the actors seem to be performing in traditional gender roles. Part of the Manic Pixie Lady’s whole deal is how adorable she is, usually without even noticing her own sexuality – but Maude not only is a-typically beautiful, but she is also acutely aware of how attractive she is to Harold. So even when she is at her most used, her most femininely-secondary to her male counterpart, she still represents a protestation against the typical women depicted in these kinds of relationships.

This dynamic is particularly apparent when the two sleep together for the first time, a sex scene that tastefully substitutes the actual dirty deed with bubbles and fireworks and sunlight, all in true Manic Pixie Dream Girl form. Instead, the actors portray their characters’ activity post-copulation. Bud Cord is sitting upright in bed, awake, alert, and blowing bubbles. Through this movement, which reflects the brilliant firework display that directly precedes this shot, Cort emphasizes Harold’s active role in the relationship, as well as the male active role in sex. Maude herself is sleeping in this scene; Ruth Gordon does not stir at all, juxtaposing Cort’s movements and emphasizing the passive role that most women play in the traditional romantic comedy relationship. Because Gordon takes on such a “feminine” role while Cort simultaneously becomes the active agent in their relationship, this scene proves that Maude, despite her age, is still able to fulfill Harold’s conventional sexual desires as competently as she fulfills his emotional ones. By presenting so unorthodox a couple in such traditional masculine and feminine roles, the actors challenge conventional conceptions of beauty, sexuality, and attraction – a key part of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s whole deal.

The film goes on, in my opinion, to break down the MPDG trope in a second, very different way, this time by addressing these conventional gendered power dynamics themselves. On the night of Maude’s 80^th birthday, Harold surprises her with a private celebration and, though he never actually goes through with it, a plan to propose to her. At the outset of the scene, Cort is again the active performer: he removes her blindfold, leads her in dancing, and even reaches across the screen to remove a tablecloth with a large flourish, allowing his body and his movements to completely dominate the shot. He also kisses her, all while she stands very still and stays relatively quiet throughout the scene. Finally, he hints at his marriage proposal. This is the ultimate example of his activity and her passivity, as he decided to marry her, assumed her consent, and announced it to his mother as a fact – all without informing Maude herself of his plan. At this pivotal moment, however, Gordon tells him (quite kindly) that she took pills to kill herself and will be dead by the end of the day. With this announcement, Cort immediately stops moving. In fact, he seems frozen, an abrupt transition symbolic of the realization that he is not, in fact, the only active partner in the couple, and that Gordon, quite untraditionally, has an agency of her own.

Now, I understand that lots of Manic Pixie Dream Girls die, robbing their partners’ of the enjoyment of their bodies, but leaving their spontaneity behind -- perhaps as a final metaphor for these women's desexualization. Cancer is one thing, however (and I'm thinking, like, A Walk to Remember, here) – suicide is another. Despite claims that Maude is just another Manic Pixie Dream Girl, albeit unexpectedly so, her final actions and control over her own death give her a freedom, at least in my eyes, that traditional female love interests simply do not have.

So, it's hard to discuss this without talking about how Harold and Maude is essentially a film about tackling authoritarianism. I do not believe that this movie, and particularly the actors in it, presents Maude as dominant over Harold in any way. Instead, the film seems to be challenging the idea that a relationship requires one active and one passive agent at all. Both main actors demonstrate these claims through their performances, toppling traditional power dynamics and introducing an alternative, anti-war and anti-authority paradigm of love. 

Interpreting Violence in DJANGO UNCHAINED

Within the first ten minutes of Django Unchained, German dentist / bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz is already killing slave owners and freeing a group of freshly-purchased African American men. The slaves, in possession of a rifle courtesy of Dr. Schultz, shoot one of their owners – and wow, they must have hit an artery or something because fake blood is suddenly gushing out the wa-zoo. I was just a little startled by this embellishment, but what was even more surprising was the ripple of laughter that swept through the theater where I saw the movie.

Was the moment supposed to be comical? I have never actually seen anyone get shot before, but this particular murder seemed hyperbolized to the extreme. Blood was flying around like water from a sprinkler at a five-year-old’s birthday party. It wasn’t exactly necessary, but there was no denying that it was a little funny. As the people sitting around me laughed at the ridiculousness of this asshole slave driver’s death, I couldn’t help but wonder: what the heck is the point of all this?

Well to begin with: Django Unchained is not a movie about moral ambiguity. There are good guys and bad guys, the people that we’re rooting for and the people we’re rooting against – and it's never unclear where to draw the line.

At the same time, however, there are obvious parallels between Django and the obnoxious slave owners he’s up against – mainly that they’re all killers. More than that, they seem to share an enjoyment of the act of murder. It’s not like Dr. Schultz ever blinks an eye before he shoots someone, and Django gets plenty of satisfaction from killing the evil Brittle brothers; similar, I believe, to Calvin Candie's mirth when he lets a pack of wild dogs tear apart a runaway slave. Our protagonists' lust for revenge killing is perhaps most astonishing when Dr. Schultz spontaneously shoots Candie and, in doing so, completely destroys any chance that Django and his wife Broomhilda can walk away from Candie-land free and unscathed – an opportunity they had spent the entirety of the film thus far trying to achieve. The doctor's explanation (before Calvin's cronies promptly kill him): "I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself." In Schultz's defense, Candie was being a huge dick. But is that a good enough reason to kill a man? Not really. The doctor simply could not exercise the self restraint required to not murder the guy. He could not do it to save his own life. He could not even do it for the long sought-after happiness of his new best friend Django. Instead, he killed Calvin Candie because he wanted to kill Calvin Candie. This German doctor and his free-bird sidekick may be more justified than the white southerners around them, but they do enjoy what they do.

It comes down to a matter of perspective. As I perceived it, there are two types of violence in Django: the at least somewhat justified and often humorous bloodshed perpetrated by bounty hunter Dr. Schultz and his accidental apprentice, Django; and the sadistic carnage that Calvin Candie, along with other white slave owners, inflict on their black property. As an audience, we laugh when Django shoots Candie’s southern-bell sister. With a hysteric cry she goes flying through the air, as if she’s being sucked into an unseen vortex in the next room, completely defying the laws of physics. We cringe when Candie himself forces one mandango fighting-machine to gauge out the eyes of another, just for a simple afternoon of private entertainment. Then we laugh again when Django shoots Samuel L. Jackson in the kneecaps, and subsequently blows him up. Quentin Tarantino encourages this behavior when he places the satirically victorious deaths of the “bad guys” up against the gut-wrenching, eye-covering torture of our heroes throughout the film, purposefully creating a painful juxtaposition.

Maybe this is supposed to be empowering. The film is, after all, the story of a disenfranchised slave gaining autonomy and kicking butt to save his woman. Maybe when you have to act with such incredible violence to procure your freedom, then that becomes what freedom is. Violence is a foundational part of old spaghetti westerns, a genre known for it’s depiction of a lawless time when cowboys were free as could be to shoot whomever they pleased. Heck, violence might just be a foundational part of most American cinema. America is “home of the free,” but as Django himself points out after Candie feeds a slaves to a pack of hungry dogs, America is home of the violent, too. And Django falls for it: even though violence is what dehumanized him in the first place, his ability to kill eventually becomes an essential part of his own freedom. When we laugh at it, we are reinforcing the idea that in order to be free, one must have the power to violently dehumanize others. 

Don't get me wrong. I loved the film, and I believe it sparked an incredibly important conversation about the significance of violence in our popular culture. I even went back and watched the original Django, directed by Sergio Corbucci in 1966. The really epic song in the opening credits of Django Unchained was originally written for this film. It was actually just as disturbingly violent as Q.T.’s movie – and it even included a shot where one unfortunate soldier’s ear gets cut off... Maybe the inspiration for a famous scene in another Quentin Tarantino film?