As I have noted before watching reaction videos on social media forms like YouTube reveals a lot about the cultural contexts, ideological contexts, and mentalities of reactors and, in actuality, generally much less about what reactors are reacting to. Recently I watched a number of reactors “react” to the 1971 black comedy Harold and Maude written by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby and what these social media“reactions” reveal about their social media “reactors" is, as always, fascinating and enlightening.
Catch-up Packets, for instance, like so many ill and limitedly educated “kiddies" today--I am using the term “kiddie" literally and metaphorically here—are, as their “reaction” reveals, fundamentalists or literalists who, as is typically the case with “reactors", can’t get beyond the most basic surface level of a film. As a consequence they miss the rather obvious point of the Harold and Maude. They spend much if not most of their “reaction” time making pointless and irrelevant remarks about irrelevant things like how Maude is profaning the sacred occasion of a funeral, failing, in the process, to understand how our perceptions of funerals, sacred or profane, are social and cultural constructs. They spend their “reaction" time pontificating about the unrealistic representation of Harold and Maude running from the cops in the film, about Harold’s treatment of the dates his mother sets up for him in the film, about Maude’s decision to end her life in the film, and so in. They, in other words, apply a notion of “realism” to a film, a notion of “realism" one of Harold’s dates actually makes fun of in the film to the film, because they have been socialised to believe that realism in film and, by extension, realism in art, is a sacred rule that all films and, by extension, all art, should follow.
This dogmatic “realism”, an approach to film and by extension art if I can call it that, means that the two “reactors” who make up the YouTube reacting duo of Catch-up Packets don’t get the contextual countercultural rebellion against authority aspects of the film though Maude when she recalls her history of activism points this up at one point in the film. It means that they don’t grasp or comprehend what Harold and Maude actually is, an allegory about death and life, living and not living. As Maude says at one point in the film while she and Harold are at one of their two funerals, summing up the meaning of the film in microcosm, Harold and Maude is about burials and births, about the circle of life. They miss the fact that Maude, despite being a Holocaust survivor, someone who has had brushes with death, and despite being 79, is an allegory of life and that Harold, despite being a young teenager, is an allegory death. They miss the fact that by film’s end old life dies in order to give young death a life to live, something symbolised and expressed in a number of ways in the film including by Maude’s yellow umbrella, by Harold’s rebirth in the vagina sculpture, by Harold going from pale facial colour to increasing lively facial colour as the film progresses, by Harold’s increasingly colourful clothing as the film progresses. and in Harold dancing off in the final scene of the film banjo in hand enjoying his new life.
Anna Chipman Reactions reaction, like that of Catch-up Packets, is rent through with the realist fallacy. Though she gets, to some extent the allegorical nature of Harold and Maude, that Maude, for example, represents life and Harold death, gets that Harold’s countenance becomes less pale through the course of the film and, in the process, foregrounds that Harold becomes more alive as the film progresses thanks to his relationship with Maud, and gets the theatricality of Harold's obsession with the spectacle of death, she mistakes Harold’s fascination with the spectacle of death for suicidal tendencies and pontificates about the dangers of such tendencies. She mistakenly blames Harold’s mum, who she sees as a latter day version of Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, for missing the suicidal tendencies in her son, suicidal tendencies that are not actually there, a misreading that is clearly over determined by her own admitted battles with depression.
This imposition of the personal on Harold and Maude shows how viewers often see films through their own biographies rather than for what they actually are and miss, in the process, what a film actually says or reveals in its actual text. She misses, for example, what Harold’s mum does not miss, namely that Harold’s enactments of death are absurd. I enjoyed being dead, Harold tells Maude at one point in the film. Additionally, by noting the awe inspiring nature of the Golden Gate National Cemetery Chipman fails to grasp the sixties anti-authoritarian and anti-war aspects of the film and, of course, fails to comprehend how the sacred is socially and culturally constructed when she comments that military cemeteries are "awe inspiring". For the director of Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby, on the other hand, military cemeteries were profane and pointed up the absurdity of nationalism and of war, something pointed up, for example, by Maude’s history of activism for social justice causes and by the fact that Maude is a victim of Nazi nationalism. In the end, Chipman’s reaction to Harold and Maude shows that many contemporary reactors not only impose an ideologically grounded realism inappropriately on an artistic text they also impose their own ideologies inappropriately on an artistic text as the fetishised becomes the normative and the normative, in turn, becomes the descriptive, something that should be bass ackwards. And it shows that many if not most "reactors" have difficulty grasping and comprehending absurdism, black comedy, satire, and parody in films, all of which are present in Harold and Maude and all of which go unmarked by Anna Chipman Reactions.
The reactor James Vs. Cinema, a self-identified filmmaker, barely scratches the surface of the Harold and Maude and like other “reactors” before him and after him is a bit to fundamentalist in his interpretations of the film. He gets the humour of the film, even some of the dark humour of Harold and Maude, though not all of it, and he grasps that the film, on the literal level, is about Maude teaching Harold how to live. However, he misses the allegorical aspects of the film, the anti-authority aspect of the film, and many of the absurdist aspects of the film. He does explore the mise-en-scene of the film and how it is another way the medium of the film communicates its message, something one would expect of a filmmaker.
One of the more interesting and initially amusing reactions on YouTube to Harold and Maude is that of Screentime with Phil and Erika. As Phil tells us in the introduction to their reaction to the film he and Erika are, with the help of The Ringer, an online cyber magazine that lists the fifty “best” romantic comedies since 1970, watching the fifty best Rom-Coms since 1970. The Ringer puts Harold and Maude at number forty-six in its poll of the greatest Rom-Coms since 1970. Apart from the inherent absurdity of such a list—these lists are always highly selective and grounded in a lack of comparative empirical analysis—the notion of Harold and Maude as a Rom-Com is somewhat misleading since it is more allegory than Rom-Com. As Phil and Erika adjust to what Harold and Maude really is, however, they recognise the complexity and depth of the film, Harold and Maude’s dark humour, and get the power of Maude, a victim of the Holocaust, being more life oriented than Harold grasping in the process that Maude is the life force in the film even if they miss a bit of the life-death-rebirth allegorical nature of the film though Erika does get how Ashby and company used changes in clothing to represent Harold becoming more alive thanks to Maude, including the anti-authority allegory in the film as a consequence, perhaps, of the residue of the realist fallacy in their “reaction" that dominates so much thinking about film and television among far too many reactors today including, if less so, Phil and Erika.
There are "reviews" of Harold and Maude on YouTube that I haven’t largely explored at this point. I did watch one of some thirty minutes in duration—most of the others are a fraction of that length—from the review duo of Off the Shelf Reviews, a review that offered an insightful, enlightening, and well argued close analysis, and a review that might make one hypothesise that reviewers generally know more about how films actually work than reactors for a variety of reasons. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this is indeed the case.
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