Infantilisation & the Terror of Growing Up

From mother: “Really, Harold, you are no longer a child. It's time for you to settle down and stop flitting away your talents on these amateur theatrics…”

From his pastor: “Eh, my boy. A moment, please. Who was that old lady waving to you earlier?”

From mother, once more: “You have led a very carefree, idle, happy life up to the present - the life of a child. But it is time now to put away childish things and take on adult responsibilities.”

From his psychologist: “It is known as the Oedipus Complex, a very common neurosis, particularly in this society, whereby the male child subconsciously wishes to sleep with his mother.”

From mother, in a portion of script unused in the final film: “You don't care! ‘Miss Shroud of 1890 Weds the Boy of a Thousand Deaths!’ Listen to me…”

So you can see why the kid’s a little stunted.

The choice to cast what looks like a tall 11-year-old in the role of 20-year-old Harold Chasen must have been deliberate, but then, Harold and Maude goes hard on the obvious symbolism.

Maude is the first adult of significance in Harold’s life not to treat him as an adult (she doesn’t), but to take care of him as one would a child. It’s this kindness, this sense of normal, this “oh, that’s what my life should have been,” that gives Harold a developmental leg up — what we’re fed of his upbringing is that it wasn’t very pleasant. Often a sickly child, with a dead father and a mother who pays him little attention beyond the showpiece he is around guests, he campaigns for dewdrops of attention within the confines of his home because he. Has. No. One. Else.

Maude and Harold’s first conversation is her offering him licorice from her purse in classic old-lady fashion. He’s not put off by the kid treatment but by the offer occurring at all, as if unaccustomed to kindness. The infantilism his mother doles out is, by contrast, a strange brew of helicopter parenting* and neglect. She’s, like, not nice to him, but Harold’s life unfolds by her book, and all his resistance is ineffective because it’s so infantile.

How is faking violent, bloody suicides “infantile?” Well, they’re a cry for help that he’s long since understood do not work, yet he keeps on trying. His mother knows he’s pretending, and, look at that, he’s literally playing a fucking game of pretend. It’s like hiding behind a tree at the park and coming out right as your mom starts to panic, like “surprise!” You’re much weirder if you do that in your 20s. Just because it’s an adult-ified version, just because it’s executed with dark humour, doesn’t make it any less immature.

So, his mother is an infantiliser of a more abusive variety who sees the child as a successor, family units as transactional. Maude is an infantiliser who sees the child as a human to mould and influence, judgement-free, expectation-free, like a particularly good parent. And Harold? Harold is functionally a child for most of the film. He walks and talks like an adult, dresses like one, but acts independent (like an adult) only in defiance to the authority figure who doesn’t love him enough (as a teenager would). Buying an old-ass hearse, repurposing its replacement, are little rebellions against his mother’s authority, which is funny for someone who still begs for her attention in such extreme ways. The reason he’s so stunted, though, isn’t because he doesn’t know better. He has no friends, no supportive, reliable family members or community to help him grow as a person. The community figures around him (a pastor, a therapist, and a crazy republican uncle… IF YOU’RE 20 AND YOUR CIRCLE DOESN’T INCLUDE THESE YOU NEED A NEW CIRCLE) are all hand-picked by his mother. They have a stake in simply spending time with him (guiding him down the holy path/the psychologically sound normie path/the unfeeling killing machine path). They’re perfectly useless guides into adulthood.

Adulthood, says Harold and Maude, is full of people who will use you. They will bleed you dry. They will give their all to convert you into their kind of human, because it’s what they calcified into for their own survival. Parents in particular are prone to doing that to their kids. They want us to learn quickly that conformity is the way to go, if only until you’re successful. Save the joy and whimsy for later. So it takes Harold some convincing to trust Maude when from day one she challenges his worldview.

It’s sweet that Harold’s first love is his key to happiness, but there is something creepy about recreating all his missed juvenile experiences with her (I can smell the nice-Christian-boy guilt emanating from the train-car bedroom, jee-zus) all at once… except, that’s the closest thing this kid will get to exposure therapy. Those practice rounds of socialising, dating, reciprocal care, fuck, even virginity loss, were his only chances at becoming a person. If he accepted any one of his mother’s dating setups, bro would end up scaring them away the next time they went out. Maude might still see him for the kid he is, but she’s oriented towards growing him, supplying the right nutrients, and only through this mentor figure does Harold grow the fuck up. She’s the first to offer him an open-ended option, whereas his life up to then was an array of “pick ones” arranged by other people.

This film doesn’t want us to believe that growing up is scary because of shit like taxes or marriage or the rest of your life comprising of meaningless labour. It’s too informed for that. The terror of growing up is that the reins are in our hands, and if we want shit done, we have to do it our damn selves. Harold’s superficial rebellion only matured into “oh, I can actually say no,” into “I can quit while I’m ahead,” after Maude planted all those hippie ideas in his head — without her, no doubt uncle Victor would have dropped him off at boot camp by now — but, hey, that’s the point:::: adult authority figures are awful examples for a growing human these days.

Culturally speaking…

Remember, the messaging is extra severe in H&M, and maybe too overtly American, because it’s from 1971. Hippies were everywhere, the Vietnam war wouldn’t end for another four years, and even the most everyday conformist Americans were waking up to how manufactured their existence was for the sake of serving a few elites. But this is the exact kind of message that most of the world needs. If you allow yourself to be a resource for others’ happiness, you cease to be a sentient human. Life becomes joyless. You wait to die, having done nothing for the world.

Dude. If I had watched this film when I was younger, in my crazy controlling-ass Slavic household where my only coping mechanisms were rage and substance abuse, my family wouldn’t have been able to stand me.

*Helicopter parenting, remember, wasn’t much of a thing in the ‘70s, making the arranged dates and all that other stuff much weirder, much more antiquated-Victorian. Today, arranged dates and marriages are quite odd beyond religious and cultural traditions, but especially for a modern New Yorker.