i was really confused about the fake suicides... they all seem very unrealistically real if that makes any sense. hanging by the neck for minutes on end. sets himself on fire. underwater for a very long time. what am i missing???
shareIt's better explained in the book. He puts a lot of time and thought into his suicides so he has little devices and knows tricks to stay alive while making his deaths look convincing. And in the book there was one not in the movie, where he made a dummy of himself with I think a cantaloupe for the head and let his mother back over it in the driveway, and that one seemed to get SOME reaction out of her.
shareI've never read the book but my take from watching the film is that Harold CAN'T die. It's never explained how he survived the explosion/fire at the boarding school when everyone believed he was dead. You clearly see him set himself on fire and shoot himself point blank in the head, yet he remains unharmed. There's no way he should have been able to lie face down in the pool for that length of time without drowning and at the film's conclusion you don't see him exit the car before it goes off the cliff.
I think that his fate was to meet Maude and learn the joy of being alive and no amount of trying to kill himself could alter that fate.
ahh.... the magic of the story.
People forget storytelling is different from real life.
Ephemeron.
There's only one I don't get, and it's the one where he sets himself on fire.
Hanging: if you've seen Heathers, it seems reasonable to assume he did it the same way Winona Ryder's character does in the movie. She has part of the rope, or in her case, the sheet, wrapped around her waist under her clothes so she isn't actually hanging by her neck - it's an illusion. Harold probably had something similar under his suit holding him up.
Wrist-slitting: pretty obvious, just covered himself with fake blood
Drowning: totally unbelievable, but in the book it's established that Harold created some kind of imperceptible breathing apparatus. That, in fact, is how Maude survives later on when she falls down the hole into the sea with Harold and his uncle watching. In the book she's wearing the device and swims to shore.
Shooting himself: used blanks, had something figured out with fake blood, forced the chair backwards with his feet
Hari kari: it was a trick knife like you'd use on stage, which Sunshine demonstrates when she tests it before stabbing herself. It's one of my favorite parts, she stops in the middle of her monologue to furtively test the knife's mechanism and you see the blade retracting when it meets her hand. Then she throws herself back into the performance. Plus, like Harold, she makes sure to toss the knife aside because she doesn't actually want to land on the handle.
As far as I can tell for the self-immolation scene, it must be a dummy under the sheet (at some point he's so stiff that it's obvious) but I still can't tell how/when he replaces himself with the dummy. It's never explained in the book either. He's up on a platform, but the bottom half is obscured by a hedge. I assume he somehow replaces himself with the dummy, starts the fire, and sneaks along behind the shrubbery to get inside without being seen. But it all happens too quickly to be real.
There's a lot about the movie that's sort of surreal/silly - like Maude's Odoriffics machine, or her surviving that fall - that I think is intentional. The producer pointed a lot of the surreal elements out in the commentary track on the Criterion Collection edition, like when Maude is playing If You Want To Sing Out on the piano, then gets up to dance, but the piano is still playing. It's not realistic but it isn't really supposed to be. It adds to the charm of the movie. In the world of Harold and Maude, all of that is possible and completely ordinary.