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In Defense of the So Fucking Typical
"This movie sucks! It's so fucking typical. He's all hooked on death, and she's all hooked on living...and she's going to teach him some things."
-- Kim on "Harold and Maude"
Who cares if it's "so fucking typical?" Casablanca is as fucking typical as it gets, yet it's still a great fucking movie.
"Annie Hall" is all about a guy obsessed with death and dying who falls for a midwestern girl chock-full of charm and a zest for life. A very similar state of affairs to "Harold and Maude," and yes -- a very fucking typical scenario -- but also very unconventionally portrayed. Also a great fucking movie. (This used to be my litmus test for potential girlfriends to see if they laughed in all the right places. No one has ever passed -- well there was one once, but she's taken).
I mean, we all agree that the idea of these movies is, at their most boiled-down, reduced, serve-it-in-a-teacup-with-a-biscuit form, entirely conventional and well-worn. But what isn't these days? The trick is in the executin', my dear, and "Harold and Maude" works some pretty fucking delightful magic.
I could spell out everything I really like about the picture and all the memories I have associated with it, but I'll keep it brief for the sake of everyone else. The scene where Harold and Maude are rolling around in the field of little flowers on a lazy afternoon. The tollbooth sequences with the cop. The "If you want to sing out, sing out" duet that Harold and Maude sing in maude's converted boxcar while they do a little dance.
The pure feeling of just driving, driving, driving -- all day long -- along the twisty, windy craggy roads of Northern California, where the afternoons stretch out into forever with Cat Stevens as your hitchhiking passenger, strumming on the old banjo.
Wonderful.
Watch enough movies, folks, (or read enough books or see enough plays) and you'll figure out that there are no new stories to tell. The Greeks beat us to it a long, long time ago (even if only 7 out of Sophicles' 123 original manuscripts survived the Burning of the Great Library at Alexandria) and we've been merely polishing the dramatic stone of the same basic forms and themes ever since. As a playwright/screenwriter, I have to resign myself to simply telling the same old stories -- the ones that are "so fucking typical" -- in a fresh way that rings true. That's it. I can't do anything else. Neither can Charlie Kaufman or Chris Nolan or David Lynch or any of the other Kings of Gimmick currently working in Hollywood these days. All the backwards-time hand-waving and pretzel-twisting of the plot cannot hide this basic truism of drama: it's all been done, folks.
As a viewer, you have to overcome this (at first) crippling, depressing notion. You have to -- like Maude admonishes Harold in that field-of-flowers sequence and as American Beauty demands in its tagline -- look closer. Then, resolved in the tiny, little details, the genie emerges. And oh, what an amazing fucking species we must be to create such exquisite nuance! What a marvelous thing to behold a book with an excellent turn of phrase or a motion picture with emotional truth right there, staring at you, right in the fucking face with nothing between you and the experience.
Yeah, they're all old stories, all So Fucking Typical. But beautifully fucking illustrated. (Apologies to "Trainspotting").
Rock on, Harold and Maude, Alvie and Annie. After thirty years, give or take, you still blow me away.
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