My favorite film of all time has become even more interesting to me after looking at it through a gender studies lens.

I first saw Harold and Maude when I was in middle school, probably around thirteen years old. As a young outcast, it immediately spoke to me, with its friendship between a young man who’s obsessed with death and a 79-year-old woman that’s full of life.

Maude is a character that lives outside the bounds of what is expected for women. She’s loud and full of personality. She bends and even breaks the rules many times. For example, she gleefully goes on a high-speed police chase after stealing a small tree from a street corner that she wants to plant in the woods. The way she lives perplexes most of the people around her because she isn’t the traditional, passive old lady that needs help crossing the street.

Harold, as a man, is expected to appear strong and stoic, and get married to a nice young girl. He rebels against this notion of masculinity by displaying his emotions in dramatic outbursts where he fakes his own demise.

I had never thought of this film through this lens before, and I feel that doing so gave me a new understanding of it.

“Wabi sabi. It had found it during those bad times when Rea had been only getting worse, and it had come to mean a lot [to] me. The thought that everything that we were going through, the things that time was doing to her and she was doing to me, that they weren’t bad, but that they were beautiful in their own way.

I looked at the scars on Rea, and now on myself, and I was comfortable with them. No, I like them. They were natural, the result of the choices we made, and I don’t regret a single choice that left one on me. We were breaking down, bit by bit. We were dying slowly.

But everyone is dying slowly.”

–gabriel blessing, Wabi Sabi (Part Nine)

In “A Desire for Death,” Lau analyses the sleeping beauties of fairytale stories, concluding that there’s an eroticisation of the deathlike state of women within. A necrophiliac appeal. I agree that there is an eroticism to these women. But I argue that it is not a necrophiliac desire.

All things which are ‘alive’ in any sense of the word eventually decay. But it is that very decay that draws the necrophiliac. It is not the pristine, timeless beauty of Briar Rose, unchanging as she was when she first closed her eyes. The eternal beauty of the sleeping beauties is the draw of vampires and their ilk.

As Wabi Sabi expresses, the beautiful part of the dead and dying, the draw of necrophilia, is a sense of universality. The main character—a necrophiliac himself—expresses the appeal to be the  “scars on Rea, and. . .on [him]self. . . .everyone is dying slowly.” That is to say, the imperfections and decay of men, women, and anything else (crows, for instance) are natural, “beautiful in their own way.”

Through the lens of Gender Studies, the universal sameness of gender to the necrophiliac gaze can be understood, Formalism giving us the tools to extract meaning from the text.