Question What motivates Harold's fake suicides? Response Harold and Maude is a romantic black comedy and it incorporates the elements of dark humor and existentialist drama. The movie interprets the romantic relationship between a young man called Harold with a 79 year-old woman called Maude. They share the same hobbies of attending different funerals of strangers. They eventually build up relationship with each other and find out their own feeling and meaning of life. The plot of the movie is attractive to lots of people since the setting of the relationship between the two main characters in the movie is with a large age gap which is unaccepted by the general. However what fascinated me the most is that the movie interprets how a person can find the meaning of life of oneself from another person they meet in occasion. There are quite a few scenes of Harold displaying fake suicide in the movie, while such behavior is related to the numb emotion, domineering mother and low self-esteem of Harold. To commence, Harold in the movie is emotionally numb, which means that he is unable to think, feel and react in a normal way. From his mother’s point of view, she thinks that Harold inherit his father’s strange sense of values, that penchant for the absurd. His father is arrested for floating nude down the Seine, experimenting in river currents with a pair of yellow rubber water wings in Paris once. (Higgins, P.1) He is fascinated by the world of death and decay that leads him to demonstrate fake suicide. In the beginning, Harold is found with his throat slashed, and blood dripping from his neck and wrists in the bathtub. After this incident, he needs to see the psychiatrist for guidance. Besides, Harold also preoccupies himself with fake suicide because of his domineering mother. His mother is a wealthy yet snooty and controlling person. In the movie, his mother always ignores Harold so that he creates fake suicide in order to get th