"I wasn’t surprised to learn that Ephron and Rob Reiner originally planned an ending where Harry and Sally remained friends, which they felt was the “true ending”; only later did they bow to the expectations of genre."
In this life, there are things you love, and things you dislike, and things you must dislike secretly. This is not out of shame, but practicality and grace. Everyone else loves these things, and they will want you to explain why you don't, but you should not try.
(Or you could try, but then you will wind up in a fruitless Bermuda Triangle of a conversation about why you don't like the Beatles, with someone who loves the Beatles, and you will feel like a jerk.)
Anyway. One of my secret "dislikes" is the movie "When Harry Met Sally". Now, everyone I've met who's seen this movie has loved it. I don't blame them! It's got love, New York, banter, sandwiches, a happy ending. Which is great! I love these things! I am a huge fan of dorky happy things. I say "Yes!" out loud when characters do something I agree with, in order to encourage them. I should like this movie.
But. In between the heartwarming funny bits, it creeped me out a little. Watching it always made me feel a little weird. But I could never put my finger on why, until this recent essay in Splitsider came out, and I went "Yes! Yes!" at my screen, to cheer on the writer.
This scene, with its excess of romance that doesn’t fit the previous storyline and its dialogue that doesn’t match the emotional meaning, is the scene in which the tension between the film’s two goals is most felt. Intellectual examination of friendship between men and women has to this point played out realistically; here intellectual examination gets too cocky, listens to music while walking in the dark, and gets mugged and stabbed to death by happily-ever-after romance. Though — is it happily ever after? If love meant having to be trapped in a talking head with a man who subtly ridiculed my careful planning of our wedding cake, I would probably end up divorced.
It's not that I think the movie's MISOGYNIST, DUM DUM DUMMM (trumpets, flaming sword, etc), so much as I find it to be... blind. What creeped me out was the discord between how the movie portrayed the relationship (charming! perfect! meant to be!) and how the relationship actually seemed to me (controlling! flawed! manipulative!)
He’s self-absorbed — rather than participating in a conversational give-and-take with Sally, he speaks in long monologues better suited to stand-up. His logorrhea minimizes the space given to Sally’s character development and takes up any time that could have been used to show us Sally’s other men friends (thereby proving Harry’s point about their absence!).
The film really, really likes Harry. It thinks he's funny and smart and pretty much awesome. But I always thought Harry was kind of an arrogant, self-absorbed jerk. And I thought Sally was a bit of a pushover for putting up with him the whole time. But the movie kept playing their interactions out like it was the perfect love story.
The climatic New Year’s Eve scene is super problematic. On one hand, hello. It’s romantic. It’s witty. It’s a legendary scene that spawned a clichéd horde of copycats. On the other hand, it is Harry listing Sally’s faults, which are now acceptable only because they are man-approved. It is Sally’s final loss of agency, where her completely justified protestations of “I hate you, Harry. I really hate you,” must actually mean “I love you,” because the man who has caused her so much emotional anguish has impulsively decided that he’s romantically in love with her.
It's like the first time you meet a new couple, and they obviously love each other, but something's a bit off. They're joking with you, and you're joking with them, but the guy keeps stepping on his girlfriend's words, or making sarcastic remarks about her judgment or clothes or taste, and she laughs like it's normal. With every remark, you keep waiting for her to pull back, to get mad, but it never happens. Your friends say, "Aren't they such a great couple?" and you realize you're the only one that thinks the scales are unbalanced.
Perhaps most importantly, Harry is absolutely horrible to Sally. He is the worst. He more or less tells Sally that he only had sex with her because she was so pathetic. Throughout the film he doesn’t listen to Sally and is dismissive of her, and when he goes too far he apologizes but doesn’t actually change. When Sally tries to break this cycle, he aggressively invades her space with “cute” phone messages. Even when Sally directly tells him to stop, that she is not his consolation prize, he won’t leave her alone. In a determination bordering on harassment, Harry tracks Sally down on New Years Eve to express the basic sentiment that his feelings are more legitimate than hers.And sorry, this is supposed to be a love story?
But really, the problem I have isn't that "Harry is a jerk", the problem is "Harry is a jerk but gets to be a hero, Sally is a woman but has to be a prop." It's like she's not an actual person, but an embodiment of Woman Who Needs Love, and Who Will Put Up With Shit. I remember watching this when I was much younger, horrified, secretly thinking, "This is love? This is what love is going to be like? He makes fun of me, he sleeps with me, he leaves me, and when he decides he wants me, I'm complete all of a sudden?"
Though she is a journalist who writes for New York magazine, she is only referred to once as a writer and she never speaks about her articles. Meanwhile, Jess, who writes for the same magazine, constantly mentions his job and talks about his pieces. In fact, it’s a source of great humor (“I’m a writer, I know dialogue, and that was particularly harsh”) and attraction (Marie quoting his line). While Jess is defined by his successful career, Sally is only allowed to be defined by her unsuccessful relationships. Her lack of agency in the film as a whole is mirrored by Harry’s dismissive description of her career choice: “writing about things that happen to other people.”
Eeeesh. I guess it reminds me of experiences I've had with some guys who have a similar movie reel playing in their heads. A few times in my life, a guy has thought that he and I are in a romantic movie, even though we're not seriously involved, or involved at all, just because we banter and joke. To these guys, we've hit all the hallmarks of a rom-com, and therefore romance must be in the offing. These guys get a bit wounded and belligerent when I gently turn them down, but they don't want to listen. They want to be listened to. They tend to talk over me, rather than listening to me. They don't ask how I feel about things. And if things go far enough, the guy can become entitled and aggressive.
And the scariest thing isn't the guy himself - usually they're sweet at heart. But I have a scary, sinking feeling that if I just went along with it, if I played along with the romantic reel, if I didn't push back, if I didn't call them on their BS (the way I expect to be called on mine), if I didn't speak up about what I wanted, if I seemed not to want anything much - they would never notice. They would think everything was fine. And so, they would never really know me at all.
ANYWAY! I don't HATE the movie. But it does get on my nerves a bit. There's actually a really nice paragraph at the end of the article about its redeeming qualities.
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