When Harry Met Sally ...

Tamar Jeffers McDonald

• Editorial: British Film Institute
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839021176
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Películas y vídeos

Ground-breaking in its departure from its predecessors, When Harry Met Sally (1989) established classic romantic comedy themes and tropes still being employed today. Placing the film in its historical, social and generic contexts, Tamar Jeffers-McDonald explores how writer Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner used structure, filmic devices, music and classic romcom concepts in innovative new ways. In her fresh and timely appraisal of this definitive, much-loved classic, Jeffers McDonald reflects on the film's enduring legacy and influence on popular culture to give readers a wider perspective on the continuing evolution and importance of the romcom genre.

‘When Harry Met Sally…’

Interlude 1 – faking it

I’m not sure if it seems odd, or appropriate, that the woman who gave us the concept of the ‘Single Girl’ as ‘the newest glamour girl of our age’⁴ and Cosmopolitan magazine in its current, sexy, incarnation, thus helping kickstart the Swinging Sixties, would also eventually be responsible for promoting the idea that it was polite for women to fake orgasms. When Sally (Meg Ryan) devastates Harry (Billy Crystal) in ‘Katz’s’ deli by making him suddenly doubt whether all the women he has slept with really have ‘had an okay time’, she is not only referencing a timeless open secret that, according to Nora Ephron all women know and no men want to consider, but also a topical idea within popular culture in the 1980s.

Helen Gurley Brown’s breakthrough book, Sex and the Single Girl, was published in 1962, and she took over the then-ailing Cosmopolitan in 1965, boosting subscription rates and making it the first modern women’s magazine dedicated to advice about sex and careers, clothes and politics. This stance that women’s experiences should be limitless is echoed in the title of her 1982 bestseller, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money Even if You’re Starting with Nothing.⁵ This is the kind of book Sally might pick up when browsing in ‘Shakespeare and Co’, a women’s self-help manual, yet it advocates pleasing one’s partner through deceit. Brown’s earlier book boldly urged women to defy the ‘double standard’, the idea that men should be sexually experienced upon marriage, but their brides should be virgins. This defiance was radical enough for 1962, but the most outrageous part of her message was not just that ‘nice girls do’⁶ but that they should be prepared to admit it: ‘Should a man think you are a virgin? I can’t imagine why, if you aren’t. Is he? Is there anything particularly attractive about a thirty-four-year old virgin?’⁷

By the time she was writing Having It All twenty years later, American societal assumptions, at least as represented in popular culture, had moved on enormously, thanks to the Pill, the sexual revolution and the women’s movement. Brown’s 1982 title implies her female readers do not have to compromise, to choose marriage and family or career success and money, which seems in keeping with the 1980s emphasis on self-advancement; but some of her notions seem more dated, even retrograde. Rather than insist that even respectable women enjoyed sex, as she had in her first book, Brown now downplayed the importance of sex to women, urging them to ‘do it anyway’ if their partners wanted to, adding ‘ You don’t have to rev up and have an orgasm’.⁸ Brown, once legible as a champion of women’s sexual satisfaction, by this point was more intent to emphasise the primacy of male pleasure, male ego: ‘After someone has made love to you with skill and grace, a [faked] orgasm is a way of saying you enjoyed yourself, even as you compliment your host on a wonderful spinach quiche.’⁹

Sally’s deli sandwich may not be a spinach quiche but her exhibition underlines that, whether complimenting a successfully cooked meal or sexual performance, women’s sincerity can be never assured.

Narrative Segment 1 – context

On the film’s release, many reviewers, both positive and negative, remarked on its accurate reflection of the zeitgeist.¹⁰ Although some disliked its ‘yuppie’ setting, it seems evident that part of Reiner and Ephron’s intent in ensuring topicality was to establish a convincing contemporary milieu for the love story. This would then highlight both the departures and continuities in modern romance compared to the traditional romantic comedy. Situating Sally at a bookstore table with the latest self-help blockbusters reveals a tendency to rely on books for romantic guidance, establishing her emotional vulnerability more economically than several paragraphs of dialogue – even Ephron dialogue – could do. And making the books recent hits would ensure nods of wry recognition from those who had seen the same titles themselves. The film has Harry read The Icarus Agenda for the same reasons Sally reads Making Life Right When It Feels All Wrong;¹¹ to illustrate their late 80s environment.

Marie and Sally amid topical bestsellers

Assuming that the film was keen to be true to its time, then, the next question is, what time was that? In what context did When Harry Met Sally... arrive? What other films were big at the box office that year, what trends were obtaining generally in popular culture and beyond?

It is a conceit in popular history that if the 1970s were, as Tom Wolfe nicknamed them, the ‘me decade’,¹² the 80s were more the ‘gimme decade’. The first title spoke to a general turning-inward in America, after the disillusionment of Watergate and Vietnam; reflecting a despair that government or society could be fixed, in the 70s the focus narrowed as individuals worked on understanding and improving themselves, a much smaller project with a greater prospect of success. I’ve noted elsewhere the effect this had on the contemporary romcom,¹³ which began to include references to support groups and self-help manuals, like 1979’s Starting Over, whose villain, the hero’s selfish ex-wife, makes him leave the family home so that she can ‘find herself’.

Such introspective self-indulgence would come to seem old-fashioned in the next ten years; according to contemporary cinema, the people of the ‘gimme decade’ didn’t want self-empowerment, they wanted money. This was the time when Gordon Gekko’s (Michael Douglas) mantra, ‘Greed is good’, from Wall Street (1987) echoed Madonna’s celebration of the ‘Material Girl’ (1984). Conspicuous consumption was in, along with shoulder pads and big hair. While this is very much a snapshot of the times filtered through then-popular culture, political and social historians have confirmed overt displays of materialism characterised the period; Nicolaus Mills, for example, suggests that the keynote of the era was sounded when Nancy Reagan wanted a new set of china – decorated with gold leaf and costing ‘$209, 508 for 220 place settings’ – for her husband’s inauguration as President in 1981.¹⁴While it might be reductive to see the decade’s mores reflected in this one ostentatious gesture, Mills persuasively argues that the costly china was symbolic of the new American worldview ushered in under Reagan: ‘American culture in the 1980s would be a culture based on triumph – on the admiration of power and status’.¹⁵

This urge towards triumphant bigness resulted in Hollywood in big special-effects movies and big franchises, repeated returns to products that had already proved themselves like the Friday the Thirteenth (1980–) and Rocky (1976–) series. Would-be serious, non-genre films looked at the current state of the nation, just as 70s films had, but instead of reproducing their pervasive paranoia and distrust of big business, government and state, there was a new respect for such institutions, an aspirational attitude towards them. In Working Girl (1988), for example, Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) beats her treacherous ‘bitch’ boss in both business and romantic terms. Her ultimate reward is to get an office, not escape from one. When the camera pulls back from Tess in her new room, further and further back from the building, showing the sunlight glinting on hundreds of windows in hundreds of office blocks just like hers, the moment is supposed to be celebratory, not indicative of a hive filled with indistinguishable drones. Similarly, the start of Wall Street shows streams of workers arriving for work in the financial district, pouring out of the subway and into office buildings, but unlike the similar images from, say, Metropolis (1927), where the number, similarity and anonymity of the workers is an indictment of the dystopia in which they live, Wall Street lacks any suggestion that there might be alienation in the massed ranks.

Tess (Melanie Griffith, centre) is rewarded with a place in the hive (Working Girl, 1988)

Against this culture of bigness, some writers and directors were managing to make personal pieces, and among them were Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron. Reiner, the son of director Carl Reiner and actress/singer Estelle, had started his career writing comedy and appearing in television shows from the late 60s; his role as Mike ‘Meathead’ Stivic in All in the Family (1971–9) became so identified with him that one review for When Harry Met Sally..., his fifth film, pigeonholed it as ‘Meathead’s Manhattan’. His first film, the mock-rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984) was hailed as a comic success, and each of his subsequent forays into different genres was similarly well received.¹⁶ When Harry Met Sally... was his most personal endeavour, however, since, as Reiner and Ephron have both acknowledged, not only was Harry Burns based on him, but the impulse to make a film about the perils of the contemporary dating scene had arisen from Reiner’s own experiences as a newly single man after his 1981 divorce.¹⁷

Ephron too had a history of working on personally inflected projects; although she saw herself primarily as a journalist,¹⁸ her novel Heartburn (1983), a thinly veiled account of her husband’s adultery and the resultant break-up of their marriage, had combined her signature sharp wit, interest in food and a portrait of the zeitgeist, elements that were to surface again in her screenplay for When Harry Met Sally... . Ephron has written that the movie’s development was a long one, beginning with lunch meetings where Reiner and his friend, the film’s producer, Andrew Sc...