WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... MOVIE
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... PROFESSIONAL

There’s more misogyny going on than Sally being proven “wrong” when clearly she’s right, or than Sally being overshadowed by Harry. She is also completely dismissed on a professional level. (Just FYI: I actually love When Harry Met Sally. But, feminism-wise, it’s kind of fucked 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!).

He’s controlling - his belief about men and women rests on the man’s unwillingness to look past sex, regardless of the woman’s feelings. 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. Harry picks his teeth while he makes the film’s central claim. Harry should not “win.” Harry is obnoxious. Against all logic, the film vindicates Harry’s fatalism and his ill-informed position on heterosocial friendship. These remind us of what Harry and Sally must finally become, and they also emphasize how little choice Sally has in most of the talking heads the woman is extremely passive, and in two she never even talks. It makes sense that the fatalism of the film favors Harry and not Sally. He is, after all, the man who reads the last page of a book first. What is important to him is not the details of the meaningful friendship he and Sally build, but whether they will eventually have sex. When Harry Met Sally begins with and is intercut with documentary-style interviews of old couples. When one considers how false the film’s ending is to its creators and audience, it becomes creepy how predetermined that ending is. So 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.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... MOVIE

Meg Ryan has male friends. I have male friends! Male friends are everywhere, they cannot be stopped. Yet this legendary movie that my lady friends and I are obsessed with essentially claims that our lives are impossible. The film resists this inevitable thesis for as long as possible because that thesis is pretty obviously incorrect. Nora Ephron had male friends.

They must end up together, and when they do the thesis of the film becomes men and women cannot be friends. While the idea of “soul mates” is now associated with passionate love, throughout history (in the Bible, in Plato, in Cicero) it has been reserved for exceptional friendships. That Harry and Sally are a split soul is visually emphasized in the split-screen scene where they sit in their separate apartments and watch a scene from Casablanca: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”īut their beautiful friendship exists in a rom-com. They joke about dead people’s apartments, talk in silly accents, and do karaoke at Sharper Image. Harry and Sally are as comfortable together as they are with themselves they are one soul in two bodies. Harry and Sally do, for a good portion of the film, have a strong platonic bond. They are the only friends in the film who talk about subjects other than romance. The film’s hook and its commercial obligation to romance create a tension. Before the question is even asked, we know whether Harry and Sally can be friends they can’t. They inhabit a rom-com, and so they ultimately have to end up together romantically. And according to Harry, it doesn’t matter if the woman doesn’t want to have sex with the man, “because the sex thing is already out there, so the friendship is ultimately doomed, and that is the end of the story.”

It’s a universal rule, he says. All men want to have sex with all women, regardless of whether or not the man finds the woman attractive. Within the first fifteen minutes, Harry makes a statement which the rest of the film debates: “Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” Sally argues that she has platonic men friends, but Harry says these friendships are invalid because those men secretly want to have sex with her. As a commercial romantic comedy, its entertainment stems from its romance (Harry and Sally ending up happily together) and from its comedy (“baby fish mouth”). The film is romantic, it is comedic, and thus it was a commercial success.īut to When Harry Met Sally’s fans, it is not about commercial success but about the question of whether men and women can be friends. This is the hook of the movie, the foundation for its romance and jokes. Its mission is to be entertaining, to ensure as much watching as possible. When Harry Met Sally is a commercial film.

When harry met sally...