It's not hard to charm Greg or me with stories set in New York City - the scenes of Harry and Sally carrying the Christmas tree through snow-covered NYC streets made me instantly regret buying a fake tree this year. Add to that the fact Sally heads to the Big Apple to pursue her dream of becoming a writer and you've sucker-punched Greg into submission.
I wrote an exegesis at university on everything that's wrong with romantic comedies from a feminist perspective but I love this film, a benchmark of the genre. Surprisingly, it stands up very well today, thanks to the excellence of screenwriter Nora Ephron. Romances written by women are far more likely to have fully realised female protagonists instead of the prototypical "preoccupied career woman who has forgotten to fall in love suddenly realises she has a desperate need to get married before all her eggs dry up and she becomes a crazy cat lady" narrative.
Don't get me wrong, there are some cringe-worthy lines - mostly from Harry (Billy Crystal) - but far fewer than I expected. I had also completely forgotten - or perhaps I never noticed given he was always an old man to me - how good looking he was back then: surprisingly hunky on a superficial level. Unfortunately, though, he's obnoxious, which I don't find hunky at all.
Pondering the film's central question, Greg seemed to concur with Harry that men can't be friends with women they find attractive, although he was being very evasive and non-committal in his answers, probably because I began listing all his female friends and accusing him of being attracted to them, which we both enjoyed very much. Initially, I thought the film agreed with Greg, given that Harry and Sally end up together, but on further reflection I realise the question has more than two answers. It isn't either yes, friendship can continue when attraction is present or no, sex will ruin it. There's a blatantly obvious third option that seems to evade Harry, but not Nora: Men and women can be friends AND be romantically involved. Take us, for example: My husband's my best friend.
HE SAW
I first saw it when I was 12, which was at least a year before I learned from my father what an orgasm was, so the movie's most famous scene meant little to me, although I was in love with Meg Ryan for a long time afterwards, so it's possible the scene gave me a little frisson only my blossoming body fully understood.
My strongest memory of that first viewing, prior to my second last week, was Billy Crystal's claim, "No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive", which is some powerful and probably damaging relationship ideology for a 12 year old boy to ingest. It was probably no coincidence that it would be years before I had any female friends, or that most of those friendships would be ruined by the lingering psychological remnants of that quote, or at least by something inside me that it accurately identified.
The movie has not aged. It's funny and fresh - a landmark piece of cinema, written by the genius Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner, who was, at the time, the hottest director in the world, having made This is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me and The Princess Bride in the space of three years leading up to this, his magnum opus.
I told Zanna that I'd read an interview in which he said Harry and Sally did not end up together in the original script and that he changed the ending after meeting the woman who would become his wife. I said to Zanna that this was the ultimate instantiation of the sort of privileged thinking so typical of the middle aged white man with a God complex: The way you perceive the world is the way it must be.
Zanna, who usually loves this sort of critique, and who so often applies it to me, disagreed. "He was in love," she said. "Love changes people. It affects the way they think."
I couldn't believe it. I'd taken a position so uncontroversial in this household as to be essentially scripture, and still somehow she'd found a way to disagree with it.
Harry and Sally end up together or they don't, and, at least according to Rob Reiner, these are both equally plausible outcomes of the preceding series of events. That's a pretty unromantic view of one of the world's most famous romantic comedies, but those are the beliefs of a middle aged white man with a God complex. Who am I to argue?
When Harry Met Sally is available to rent on Apple TV and Google Play
