“Very few people end up knowing who you are,” Nora Ephron told an interviewer in 2010, two years before she died. An odd thing for her to say, in some ways, given that lots and lots of people do in fact know who Nora Ephron is. But there’s knowing and then there’s knowing: there’s recognising and then there’s understanding. And I don’t think Nora Ephron, who would have been 80 today, ever expected to be understood.
Even if you don’t know her name, you’ve probably seen her movies; and even if you haven’t seen her movies, you know about that bit of When Harry Met Sally. And even if you absolutely insist that you live in a state of perfect Ephron-innocence, the incredible pervasiveness of her work means she’s still the author and the architect of a large chunk of the way we all think about women and men and love. Her sensibility is the sensibility of the modern romcom. It feeds into most of the sitcoms that have been filmed in New York since 1989: Friends and Seinfeld and 30 Rock.
When someone’s influence is so strong, their originality can be obscured. The three films Ephron made starring Meg Ryan between 1989 and 1998 — When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail match screwball sensibility with a dash of therapised insight, and always a happy ending (“I insist on happy endings,” wrote Ephron in her 1983 novel Heartburn). There’s the meet-cute, followed by a flurry of very funny adversity between Meg Ryan’s character and the male lead. Finally, love wins.
If it sounds cliched now, it’s only fair to acknowledge that Ephron was rewriting the rules at the time. The release of When Harry Met Sally coincided with what Susan Faludi considered the height of the anti-feminist backlash in cinema, when movies offered “morality tales in which the ‘good mother’ wins and the independent woman gets punished”, and told women that they were “unhappy because they were too free”. The same year When Harry Met Sally came out, Disney released The Little Mermaid, and I watched and rewatched Ariel on VHS, learning the songs and learning the message that a handsome prince is worth giving up your family, your home and even your voice for.
When Harry Met Sally has none of that. Sally has a job, just like Harry has a job, and you see exactly the same amount of each of them at work. There’s not even a hint that Sally needs to be broken in and saved from her own unseemly ambition. Sally has friends, and Harry has friends, and they both complain to their friends about the opposite sex — which means that the film fails the Bechdel test, but it also fails the anti-Bechdel test, so it all evens out. It’s equality, of a kind.
It’s certainly not a morality tale. Sally’s best friend Marie (played by Carrie Fisher) starts the movie as the mistress of a never-seen married man: the running joke is that every conversation concludes with her saying “he’ll never leave her”. And is Marie punished for this assault on the institution of monogamy? Is she perhaps drowned in the bath and then shot in the chest by the wronged wife, Fatal Attraction-style?
No, she is not. Instead Marie meets and marries a perfectly nice man, and they’re very happy together. When Harry Met Sally’s diner scene giddily busted the omertà around men’s sexual incompetence and the way women cosset men’s egos; but on my last watch, the cool refusal of judgement towards the adulteress struck me as equally feminist in a quiet way.
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