Never Speak Ill Of A Woman: Taking When Harry Met Sally Personally

I have fond memories of When Harry Met Sally, at least in part because I saw it in first runs back when Hollywood made movies for actual grownups, ones that didn’t involve the whole cast in gaudy spandex uniforms. The film itself did quite nicely at the time, hauling in $92.8M, and a good bit of critical acclaim as well (viz. Roger Ebert’s contemporaneous review). I have my criticisms of it; Billy Crystal’s excellent comedic acting takes the edge off Harry Burns’ self-absorption. His character in isolation is a real ass, something screenwriter Nora Ephron drew from an early interview with director Rob Reiner after the latter’s recent divorce. Reiner has always struck me as something of a narcissist, so this goes a long way toward my own bias confirmation.

But as everyone knows now, We Can’t Have Nice Things, at least not so long as women come in for any sort of criticism at all, and thus the motive for Megan Garber’s “The Quiet Cruelty of When Harry Met Sally”. I can’t tell if the author is trying to live out Sally Albright’s life as a woman who thinks she’s low maintenance but is actually high maintenance, but she apparently lives in timorous fear of being so labeled. That is, she takes the movie as a 30-year-old attack on her:

What I did think about, though, every once in a while, was whether the text message I was about to send might make me seem high-maintenance. What I did sometimes wonder, packing a carry-on for a week-long trip, was whether I might be, in spite of myself, “the worst kind.” Movies’ magic can take many forms. Their words can become part of you, as can their flaws. Thirty years after When Harry Met Sally premiered, in this moment that is reassessing what it means for women to desire, it’s hard not to see a little bit of tragedy woven into comedy’s easy comforts. Sally may have gotten a happy ending; she waited so long for it, though. And waiting is not as romantic as her movie believes it to be. Maybe there were times along the way when she almost said something to Harry but didn’t, understanding how easily her preferences could be dismissed as inconvenient. Maybe she questioned herself. Maybe she knew that, despite it all, women who just want it the way they want it are still assumed to be wanting too much.

Never mind that the author behind this terror was an actual woman, no; never mind that, maybe, just maybe, being overly demanding impedes actual happiness. Men mansplain, they manspread on subways, and women get awards for designing uncomfortable furniture to suppress the latter. The slings and arrows of life are fine for men, who must comport themselves to women, but women are always and ever above criticism, even the mildest sort, lest they collapse in a heap of neuroses, as the author.