© Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.
My first memory of When Harry Met Sally… is that I wasn’t allowed to watch it. When I think about the film now, I see it as a romance—an inverted one, where love does not come until 12 years after first sight, but a love story nonetheless. But When Harry Met Sally…’s unwholesome raciness—the faked orgasm, the f-bombs, the woman who meows in the throes of passion—featured prominently in the film’s marketing campaign. So did the film’s central, provocative, deeply heteronormative question: Can men and women ever “just” be friends? And it needed an R rating to answer that question, too! The film glowed with forbidden allure.
My parents held the common, irrational conviction that watching sexuality was much worse than watching violence. I somehow saw The Killing Fields before I watched When Harry Met Sally…; if you can’t guess from the title, The Killing Fields is a harrowing movie about genocide in Cambodia.
So what I first learned about When Harry Met Sally…, besides its cast, was that Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in the movie. Someone had to explain the joke to me after an assembly in which a visiting lecturer made a joke about having a When Harry Met Sally… moment to an auditorium full of middle schoolers. (No one laughed.) I wasn’t entirely sure what an orgasm was, let alone how to fake one. But it seemed like a power move.
Now this movie is one of my formative texts, those stories shelved in your brain that gradually become a part of your psychology. It goes without saying that it’s magnificent, a combination of talents at the height of their powers, coupled with filmmaking that treasured its characters, atmosphere, and setting.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in Katz's Deli, the site of the famously faked orgasm. ©Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.
When Harry Met Sally… is a collection of finely hewn set pieces—nearly all of which pivot around nothing more than a conversation. (Marie with the Rolodex at the Central Park Boathouse! Jess and Harry doing the wave in Giants Stadium after Harry’s divorce! The “wagon wheel, Roy Rogers, garage sale coffee table”!) I’ve seen it so many times that I don’t watch it so much as remind myself of what happens next, mouthing the dialogue to myself. I realized that I have unconsciously adopted a hairstyle close to Ryan’s in the film, a curly shag with bangs.
Writer Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner used When Harry Met Sally… as a canvas to explore heterosexual partnership, infusing the leads played by Ryan and Billy Crystal with facets of their respective personalities. Ryan was in her first role as Ephron’s muse and stand-in, playing fussiness to the point of painful, adorable tenderness. Crystal was the recipient of Reiner’s projections, creating in Harry a brooding jokester who prefers sports to feelings.
The story springs past Harry and Sally’s tortured relationship to explore other characters—notably Carrie Fisher as Marie, Sally’s best friend, who inelegantly falls for Harry’s best friend, Jess, played by Bruno Kirby. The main story is broken up by little interviews with happily married elderly couples. (The dialogue comes from interviews with real-life couples, but actors were hired to perform the lines onscreen.) It’s an ecstatic survey of marriage, a loving portrait of loving.
And though it is candid about sex, the film is barely racy; there’s only one actual sex scene, and it’s not particularly hot. It’s not heaving bosoms and rippling abs; it’s bookish New Yorkers and a dozen-odd old people talking about their love lives. Ephron and Reiner’s love language pushed the envelope in 1989 in a way that seems rather tame now: As I grew up and began to dabble in romantic partnerships myself, When Harry Met Sally… felt like the rare option I wanted to emulate and embody, and I studied it like a textbook. In many ways, it’s a manual for romantic partnership—a funny, entertaining film that’s closely attentive to the nuts and bolts of falling in love.
Billy Crystal, director Rob Reiner, and Meg Ryan. © Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
Still, I understand where my parents were coming from. Watching When Harry Met Sally… as an adult, it feels as if the movie spills some secrets that grown-ups aren’t supposed to share—about the messiness of attraction, the circuitous path of romance, the erotic tension in spirited antagonism. It’s about how another person can become a part of you despite your best intentions. Behind the film’s wryly entertaining tone, there’s a wild liveliness that animates the characters, a combination of deep-seated longings and carnal passions. Harry has to learn to confront his feelings. Sally has to learn to assert her orgasm.
Ryan is translucent with her character’s emotions, and Crystal’s never been as darkly alluring, or worn his facial hair better. They have the opposite of a meet-cute in the opening scene—a meet-hate. But Harry and Sally’s mutual antipathy still fuels their curiosity about each other, extending their initial conversation into a years-long back-and-forth that becomes their lifelong partnership.
The famous question that begins their charged, decade-long dance—the idea of sex—haunts their relationship for more than 10 years, shutting down intimacy, sparking their anger, and occasionally, making them dishonest. When they do have sex, it changes everything. The film is constructed around the idea of Harry and Sally’s friendship—and their romance only progresses because they attempt to be friends. But by the end, their friendship succumbs to love; the sex thing, as Harry said from the start, never went away.
Billy Crystal. © Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.
More than thirty years after it premiered, I’m finally in the kind of romantic partnership the movie depicts. I’m not entirely sure if studying the film has prepared me for this marriage, as I sort of hoped it would. But it was a little affirming, and a little painful, to watch the movie again and feel so close to its ups and downs—the push and pull of intimacy, the slow pace of personal growth. When Harry Met Sally… has served as this example I could keep in my pocket of what love should feel like—an endless, unspooling conversation with a partner who, like a counterweight, provides equilibrium.
A postscript: My husband and I are going to be have a Hindu wedding ceremony later this summer, and in an effort to understand what we’re promising each other, I looked up the translations of the Sanskrit vows. Amusingly, the bride and groom are charged to love one another as friends, even as they explicitly vow to maintain an active sex life. (Other vows: fidelity, mutual support, rights to livestock.) Sex doesn’t seem to diminish the friendship, but rather to enhance it—and it seems as if that’s the hidden postscript of When Harry Met Sally…, lurking under its sexy, rated-R veneer. Perhaps some men and some women can’t just be friends. But spouses better be friends already.
Sonia Saraiya is Vanity Fair’s television critic. Previously she was at Variety, Salon, and The A.V. Club. She lives in New York.