Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (12 page)

‘Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare’ – No! Stop it!

‘Someone is staring at you in personal growth’ – Stop! You promised you wouldn’t do this!

‘You know, I’m so glad I never got involved with you. I just would have ended up being some woman you had to get up out of bed and leave at three in the morning and go clean your andirons, and you don’t even have a fireplace – not that I would know this.’

Ah well. It takes a stronger woman than me to resist the pithy power of the Ephron.

But as funny and wise as
When Harry Met Sally
…
is – and it is so funny and wise, and we’ll return to this – the funniest thing about it is that it was dismissed by the critics when it was released. The
New York Times
described it as ‘the sitcom version of a Woody Allen film’ (critics can be real idiots) and it was only nominated for one Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay – and it lost that to
Dead Poets Society
.
^fn3
Dead Poets Society
! Well, I did tell you the Oscars were stupid.

I get the surface comparisons with Allen – the white on black opening credits, the adoring shots of New York City, the privileged uptown world, the hat-wearing women – but
When Harry Met Sally …
is nothing like a Woody Allen movie, even though plenty of critics still beg to differ on that point (writer Mark Harris memorably described it as ‘not
Annie Hall
but a movie about people who have seen
Annie Hall
’).

Like the best of Ephron’s writing – her journalism,
Heartburn
, her essays –
When Harry Met Sally …
has the precision of a personal story but is actually interested in drawing out universal truths. Allen, by contrast, is only ever interested in his stories and would never dream of suggesting that they somehow say something about anybody but him, and sometimes that’s great and sometimes it’s less so. When people talk today about the message of
When Harry Met Sally …
, they think of Harry’s claim that ‘men and women can’t be friends’, and how the movie seems to confirm that. But Ephron said she didn’t believe that at all. Instead, she wrote:

What
When Harry Met Sally …
is really about is how different men and women are. The truth is that men don’t want to be friends with women. Men know they don’t understand women, and they don’t much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they’re not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sport, and I have no idea what else. Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don’t understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what’s more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help.

Gender generalisations are, as a generalisation, abhorrent, but it takes a truly po-faced pedant not to delight in this one. Imagine a romcom today being built on this kind of subtle wisdom. And as abhorrent as gender generalisations are, I think only a man could ever claim that
When Harry Met Sally …
feels like an Allen movie. Sally and her female friends are so different from the kinds of women you find in Allen’s movies they may as well be aliens, because the women in
When Harry Met Sally …
were written by someone who didn’t just like women, but understood them.

Unusually for a romcom – or any movie, for that matter –
When Harry Met Sally …
is equally interested in the women in the film as it is in the men, and the reason for this is Ephron was writing about real people. Harry was based on Rob Reiner, the film’s director, and Sally was based on Ephron herself: ‘I realized that I had found a wonderful character in Rob Reiner. Rob is a very strange person. He is extremely funny, but he is also extremely depressed … but he wasn’t at all depressed about being depressed; in fact, he loved his depression,’ Ephron wrote. ‘And because Harry was bleak and depressed, it followed absolutely that Sally would be cheerful and chirpy and relentlessly, pointlessly, unrealistically, idiotically optimistic. Which is, it turns out, very much like me.’

Incidentally, the best female character Allen ever wrote was also based on a real person – Annie Hall, which was a straight-up homage to his ex-girlfriend Diane Keaton (real name: Diane Hall). Anyone who thinks that an author is cheating if they use real life in their fiction is a fool. Real life is often what gives fiction its truth, and good fiction in turn helps us understand real life. Ephron knew better than anyone that real life is the stuff great fiction is made of: ‘Everything is copy,’ was her mother’s mantra and this attitude turned her into a legend when she turned her brutal divorce from Carl Bernstein into one of the funniest novels ever written,
Heartburn
. So it seems like the best way to honour her memory would be to write a little bit about the personal relationship I have to this movie.

I first saw
When Harry Met Sally
… when I was a teenager, almost a decade after it came out. I must have watched it in London, where we moved to from New York in 1989, in our living room on our dying VHS, and the character I related to immediately wasn’t Sally, the female lead who wants to be a writer, but Harry, the miserable and proud-of-his-misery Jew. Harry was the first character I’d ever seen in a film who was Jewish the way I was Jewish: if someone was asked what religion they thought Harry and I are, they’d probably say ‘Jewish’, but it wouldn’t be the first personality attribute you’d list about either of us (that would be ‘self-absorbed’). This was Jewishness the way I knew Jewishness – being Jew-ish – and not the self-conscious outsider and faintly minstrel Jew-y-ness that Woody Allen portrayed. Also, like Harry, I was miserable, in a way that only an extremely privileged, middle-class teenage girl from a very nice family can be miserable. And like Harry, I made the mistake of thinking that made me deep.

It wasn’t – and it still isn’t – easy being a female movie fan. Movies tend to be written and directed by men, which means that the female characters are generally insane or boring. I only began to notice this when I moved on from eighties teen films, where I had Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Winona Ryder and Jennifer Jason Leigh for companionship, to nineties movies for grown-ups, where my options felt hugely reduced. So when I was a teenager and I wondered who would play me in the biopic of my life (I told you I was self-obsessed), I settled on Bill Murray. Only he had the qualities of humour, cynicism and lovable-ness that I was sure would be appreciated in me one day. Until I saw
When Harry Met Sally …
, that is, and then I thought Billy Crystal might just make the cut. After all, he was Jew-ish. And miserable. And deep.

But as I grew older, I began to see a different strength in the movie, one I had entirely missed when I was younger because, like Harry, I was too self-obsessed: I began to see Sally. And this is when my life began to change thanks to
When Harry Met Sally
(I’m going to skip the ellipses hereon: I get the point of them in the title but they’re annoying to type and even more annoying to read, and I don’t think Ephron would mind. She never even liked the title).

So as I was saying, it’s not always easy to be a female movie fan, especially a female fan of comedies. Men are generally the protagonists of comedies, because comedies tend to be written by men, so it’s easy to grow up resenting your gender, a little. Why do you have to be a woman? Women are boring. Women are there just to laugh at the men’s jokes, or be the disapproving shrew. Women don’t get the good lines. Women are Margaret Dumont and men are the Marx Brothers, and I like Margaret Dumont (especially when she was wearing a swimming costume – her swimming costumes in the Marx Brothers films were amazing), but I prefer clowning to making moues of disapproval at Groucho. Worse, when you grow up watching men play leads in films, as I increasingly did, you get used to wanting everything to work out well for men, because you’ve been trained to be on their side. I spent years staying in relationships with men who were not worth my body, let alone my time, because I worried that if I broke up with them they’d be sad like Lloyd Dobler was in
Say Anything
(it turned out, they weren’t, because Lloyd Dobler is fictional) (and also, those guys were all idiots).

Until, that is,
When Harry Met Sally
. It’s written by a very funny woman and therefore features many funny women. Sally is not just Harry’s straight sidekick – the Sigourney Weaver to Dr Venckman, or the Buttercup to his Westley. Sally doesn’t even have to perform any of the three functions women are usually lumbered with in romcoms: pine desperately for the man, make the man grow up by being a nagging shrew, or be liberated from her frigid bitchiness by the power of his amazing penis. In fact, for the first half of the film it’s Harry who’s heartbroken after his ex-wife left him for Ira the accountant, making him the vulnerable, humiliated, needy one. Sally supports him – helping him lay carpet, singing songs from
Oklahoma!
with him – because she is seemingly over her ex-boyfriend Joe (‘“I am over him,” Sally says, when she isn’t over him at all; I have uttered that line far too many times in my life, and far too many times in my life I have believed it was true,’ Ephron wrote).

Here, I realised, was an adult female character who wanted love, but wasn’t pathetic, and was loved, but also human. She wasn’t just Harry’s romantic quarry – she was her own person. I was thrilled when I read that Ephron based Sally on herself because that meant Sally must be Jewish. I’m not some cinematic Zionist who can only enjoy her characters if they’re kosher, but this proved that the film doesn’t follow that insufferable template of having a goyish woman fall for a Jewish man because of his allegedly adorable Jewish qualities, and the Jewish man falls for her in turn because she is not (mazel tov, sir!) a Jewish woman. Woody Allen populated the cliché and Judd Apatow has since flogged it to death (while Larry David has waved the flag for it on TV). In Sally, Ephron coined that rare-to-the-point-of-non-existent film character: a desirable Jewish woman. A Jew-ish woman. Sally also pointed out to me that being miserable didn’t mean I was deep. It meant that I was just ruining my own life.

Sally’s relationship with her girlfriends, especially Marie (Carrie Fisher), is one of my favourite things about the movie. Her friends are portrayed as a source of support, but also have lives of their own (an extreme rarity in a movie, in which friends usually exist merely to be friends with the protagonist). This makes their friendship feel utterly, utterly real. ‘You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right,’ Marie chants in self-recrimination whenever Sally tells her, for the ten thousandth time, that Marie’s married lover will never leave his wife for her.

Like Sally and Marie, I lived in New York City in my early thirties and, like them, I dated some absolute shockers who I should have been smart enough to avoid. It turned out, much to my surprise, that even those of us who grow up hoping to be as wise and cynical as Dr Venckman make the same grim, boring, sad mistakes as so many other women, and for exactly the same reasons: we’re hopeful, we’re suckers, we’re lonely. Ephron knew that, but didn’t mock women for it, or depict them as pathetic for wanting companionship; rather, she regarded them with fond affection, and that made me do the same about myself, eventually. Bad romcoms stigmatise and deride feelings of heartbreak and loneliness, and make me feel like I’m being a shameful cliché for desiring love, like some subnormal character in a Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl movie. Good romcoms, like
When Harry Met Sally
, reassure me that this is what it’s like to be a human being. Every time my best friend Carol made these mistakes we’d call each other for reassurance, just as Sally and Marie do, and the other one would say, ‘You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right.’ And eventually, the point would sink in: don’t beat yourself up about this, but get yourself together and move on.

Writing good romcoms is hard. You can’t fake them because most people recognise when something is funny and most people have been in love, whereas no one is a superhero so you can do whatever you want there. I was amazed when I read in an essay that Ephron ‘struggled’ with the screenplay for
When Harry Met Sally
and that ‘it was really hard’ (‘I was just doing it for the money,’ she cheerfully admits), because it reads as smoothly and effortlessly as a bunch of friends talking.

It makes me laugh when I hear male screenwriters today insist they don’t write female characters because, well, how can they possibly understand women, what with them just being dumb lugs? In an interview with the
Guardian
, Evan Goldberg, writer of the bro-heavy comedies
Superbad
and
This is the End
, offered what he thought was a reasonable explanation for why there are so few female roles in his movies: ‘I’m a guy! I’m not as good at writing about women. Kristen Wiig [who wrote
Bridesmaids
] is way better. I don’t fully understand my wife’s emotions – and I’m supposed to write an excellent female character and unravel the secret of women?’

And he learned this mentality from his mentor, Judd Apatow, who that same year said the following to the
New Yorker
: ‘The reality is, I’m a dude and I understand the dude thing, so I lean men just the way Spike Lee leans African-American.’ Imagine how different movies would be if more men realised that women are humans and not an entirely different species. Because insisting you can’t write dialogue for the opposite gender is not being gender-sensitive, it’s being lazy.

So what happened after Harry and Sally’s ellipses? Well, there was an absolute glut of romcoms in the nineties, starting with the mighty behemoth of
Pretty Woman
, the timeless and romantic tale of what happens when a rich asshole picks up a hooker in LA for a blow job. Some nineties romcoms were a complete delight (
Four Weddings and a Funeral
,
Groundhog Day
,
The Wedding Singer
), but even Ephron’s romcoms had diminishing returns, going from the magic of
When Harry Met Sally
to the sweetness of
Sleepless in Seattle
to the meh-ness of
You’ve Got Mail
. By the late nineties and early noughties, the trend had switched to raunch with male leads, kick-started by
There’s Something About Mary
. Hollywood made more romcoms with male leads (
Along Came Polly
,
Garden State
), which were increasingly tired and formulaic and were written solely from a male perspective.