Cinematic Nostalgia: “When Harry Met Sally” Was The First Romantic Comedy For Boomers

From a Vanity Fair article by Sonia Saraiya

“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.”

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.