When a couple’s “how they met” story takes 95 minutes to be told, it’s either a case of a couple’s friends trying desperately “not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together, together again” (2) or it’s 1989’s When Harry Met Sally. In this case, it’s both.
The film’s title is its first joke: it implies a love-at-first-sight kind of narrative, but instead delivers a twelve-year slow burn in which its titular characters meet, decide they never want to speak to each other again, rinse, and repeat. The audience stands by as they gradually grow to understand each other and become friends, entwining each other slowly in their own lives (to the extent of helping one another move, carrying a Christmas tree on foot, and setting each other up on blind dates who eventually skip the middlemen entirely and marry each other). They spend twelve years “stuck in an orbit around the foci of desire and contempt. This is a fairly familiar perception of what marriage is. The conversation of what I call the genre of remarriage is, judging from the films I take to define it, of a sort that leads to acknowledgment; to the reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness” (18). In fact, to read When Harry Met Sally as a tale of whirlwind romance/marriage (the drive from Chicago to New York), divorce (the next ten years), and reconciliation (the New Year’s Eve party where Harry confesses his love for Sally) allows the plot to hang together much better than a traditionalist reading of the film confirming Harry’s statement at its start, that men and women cannot be friends because, in his words, “the sex part gets in the way”.
It is similarly easier to understand the couple’s struggle to (re)marry not as proof that platonic relationships between men and women do not exist, but rather, as Cavell points out, as “a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man” (17). At the end of the film Sally cannot accept Harry’s love confession for what it is until she is sure that he isn’t just lonely or bored, just as at its start she brushes off his attempts at flirting because she believes they are half-hearted and based in condescension (which they are). It is not until a sense of equality between Sally and Harry is constructed that the “phase of development” can transform itself into a (re)marriage.