Salon.com > When Harry Met Sally

Nora’s brand-new world for women

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 19:36:00 +0000

Early Wednesday morning, in the hours after Nora Ephron died, I had a loopy, obvious nightmare about a road trip during the summer solstice and a papier-mâché map laid out on the floor that was terrifyingly rearranged, so that I couldn’t find the places I needed to go. Nora was there, dressed in white, not her customary black, so pale of face and hair that I could see through her. Dream-Nora, or, I guess, ghost-Nora, was trying to give me financial advice, telling me to buy “incentives” and saying she had more to say but that by the time I returned from wherever I was going, she’d be gone.

When I woke in the middle of the night crying, something I thought only happened in movies, I tried to explain the dream to my husband. “She was going to tell me more,” I wept, trying to explain the “incentives,” the solstice, the road trip. Finally I heard myself sob angrily, my nose running and tears streaming with the fury of a child: “And the map of the world was all changed!”

When I say that Nora Ephron drew a map for many of us, I don’t just mean that she paved the roads and put up signposts for the female journalists, filmmakers, novelists (and really, female professionals of every stripe) who came after her, though she did.

Nora Ephron’s romantic-comedy revolution

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 16:35:00 +0000

Nora Ephron apparently once said that all romantic comedies, from the 1930s onward, were just attempts to rewrite and restage "The Taming of the Shrew" and "Pride and Prejudice." She was right about that, of course, and was far too intelligent a person to claim that she had invented anything new. Her now-classic scripts for "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle" depend upon the simplest of reversals -- the two people who seem so wrong for each other are actually right for each other -- and the proposition that the war between the sexes ends in the mutual surrender of marriage. How much these ideas reflect reality is debatable, at best, but as comic conventions they have endured for centuries.

Ephron also learned from Shakespeare and Jane Austen that the genre requires a little bite, the threat of emotional violence not far below the surface. Meg Ryan's last words to Billy Crystal in "When Harry Met Sally," right before the big clinch, are, "I hate you, Harry. I really hate you." Ephron was both a traditionalist and a revolutionary, or perhaps a traditional revolutionary; she brought romantic comedy into the era of feminism without challenging its fundamental assumptions about men and women and what they want. Maybe that reflects underlying truths about human nature and maybe it doesn't, but it certainly both reflected and affected the Zeitgeist of turn-of-the-century America. Ephron's best scripts offered the comfort of an old-fashioned love story in what felt like a fizzy, urbane contemporary setting.

Did Nora Ephron’s “When Harry Met Sally” ruin male-female friendship?

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 15:15:00 +0000

Mary Elizabeth Williams: Let me start by saying I adore Nora Ephron, who died yesterday evening at 71. Her essays introduced me to Fay Weldon and, more significantly, Jane Austen, when I was a teenager. "Silkwood" had one of the first great LGBT characters I ever saw in a movie. Her New Yorker essay about Manhattan real estate, just a few years ago, made me laugh and weep like something out of a Nancy Meyers movie.

But her greatest legacy will likely be ruining countless viable, thriving, necessary relationships. That, and giving us the phrase "Steve Harvey, relationship expert." I'm talking about "When Harry Met Sally." The moment Harry said, "Men and women can't be friends" 23 years ago, it passed from being a provocative line uttered by a guy who, by the way, is pretty much a jerk, and into accepted doctrine. "When Harry Met Sally" remains an ersatz Woody Allen movie about two incredibly irritating people. I still can't think of that film without wishing it'd been "When Jess Met Marie."

Remembering Nora Ephron

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 23:30:00 +0000

We once wrote of Nora Ephron that "her cultural influence is so elemental ... she’s like hydrogen." We've written about -- and chatted with -- her and her work so frequently that when news broke Tuesday evening of her death, it came as a swift, sad shock.

So we immediately returned to -- and urge you to, as well -- Rebecca Traister's fine and defining profile of Ephron in 2006:

For 40 years, Nora Ephron has been a wicked social critic and storyteller, spotting and eviscerating trends, spinning somber tales into comic gold, and revivifying a moribund cinematic genre — the romantic comedy — for a country still trying to recover from the sexual revolution. She began her writing career in the ’60s as a reporter for the New York Post and covered the media, fashion and women’s issues for Esquire and New York magazines in the ’70s. In 1983 she wrote the novel “Heartburn” and then adapted it for film; soon she was penning Oscar-nominated scripts for “Silkwood” and “When Harry Met Sally,” and by the time the ’90s rolled in, she had largely abandoned journalism for Hollywood, directing and producing movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail” and “Bewitched.” It was in this last stage of her career that Ephron became most famous; these starry, heavily soundtracked films are also what got her labeled schmaltzy.

Yet while she has surely trafficked in some synthetic twinkle, Ephron is no sap. In fact, in much of her work, she is a lot like her beloved Manhattan: protean, resilient, sharp, eager to crack a grim smile in bad times, susceptible to big-strings romanticism, but often willing to resist — yes, resist — sentimentality in the face of change.