A Wonderful Life
by Rax King
At intervals throughout Rob Reiner’s 1989 romcom When Harry Met Sally…, an elderly married couple sits on a loveseat, describing how they fell in love. These interstitial clips feature actors, not actual couples, but the stories are real and come from screenwriter Nora Ephron’s interviews with people who worked for the film’s production company. One husband and wife met as counselors at neighboring summer camps, while another pair had lived within blocks of each other for decades without ever meeting. My favorite couple were wed for three years, got divorced, and remarried thirty-five years later when the husband ditched his girlfriend at a funeral to take his ex-wife on a date.
When I first saw the film, I began imagining what my own turn on the loveseat would look like with this or that partner, if Reiner were to interview us. We were in a blackout and our legs touched under the bar, I might say in the same warm tranquil voice that Reiner’s interviewees speak in, or, He was so nervous when he kissed me that I could feel his heart jackhammering through his sweatshirt. My stories were a little scummier than those of Reiner’s summer camp sweethearts but no less wholesome, as I believe he would have agreed. Reiner’s romantic comedies understand how wrongness runs through love like marbling through meat. He sympathizes with everyone who’s been crushed underfoot by love, and with all the people doing the crushing, too.
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