Love story / Green day
Today: Rax King, the author of essay collections Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer and the recently published Sloppy; and Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.
Issue No. 463
A Wonderful Life
Rax King
Becoming Kermit
Amy Chu
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.
It saddened me this morning to learn that Reiner had died, and then it took me several hours to learn that he and his wife Michele Singer Reiner had been murdered. One doesn’t necessarily assume foul play when one hears that a 78-year-old man has passed away. I understood what had happened only when I stumbled on Trump’s Truth Social “eulogy,” a masterwork of petty narcissism which made it clear both that the Reiners had been killed and that he found it funny to blame “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” caps lock very much sic. When I found out, my first thought was obviously who on earth would want to kill Rob Reiner?—and when I found out their son Nick is in police custody in connection with his parents’ deaths, I put my phone away.
Seventy-eight years is a damn good run no matter how it ends, and few artists had a better run than Reiner. It’s not just that he made so many great films; it’s that, in multiple genres, he made the film, the standard of its type against which others will forever be compared. No mockumentary is more cherished than This Is Spinal Tap, no coming-of-age story more influential than Stand By Me. And of course, between The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally…, Reiner basically remade the romantic comedy in his own laughing, neurotic, incomparably Jewish image. Part of what I’ve always loved about the interviews in the latter film is how Jewish most of these couples seem to be, with the exception of a Chinese couple whose segment discussing their arranged marriage has not aged well. But all the people in all the other clips are at least Jewish in the sense that, as Lenny Bruce once said, a Catholic living in New York is still Jewish. That is to say they kibbitz like Jews, they interrupt each other like Jews, and their English has the warm throaty qualities of Yiddish.
Keep us breathing fire!
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