The Quiet Cruelty of <em>When Harry Met Sally</em>
There’s a scene midway through When Harry Met Sally that finds the rom-com’s title couple, one evening, in bed—separate beds, each in their respective apartments, shown on a split screen. The will-they-or-won’t-they best friends, currently in the won’t-they stage of things, are talking on the phone as they watch Casablanca on TV. “Ingrid Bergman,” Harry muses. “Now she’s low-maintenance.”
“Low-maintenance?” Sally asks.
“There are two kinds of women,” Harry explains, anticipating her question: “high-maintenance and low-maintenance.”
“And Ingrid Bergman is low-maintenance?”
“An L-M, definitely,” Harry replies.
“Which one am I?”
Harry has anticipated this question, too—of course Sally would wonder. “You’re the worst kind,” he says, coolly. “You’re high-maintenance, but you think you’re low-maintenance.”
It’s not one of the scenes , which turns 30 years old this month, is best known for—not , not , not the “.” It’s quieter, and more functional: The scene works mostly to suggest, in a movie about love’s contingencies, a cosmic kind of wrongness. Here are Harry and
