When Harry Met Sally...

This is officially the 7th movie that I have given a 5/5 rating after my first viewing. 

I came into this intending to give it a 4 based on vibes -- 4 is my average, and I thought this would be average. I first logged this at a 4, then as I thought more about it, I bumped it to a 4.5. By the time I finished writing this out at 4:00 AM after a caffeinated night of watching this film, thinking about how the plot surprisingly parallels a number of philosophical ideas I was familiar with, and digging beneath and perpetually rewatching the dining scenes, it was clear that this deserved a 5. 

What an incredibly exceptional film. Enjoy reading my thoughts below.
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This film is a deceptively cute rom-com. Digging a bit below the surface points to deeper philosophical currents, particularly in the context of food, relationships, and romance. For Harry and Sally, dining in particular serves as a vehicle for building intimacy, managing desire, and negotiating control. Over the dinner table, they tacitly convey their outlooks on life, philosophical allegiances, and general worldviews.

Sally's hyper-specific orders embody her need for control in a chaotic world. Like Descartes or Kant, she hopes to reduce chaos down to simple, predictable, rule-bound systems, showing her faith in a rationalist impulse that reality can be ordered, managed, and improved. Yet, as Sally enters spaces outside of the dining table, she realizes that her world cannot be fully deduced and puppeteered into simple parts. She faces the fact that her life cannot operate like the dining table, and relationships are not as simple as ordering a plate of food exactly how she wants it. If the dining table demonstrates her rationalist, Enlightenment-rooted optimism of reality, then the world outside of it makes her confront an existentialist dilemma: that her life is not as orderable as she hoped. 

Yet, for Harry, food is just food -- it is a straightforward satisfaction of appetite, hunger, and devoid of ceremony or ritual. He eats to not feel hungry, and whenever he feels hungry, he eats. By stripping the dining experience of nuance, Harry repeats the same principle underlying his famous line, "men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way" -- he reduces complex, multifaceted relationships to a single, base drive. 

In his perspectives toward dining, sex, and complex human relationships, Harry hints at a Hobbesian impulse toward desire, as well as his alignment with existentialist absurdism. Hobbes argues that our lives are simple repetitions of us fulfilling one singular desire after another, but only in the service of satisfying our own innate self-interest. Harry exercises this Hobbesian muscle by taking valuable social goods, such as friendship or the dining ritual, and insisting that they will always collapse into an innate desire to consume and satisfy some "fundamental" need. 

Harry's Hobbesian impulses are coupled with absurdist tendencies as well. For Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, existentialist absurdism rests on the view that life has no pre-given "script" or "meaning", which suggests that nothing is guaranteed (including relationships) and implies that if we desire something, it must be constructed, not discovered. Yet, unlike Camus' idea of "revolting" against absurdity by living life to the fullest, Harry uses the premise of absurdist thought as a measure to fall into cynicism and protect himself from being harmed. For Harry, if nothing is guaranteed, and life has no pre-written script, then being cynical feels safer than jumping into the unknown and becoming vulnerable. At the dining table, this is seen in how he doesn't fuss with the menu -- he is willing to accept imperfection and surrenders to the menu's chaos in order to prevent himself from feeling disappointed. By refraining from the act of adjusting his order to his own preferences, Harry falters in the face of absurdity, rather than attempting to take advantage and live in the menu's chaos. 

The film doesn't simply cement each character in their initial postures toward dining, though. As the film unfolds, the dining table slowly, but surely, transforms into a site for playfulness, intimacy, and ritual. 

As a preface to the thoughts below, it's important to note that this film has undercut the main artery that powered rom coms for decades: the "lighting strike" moment where two people fall in love at first sight. "When Harry Met Sally" testifies that love does not always come into fruition like this. It posits that relationships, romantic or otherwise, unfold across years of banal repetition, through things like walks together, coffee, calling one another while watching Casablanca, and run-ins at the bookstore. 

The film's radical departure from the dominant rom-com canon is firmly rooted in the philosophy of pragmatism. Pioneered by John Dewey and Henry James, pragmatism posits that meaning in life is not discovered in some sudden one-off event, but rather, is made in the course of lived experiences. Harry and Sally build their love in that same way -- through iteration and ritual over many years.

Over the dining table, they put that philosophy into practice; the mundane act of splitting a dessert or chatting over sandwiches is where their love for each other grows. It grows not because they are theatrical moments of love at first sight. Their love for one another flourishes through perpetual repetition, compromise, and shared experience with each other over the course of many years. In this vein, eating together is not incidental, but essential for their relationship -- it is how they perform care, companionship, and a willingness to return, again and again, to the same table, across from the same person. At the end of the film, Harry admits that he loves Sally not for some grand metaphysical justification, but because of the small things: for the way her brow furrows when she gets angry, for how she gets really cold when it is barely chilly out, and for the way she takes forever to order her food. Their buildup of various shared routines, like splitting a slice of pie for dessert, is precisely what enables him to find those details. 

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Many things can potentially go wrong when ordering a meal -- the dish could be out of stock, it could be prepared with an allergen, or it could come out and taste terrible. 

Sally treats this set of chaotic risks in her dining experiences as a miniature arena to test her theory of imposing order on the world -- that if she is precise enough, order will prevail. Yet, by the film's second act, she is confronted with the existentialist dilemma that there is no controlled order or neatness to our world, and the control she feels at the dining table doesn't necessarily carry over elsewhere. 

Harry sees this chaos and pegs it to his belief that life is a project of repeatedly satisfying various appetites. For him, dining is simply consuming for fuel, and love boils down to sex. After roughly the second act in the film, Harry enters a period of turmoil and decides that if nothing is really guaranteed, then it is better to believe that love never lasts. He doesn't embrace the chaos, but continues to shrug in its face. 

However, by the end of the film, Harry and Sally accept that meaning in their lives is built through the ordinary together. They embody pragmatic thinking by grounding themselves in shared rituals over the course of years, which builds a texture to their relationship. "When Harry Met Sally..." reminds us that the ordinary, mundane, and banal everyday occurrences we seem to discount are the substance of relationships.