The tests are testaments, in their promises to apply scientific rigor to a question that doesn’t deserve it, to movies’ power as engines of language. “ What % High and Low-Maintenance Are You?” invites another. “ How High Maintenance Are You Really?” one test offers. Today there are internet quizzes, as there always will be, to help clarify things. Which is also to say that it might lead them to question themselves: Which one am I?
The diagnosis might lead them to question things that don’t really require questioning. Can’t he? What if they-? But how about-?Īs for Harry’s cold assessment of the world’s “two kinds of women,” the effect might well be the same for the women who watch the film as it was for the one who starred in it. One of Harry’s swaggering pronouncements-“ No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive”-is also the movie’s central premise, and its question is meant to leap off the screen and into the open spaces of audiences’ lives. And, because of that, they infuse the film. But they are also one of his defining character traits. (On Mallomars: “the greatest cookie of all time.” On Sally: “Empirically, you are attractive.”) Harry’s taxonomic tendencies double as defenses, yes, and as attempts to exert control over life’s chaos. When Harry Met Sally aspired to operate as a kind of allegory-one of the movie’s working titles was the teasingly vague Boy Meets Girl-and there is an aptness to the idea that its hero’s way of reckoning with the world is to reduce it to easy rankings. The man, inventing the categories, and the woman, slotted into them. “Well, I just want it the way I want it,” she says. “On the side is a very big thing for you,” he concludes. The salmon, but with the mustard sauce, and that sauce on the side. Harry replies with a dramatic rendering of one of her extremely specific restaurant orders: the house salad, but not with the standard dressing, and with the substituted version on the side. “I don’t see that,” she protests, when Harry informs her that she is the worst kind. (She is annoyed to be dismissed as high-maintenance? This is, obviously, the clearest evidence of all.) Sally, in the scene that popularized the term, resists the label-or tries to. She’d prefer the turkey burger? High-maintenance.Īs insults go, just as Harry intuited, high-maintenance is extremely effective: Once introduced, it can’t really be argued with.
It neatly captures the absurdity of a culture that in one breath demands women do everything they can to “maintain” themselves and, in the next, mocks them for making the effort. But the term today does precisely what it did 30 years ago, as backlash brewed against the women’s movement: It serves as an indictment of women who want. An assessment that is also a rebuke, high-maintenance is one of those breezy truisms that is so common, it barely registers as an insult. And there it has remained, its use climbing steadily over the past 30 years. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it was When Harry Met Sally that popularized the term high-maintenance in American culture. It is also a scene, though, that made for one of the film’s many lasting cultural contributions. Here are Harry and Sally, who should be together but are not, engaged in the drowsy conversation a couple might have-but over the cold stretch of physical distance.
When harry met sally cast movie#
It’s not one of the scenes When Harry Met Sally, which turns 30 years old this month, is best known for-not the wagon-wheel coffee table, not the paprikash at the Met, not the “ I’ll have what she’s having.” It’s quieter, and more functional: The scene works mostly to suggest, in a movie about love’s contingencies, a cosmic kind of wrongness. “You’re high-maintenance, but you think you’re low-maintenance.” “You’re the worst kind,” he says, coolly. Harry has anticipated this question, too-of course Sally would wonder. “There are two kinds of women,” Harry explains, anticipating her question: “high-maintenance and low-maintenance.” 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. 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.
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