Chapter 2

LOVE LIES: ROMANTIC FABRICATION IN

CONTEIV!PORARY ROMANTIC COl\1EDY
Frank Krutnik

Annie Hall: The split screen anticipates the fragrnentation of the couple as [Link]
>:,Yrants more (neurotic) space to himself as Alvy than to Annie (Diane Keaton)

On stage, on screen, in literature, romantic comedy has been around

for an embarrassingly long time. Endlessly recirculating, remobilising
and rearticulating a stock repertoire of narrative and representational
stratagems, the genre tells the same old story of heterosexual coupling.
Only, it is never quite the same old story. To succeed, romantic comedies

15
16 FRANK KRUTNIK

must do more than simply redress themselves in contemporary fashions:

they must engage with the shifting priorities and possibilities of intimate
culture and with the broader cultural, social and economic spheres that
organise its forms and meanings. In the past three decades, Hollywood
romantic comedy has had to deal with a series of especially intense
reorientations within US intimate culture. The insurgent discourse of
'sexual revolution' promoted the acceptance of non-monogamous and
non-heterosexual choices and lifestyles, and this inevitably weakened
the previously forged bonds between love and marriage, eroticism
and romance, pleasure and procreation. From the mid-1970s the lib-
erationist sexual ethic was itself vigorously challenged by a counter-
critique that'highlighted the dangers and undesirable consequences of
a free-wheeling, pleasure-centred desire, from depersonalisation and
sexual objectification, to the destabilisation of intimate bonds and expo-
sure to disease, exploitation and violence' (Seidman 1992: 58). Spurred
on by moral panics over herpes and AIDS epidemics, opposition to the
liberationist sexual ideology became a fixture of popular discourses by
the mid-1980s (Seidman 1992: 82). 1 In 1984, for example, a Time mag-
azine cover feature jubilantly proclaimed that'The Revolution is Over':

From cities, suburbs and small towns alike, there is growing evi-
dence that the national obsession with sex is subsiding. Five-speed
vibrators, masturbation workshops, freshly discovered erogenous
zones and even the one-night stand all seem to be losing their
allure. Veterans of the revolution, some wounded, some merely
bored, are reinventing courtship and romance and discovering,
often with astonishment, [Link] they need not sleep together on the
first or second date. Many individuals are even rediscovering the
traditional values of fidelity, obligation and marriage ... The buzz
words these days are 'commitment', 'intimacy' and 'working at
relationships'. (Leo 1984: 48)

In a 1978 article in Film Quarterly, Brian Henderson suggested that

alongside its challenge to the traditional agenda of heterosexual relations
the liberationist ideology also threatened the viability of romantic
comedy as a genre. Henderson's article laments the capitulation of the
heterosexual dialectic to an ethic of individual fulfilment which prizes
sex not as a vehicle for the consummation of the couple but as an
 Love Lies 17

When Harry Met Sally: HafT':! (Billy Cn;stal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) begin their
quest for a trouble-free paradise

instrument of self-realisation. Romantic comedy has reached an impasse,

he argued, because men and women are no longer:

willing to meet on a common ground and to engage all their

faculties and capacities in sexual dialectic . . . What we begin to
see now in films is a '>Vithdrawal of men and women from this
ground (or of it from them) . Or we see - in effect the same thing -
false presences in the sexual dialectic or divided ones (one realises
at the e1<d that one did not want to play the game at all) or
commitments for trivial stakes only. It seems that when the new
self pulls itself together, it is away from the ground of full sexual
dialectic. To argue this is to argue the death of romantic comedy.
(Henderson 1978: 19)

Henderson develops his argument through a reading of Semi-Tough

(1977), one of several films produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s
to initiate a tentative dialogue betvveen the inherited voices and values
of traditional romance and the competing utterances of contemporary
18 FRANK KRUTNIK

intimate culture. In their exploration of the fragile state of heterosexual

relations, these nervous romances frequently blamed the new social
and psychic horizons that feminism had opened for women. 2 For
example, Starting Over and Manhattan (both 1979) centre upon men
who are cast adrift in the post-feminist emotional wilderness, their
problems inspired by narcissistic wives- respectively Jessie Potter
(Candice Bergen) and Jill Davis (Meryl Streep)- who desert them in
order to realise self-seeking desires (to achieve success as a writer, a
singer-songwriter). In each case, the beleaguered male protagonist
claws back his self-respect through a relationship with a woman over
whom he can maintain greater control: the neurotic teacher Marilyn
(Jill Clayburgh) in Starting Over; the teenage girl-woman Tracy (Mariel
Hemingway) in Manhattan.
As they catalogue the perils of loving in the modern world, the ner-
vous romances detail the difficulties men and women face in initiating,
establishing and sustaining attachments in an age that has seen the
splitting of sex and self from previous guarantees of romantic and
emotional fulfilment. Starting Over makes this point clearly in the
scene where Phil Potter (Burt Reynolds) tries to surmount his desire for
Jessie by sleeping with Marilyn, whom he has previously spurned:

PHIL: 'I want to have sex with you.'

MARILYN: 'I don't like the way you put that. It - it makes me feel
very strange.'
PHIL: 'I know ... it did ... did sound a little bit like Tarzan. It's just
that ... I was trying to avoid the whole romantic thing.'
MARILYN: 'I don't like that either. I hate that. But can't you just per-
sonalise it a little- "I want to have sex with you, Marilyn?"'
PHIL: [Kneels beside her, speaks with breathy sincerity] 'I want to
have sex with you ... Marilyn.'
MARILYN: 'I want to have sex with you.'

In the post-1960s'world, heterosexual engagement is posed as a per-

ilous voyage into unmapped territories beyond the frontiers of the old
cartographies, where lovers must steer between the wrecked vessels of
romantic discourse and the abysmal prospect of emotional limbo. With
the security of the 'whole romantic thing' in tatters, they must make
their own rules and compromises in mediating between desire and
language, self and other.
 Love Lies 19

While traditional romantic discourse could be oppressive and con-

stricting, these films imply that it nonetheless provided guidelines from
which individuals could wring their own variations. Like Semi- Tough,
Starting Over beats a tactical retreat from the battlefield of romantic
disarray to the hopeful sanctuary of romantic comedy convention, a
haven more symbolic than secure. Even though it exposes the disor-
dered state of romance and romantic comedy, the film ultimately cannot
find anywhere else to go. In her New York Times review of Starting Over,
Janet Maslin complained that director Alan J. Pakula and scriptwriter/
co-producer James L. Brooks

have spent the early part of the story establishing a complicated

and difficult situation, [but] they devote the second half of the film
to pretending it's something that can be laughed away ... Nervous,
demanding, high-strung and nevertheless charming, Marilyn is
all wrong for Phil -that's what makes the affair so unexpectedly
touching and gives the story so much life. So when the movie
begins to insist that these two were made for each other, it gives
the lie to all that has gone before. (Maslin 1979: CS)

As both Henderson and Maslin emphasise, the nervous romances

betray a wistful nostalgia for the 'whole romantic thing' while
acknowledging its impossibility. By contrast, the romantic comedies
which have proliferated since the mid-1980s reveal a more confidently
wishful embrace of idealised heterosexual union. These new romances,
as Steve Neale has termed them (1992: 287), seek to banish nervousness
by asserting the previously discredited values of old-fashioned romance
and reclaiming the conventions of romantic comedy. 3 To make plain
what is at stake in the reinvention of romance in the contemporary
cycle, I will explore how the dismemberment of the conventional
armature of romantic comedy in Woody Allen's 1977 nervous romance
Annie Hall is structurally and strategically reconfigured by the influen-
tial 1989 new romance When Harry Met Sally. 4 As I will suggest, this
Rob Reiner-Nora Ephron film bids to transform its eponymous protag-
onists into a couple through a direct revisioning and reorientation of
the disordered intimate terrain mapped by Allen's film. Reviewers rou-
tinely noted the debt When Harry Met Sally owes to Woody Allen, 5 and
Kathleen Rowe goes so far as to describe it as'something of a remake'
of Annie Hall (1995: 197). But, as I will suggest, the film is not a remake
20 FRANK KRUTNIK

so much as an extended and self-conscious attempt to reassemble'the

whole romantic thing' from the debris left in the wake of Annie Hall's
dismantling of romantic comedy. Where Semi- Tough and Starting Over
lurch from the landscape of heterosexual disarray into the emergency
exit of romantic comedy convention, the new romances are able to
embrace convention more readily by framing it as a necessary lie, a
strategic fabrication.

SMOTHERED BY SINATRA?

The most formally audacious of the nervous romances, Annie Hall

marks an ambitious departure from Allen's earlier comedian films.
Presented as the self-critical confessional of Alvy Singer (Woody Allen),
the film weaves together romantic comedy, comedian-comedy and
melodrama to create an unsettling vision of the emotional battlefield
of modem romance. The film offers many of the scenes conventionally
found in a romantic comedy, but disassembles the structures that tra-
ditionally organise their meaning. Jumping back and forth across the
history of the relationship betweenAlvy and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton),
the film fractures the classical ordering of romantic comedy narrative -
the clearly signalled progression from exposition, through complication,
to resolution. 6 It further disorders and destabilises the presentation of
the love-story through the insertion of denarrativising devices like
the comic monologue, spoof documentary scenes and the sliding of
characters back into scenes replayed from their past. Annie Hall's flam-
boyant narrative derangement makes the breakdown of structures a
principal issue in the film's representation of intimate affairs, implying
the difficulty of sustaining attachments in a post-1960s' world in
which traditional conceptions of heterosexual intimacy have lost their
authority.
The film focuses upon specific problems of and with the protagonist-
narrator - his obsessions with sex and death; his anhedonic inability to
reconcile the claims of mind and body; his recurring difficulties with
emotional commitment. The urban artist-neurotic Alvy Singer may be
too idiosyncratic to operate as a representative figure, but the film
nonetheless suggests that the confusion he experiences connects to a
more general disintegration of confidence in the traditional scripts of
heterosexual intimacy. This is most readily apparent in the persistence
 Love Lies 21

with which Annie Hall mines the disarray of conventional romantic

discourse for comic effect. The problem of how to articulate and syn-
chronise desire is an axiom of romantic comedy, which forces the
lovers to undergo a tortuous process of learning and negotiation so
they can establish a secure basis for communication. With Annie Hall,
however, disarticulation is foregrounded consistently.
The early scenes of the Alvy-Annie courtship make this plain. As
they struggle to express their mutual attraction through small-talk,
subtitles playfully expose the gap between what they want to say and
the disengaging platitudes they actually mouth. Alvy and Annie are
highly self-conscious players of a scenario of romantic initiation that
seems both tightly prescripted and worryingly prescriptive in its de-
individualising force. A couple of scenes later, Alvy expresses his anxiety
about the rituals or romance. Walking through the streets with Annie
on their first proper date, he beseeches her:

Hey, listen, listen - give me a kiss ... Yes, why not? - because we're
just gonna go home, later, right, and- and- there's just gonna be
all that tension - you know, we've never kissed before, and I'll
never know when to make the right move, or anything. So we'll
kiss now, we'll get it over with, and then we'll go eat - okay? We'll
digest our food better.

Between these two scenes of romantic disarticulation, the film inserts

Annie's faltering debut as a nightclub chanteuse. As Alvy looks on, she
performs the romantic standard 'It Had to be You', a song evoking the
values and certainties of old-fashioned romance. Competing with the
ringing of a telephone, the chatter of a disinterested audience and the
clatter of glasses, Annie fails to engage a contemporary audience for
the song's romantic ethos- which also serves as an ironic counterpoint
to Alvy's own hesitant courtship. The film's most conventionally roman-
tic moment is similarly undercut: as soon as Alvy utters the word 'love',
he must compulsively subject it to a string of punning disavowals and
deformations that translate it into the pregnant signifiers 'loathe' and
'laugh'.
Annie Hall is a collection of scenes and fragments organised not by
the familiar co-ordinates of romantic comedy narrative but by the more
disorderly flow of Alvy Singer's reminiscences, which mix together
22 FRANK KRUTNIK

memory, desire and compulsive gagging. As he combs through the

chaotic jumble of his life, Alvy seeks to rearticulate the fragments of
experience to make sense not just of his failed relationship with Annie
but also of his more long-standing problems with reconciling the
claims of self and other. As Kathleen Rowe points out in her book The
Unruly Woman, the focus upon the melodramatised male in the nervous
romances serves to eject women from the central place they generally
enjoy in romantic comedy (1995: 197). But although it speaks of the
crisis besetting heterosexual romance and romantic comedy from a
male perspective, abandoning the genre's traditional dual-focused
narrative, Annie Hall's critical dismantling of its narrator-protagonist
prevents an easy scapegoating of women. Especially revealing is an
early flashback where his second wife, Robin (Janet Margolin), an
aspiring writer, drags him to a party full of New York literati. Retreating
to the bedroom to watch a baseball game on television, Alvy tries to
cajole Robin into having sex: 'No, it'll be great, it'll be great- because
all those PhD's are in there, like, discussing modes of alienation and
we'll be in here quietly humping.' This wisecrack is not simply an
attack on intellectual pretensions, it also targets Robin's desire to gain
acceptance in a world beyond his control. As Robin charges, Alvy uses
sex to express hostility: a quiet hump in the midst of, and in defiance
of, the professional intelligentsia, would also enable the subjugation of
(her) mind to (his) body.
Employing sex as a prop to shore up the fragile barriers of self, any
victory Alvy achieves is not merely temporary, it is also at the expense
of his female partner. The film continually exposes his obsessive need
for control and reassurance, highlighting the possessive and destruc-
tive components of his love for Annie. As Rowe notes, Alvy's neurotic
overinvestment in sexual fantasy serves as a means of asserting his
masculine competence (1995: 196-7). This is brought to the fore when
he challenges Annie over her inability to enjoy sex without the aid of
marijuana. With sex, as with his professional work as a comedian, Alvy
needs to believe in the authenticity of the response (orgasm, laughter).?
In both cases, however, the authentic reception is also a surrender, a
willing subjugation to Alvy Singer's performative skill. While he criti-
cises Annie for using cannabis as an emotional crutch, the film implies
that this is precisely the role that sex itself plays for him.
At the heart of all romantic comedy is the fantasy of the transcendent
 Love Lies 23

couple, achieved through mutual learning, negotiation and exchange.

Tracing the process by which a man and a woman move from their
separate emotional and psychic spaces to embrace the space of the
other, the genre shapes the union as an idealised reorganisation and
redistribution of their individual differences. As Steve Neale emphasises,
however, the ideal of the couple rarely surmounts the established gender
hierarchy: although the genre may be expressly committed to an ideal
of 'equal partnership', in most instances it is the woman who has most
to learn (1992: 293-4). In Annie Hall the heterosexual learning process
does not promote the unification of the couple but directly provokes
its disintegration. Alvy's self-appointed role as Annie's mentor is
repeatedly undermined. Neurotically exploiting the intellectual gap
between himself and Annie as a controlling stratagem, he tries not
merely to make her like him, but also to be more like him: to read the
books he recommends; to see his preferred angst-ridden movies (Ingmar
Bergman, The Sorrow and the Pity, 1969); to share his obsession with
psychoanalysis. Demanding that the other functions as a mirror for the
self, Alvy searches for an' authenticity' shaped exclusively by his own
chaotic needs.
As the relationship begins to founder, the contradictions within
Alvy's desire for Annie become increasingly explicit. When she returns
from her first visit to the analyst, Annie tells Alvy of a dream in which
Frank Sinatra attempted to smother her with a pillow, a dream he
analyses with breezy authority: 'Sure, because he's a singer and you're
a singer. You know, so it's perfect. So you're trying to suffocate yourself.
It makes perfect sense. It's a perfect analytic kind of insight.' This kind
of insight may suit Alvy, enabling him to locate the roots of her anxiety
within her 'misguided' ambitions, but Annie's psychiatrist offers a
different reading of the dream: 'she said your name was Alvy Singer'.
Shortly after, Alvy's authority is further satirised: he encourages Annie
to take up evening classes, and the film cuts immediately to a scene in
which he proclaims that adult education is junk (he suspects she is
having an affair with her tutor). The more Annie grows, the more she
grows apart from him. Her desire to pursue a vocation which literally
allows her voice to be heard displaces Alvy as the centre that gives her
meaning.
While romantic comedy is founded on the promise that the differ-
ences between the man and the woman will ultimately be overcome,
24 FRANK KRUTNIK

the relationship between Alvy (New York, Jewish, death- and sex-
obsessed intellectual) and Annie (Mid-Western, WASP, 'yo-yo')
founders because they cannot find common ground without risking a
damaging loss of self. Towards the end of the film Alvy watches a
rehearsal of his first play, based on his time with Annie. We witness a
scene that recreates the moment of their parting, at a health-food
restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Alvy has added a significant reversal,
however: as the man begins to leave, the woman suddenly decides to
abandon her new life in Los Angeles to return with him to New York.
Rather than bidding one another farewell, they embrace. After this
fantasy twist, Alvy turns to the camera: 'You know how you're always
trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult
in life ... '. Alvy's experiences with Annie provide him with the raw
material to shape an art-work that aids his release from the pain of
romantic disillusion, providing a means by which it can be dealt with,
ordered, meaningfully rearticulated. Abandoning, with regret, the
mutuality of heterosexual coupledom, the film cautiously validates
the power of art as a process of catharsis. Alvy's aesthetic rescripting
enables him both to renew his friendship with Annie and to come to
terms with the transience of heterosexual attachments.

SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES?

Where Annie Hall dislocates and disassembles the signifiers and struc-
tures of heterosexual romance and romantic comedy, When Harry Met
Sally, like many of the new romances, strives to realign and rearticulate
them. The film follows Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright
(Meg Ryan) from college graduation in the late 1970s' era of nervous
romance to mature adulthood in the reconfigured intimate culture of
the late 1980s. When Harry Met Sally differs from traditional romantic
comedies in the chronological range of its narrative, but although it
covers a twelve-year period the story of Harry and Sally eschews the
chaotic temporal and subjective flux of Annie Hall. With its linear, care-
fully signalled shifts in time, the film is able to suggest that events are
actually leading somewhere - to the 'inevitable' pairing of Harry and
Sally. The film manoeuvres them through a convoluted range of rela-
tional permutations - antagonists, friends, regretful bedfellows, married
 Love Lies 25

couple - but contains this plurality by asserting and prioritising the

values, the language, the scenarios of the 'whole romantic thing'.
The connection to Allen's film is triggered from the very start: the
credits are accompanied by a bouncy instrumental version of Annie's
audition song. In Annie Hall, 'It Had to be You' registers the discrepancy
between the values of old-fashioned romance and the uncertainties of
modern love, but When Harry Met Sally uses it to underscore Harry's
conversion from hesitancy to romantic commitment. Towards the end
of the film, he walks aimlessly through the streets of Manhattan,
wrestling with the conflict between his feelings for Sally and his fear
of emotional entanglement. In a further evocation of Annie Hall, a
montage of visual and aural flashbacks replays highlights from Harry's
long relationship with Sally. This is followed swiftly by a reflective
version of 'It Had to be You' - performed, significantly enough, by
Frank Sinatra. With the appearance of this distinctive voice on the
soundtrack, Harry begins his dash through the streets to find Sally at
the New Year's party where he will declare his love for her. 8 As the
lovers meet, Sinatra sings 'For nobody else gave me a thrill/ With all
your faults, I love you still/ It had to be you, wonderful you/ It had to
be you'. Annie Hall may have feared Sinatra's suffocating embrace, but
When Harry Met Sally tactically reclaims the authority of the crooner
once described as 'the love voice of America' (Shaw 1970: 252).Y
As Steve Neale has considered, romantic music recurs in many of
the new romances as part of their 'persistent evocation and endorse-
ment of the signs and values of "old-fashioned romance"' (1992:
295-6).'It Had to be You' is one of a large number of romantic standards
featured on the soundtrack of Reiner's film, the voices of Sinatra, Louis
Armstrong, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and young pre-
tender Harry Connick Jr summoning a nostalgic vision of romantic
certainty to guide the stumbling but inescapable progress of Harry and
Sally towards coupledom. A similar role is played by the citation of
familiar romantic narratives: for example, Roxanne (1987) reworks the
story of Cyrano de Bergerac; Pretty Woman (1990) revisits the Cinderella
tale; Sleepless in Seattle (1993) makes extended reference to Leo
McCarey's 1957 romance An Affair to Remember (Neale 1992: 296).
Across the years of their friendship, Harry and Sally repeatedly discuss
the ending of Casablanca (1942), the transformations in their reading of
26 FRANK KRUTNIK

this romantic melodrama's emotional logic mapping the shifting ter-

rain of their own relationship. 10 The film also mobilises the discourse of
old-fashioned romance through a series of' documentary' interviews, in
which married couples - including, ultimately, Harry and Sally them-
selves - tell of the difficulties and uncertainties they had to overcome in
order to find one another. These 'non-fictional' interruptions take the
place of Alvy Singer's monologues to the camera: instead of one man
speaking of his failed relationships, When Harry Met Sally showcases
men and women testifying to the value of the heterosexual love-
match.
The film's romantic project is most clearly affirmed by its determined
return to the formal convention of the dual-focused narrative. Harry
Bums resembles the Allen protagonist in terms of his morbidity and
his compulsively cynical wisecracking, but Alvy Singer's narrational
dominance is denied him. The film consistently balances scenes devoted
to Harry with scenes that privilege Sally, and draws numerous structural
parallels between their separate lives. For example, the 1977 section of
the film begins with Sally first catching sight of Harry as he kisses her
friend Amanda (Michelle Nicastro), his girlfriend; at the start of the
1982 section Harry observes Sally kissing her boyfriend Joe (Steven
Ford), his former college pal. The breakdown of Sally's relationship
with Joe is similarly synchronised with the collapse of Harry's marriage
to Helen (Harley Kozak). The effect of such structural parallels, which
recur throughout the film, is to forge a sense of the compatibility of
Harry and Sally, their ultimate rightness as a couple, in the face of their
individual differences.
Validating love as a traversing of borders, romantic comedy moves
each partner from the territory of the known to the sexual and emo-
tional space of the other. On occasions, the motif of boundary-crossing
is directly visualised. The locus classicus is found in It Happened One Night
(1934), where the unmarried protagonists, forced to share a bedroom,
erect a rope-and-blanket partition to demarcate their respective spaces.
This barrier of convenience, which they christen the 'Wall of Jericho',
derives its strength from the symbolic power ascribed to it by the two
players of the game of love. Runaway heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette
Colbert) and headstrong reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) require its
presence not just to affirm social propriety but also to 'screen' their
uncertainties about emotional involvement. Ellie and Peter are clearly
 Love Lies 27

feted to be mated, but they may occupy a unified physical, sexual and
emotional territory only when the less tangible barriers dividing them
- differences in gender, class and economic status - can be toppled as
a result of their mutual learning and negotiation. Variations of the 'Wall
of Jericho' device recur throughout the romantic comedy genre. The
Doris Day-Rock Hudson sex comedies Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover
Come Back (1962), for example, use split-screen compositions to insti-
tute a similar play between proximity and distance: the man and the
woman are visually yoked together at the same time as they inhabit
distinct private spaces. Annie Hall redeploys the split-screen device
against the grain of its conventional articulation. The two sequences
that make use of split-screen compositions expose the gulf that sepa-
rates Alvy and Annie: the first juxtaposes the incompatible worlds of
the Hall and Singer families; the second places together their respec-
tive visits to the analyst, where they articulate divergent views of the
quality and meaning of their sex-life.
In Annie Hall the split-screen device becomes but one further sign
of the dismantling of romantic certainty, the visual continuity only
sharpening the divisions between Alvy and Annie. When Harry Met
Sally, however, returns the device to its conventional place. On the first
occasion, Harry and Sally are shown together onscreen while they
watch Casablanca in their separate bedrooms, discussing the movie
over the telephone. The second instance occurs after they have sex.
Unable to speak openly with one another following this dramatic
change in their relationship, Harry and Sally confide in their best
friends Jess (Bruno Kirby) and Marie (Carrie Fisher), now themselves a
couple. At this moment of crisis, when the facility of communication
established between the man and the woman is jeopardised, the film
once more emphatically parallels them. A three-way split-screen
composition securely centres the happy couple between the estranged
lovers, placing Harry on the left, Sally on the right, with Marie and Jess
in the middle.
The return to romance charted by When Harry Met Sally relies to a
considerable degree upon the kind of formal realignments outlined
above. Reconstructing romantic comedy out of Annie Hall's disassembly
and disarticulation, the film supplants Alvy Singer's impossible desire
for 'authenticity' with a knowing embrace of the artifice of convention.
As Norman Denzin points out, Harry (a political consultant) and Sally
28 FRANK KRUTNIK

(a journalist) are professionalised agents of a postmodern media cul-

ture 'where images and their manipulation constitute reality' (1991:
115). They may be too'smart'to believe naively in the hoary old illusion
of romantic love, but they nonetheless come to embrace it with con-
viction - a sense of purpose motored not by idealism but by fear of its
alternatives. The film echoes the nervous romances in suggesting that
outside the protective shelter of a fantasised coupledom lies the horror
of emotional limbo, or the jungle of the singles scene, or - in the case
of Jess - a slavish subjection to work. Sally is warned by Marie that 'the
right man for you may be out there right now, and if you don't grab
him someone else will. And you'll have to spend the rest of your life
knowing that someone else is married to your husband'Y The desper-
ation behind these words implies that what impels the film's validation
of heterosexual monogamy is not a genuinely romantic vision of tran-
scendent union but the terror of isolation. When Marie finally escapes
from the sexual wilderness by marrying Jess, she gets him to promise
that she will'never have to be out there again'. When Harry Met Sally
suggests that in the post-liberationist emotional landscape not being
'out there' is a more manageable goal than the illusion of the couple
who are'made for each other'. 12

LOVE IN AN AGE OF LOST INNOCENCE

As post-liberationist lovers, Harry and Sally face a predicament similar

to that confronting the players of an amorous scenario devised by
Umberto Eco. Eco suggests that new forms of communication are
required within a postmodern culture haunted by the overpresence of
the' already said':

the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction

leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a
very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her 'I love you
madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows
that he knows) that these words have already been written by
Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, 'As Barbara
Cartland would put it, "I love you madly"'. At this point, having
avoided false innocence, he will nonetheless have said what he
 Love Lies 29

wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in
an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she
will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of
the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the
challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be elimi-
nated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of
irony ... But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of
love. (Eco 1985: 227)

To say 'I love you' is not simply to 'open one's heart', it is also to risk
immediate engulfment in a swirling vortex of speech from elsewhere.
However, through a recoded embrace of the exhausted and compro-
mised language of love, Eco's lovers transform 'degraded' romantic
discourse into a foundation, no matter how slippery, upon which to
build discursive intimacy. Simultaneously acknowledging and tran-
scending the debased currency of romantic language, the players of
the game of love find one another through the otherness of Barbara
Cartland. 13 Revisited with irony, the legacy of the past is made usable
once more, and intimacy can be refound by speaking through the
multi-forked tongues of inherited voices.
Like Eco's imaginary lovers, the contemporary romantic comedy film
grapples with the difficulty of speaking of love in an age when the
language, the conventions and the values of heterosexual union lack
the integrity they once possessed. This is not essentially a new problem:
the genre has always faced the challenge of how to deal with the
formal and narrative conservatism that provides its basis, with how to
effect a credible compromise between individual expression and the
force of convention. But what distinguishes the new romances is the
self-consciousness of their bid to revalidate and reconstruct heterosex-
ual intimacy and the genre of romantic comedy. When Harry Met Sally
is an exemplary new romance because it values aesthetic fabrication
not as part of a process of critical self-awareness, as Annie Hall does, but
as a necessary tool to achieve the reconsolidation of romantic illusion.
The film reorders the repertoire of romantic comedy conventions to
paper over the void exposed by Alvy Singer's brutally honest auto-
critique. Where Allen's protagonist fears romantic expression because it
poses the threat of self-estrangement, of an/other-voicing, the new
romancers manage a more comfortable rapprochement with old-fashioned
30 FRANK KRUTNIK

heterosexual love by evoking and endorsing its signs and values with
full awareness of their fantastical nature.
The new romances are not simply stories about love, they are tales
of love and disavowal. The play of assertion and denial is illustrated
succinctly by the ending of the phenomenally successful1990 film Pretty
Woman, an against-all-odds romance between a prostitute and a corpo-
rate raider which gratifies the Cinderella fantasy while simultaneously
underlining its status as a worn-out myth (what one character terms
'Cinderfuckinrella'). As Vivian Gulia Roberts) is rescued by her charm-
ing prince, Edward (Richard Cere), the camera withdraws slowly from
their kiss and a (black) male voice cheerily intrudes: 14 'Welcome to
Hollywood. What's your dream? Everyone comes here. This is Holly-
wood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don't. But keep
on dreamin'. This is Hollywood. Always time for dreams, so keep on
dreamin'. Presenting the fulfilment of the fantasy of heterosexual union,
while underscoring that it is only wish-fulfilment after all, this is the
perfect solution for an audience disenfranchised from the constituency
of old-fashioned romance yet wary of taking up citizenship in the
disordered emotional territories explored by the nervous romances.
The ending of Pretty Woman neatly encapsulates the fetishistic split-
ting of belief and knowledge that drives romantic comedy in an era in
which the metanarratives of both old-fashioned romance and 'sexual
revolution' have lost their former powers of legitimation. In their
attempt to rescue the protocols of heterosexual monogamy from the
wasteland to which they were banished in the 1960s and 1970s, the new
romances cannot easily ignore how precarious the 'whole romantic
thing' has been rendered by the new perceptions of love, sex, marriage
and gender identity that issued from this turbulent period in US inti-
mate culture. But even though the old certainties have been tarnished,
these films propose that it is better to believe in a myth, a fabrication,
than have nothing. Contemporary romantic comedy suggests, more-
over, that the mythology of love, now it has been removed from the
social moorings which anchored it in the past (marriage, the secure
hegemony of gender disequilibrium), must service its own aspirations
and provide its own ground rules. As noted earlier, many of the films
signpost the fabrication of romance by strategically remobilising the
self-referential armoury of the 'already said'- old songs, old romantic
narratives, poeticised speech (Neale 1992: 296). Even more suggestive,
 Love Lies 31

however, of the priorities of the new romance is the prominence it

accords scenarios of deception.
While they are not uncommon in the genre, deception narratives
have proliferated in recent years. For example, Green Card (1990) features
a mutual fabrication, in which a man and a woman collude in a mar-
riage of convenience to realise self-seeking desires. As in the pretend
marriages of screwball-era films It Happened One Night (1934) and
Come Live with Me (1941), the false basis for union facilitates the learn-
ing process that will transform them into a 'genuine' couple. A more
provocative use of deception characterises Housesitter (1992), While You
Were Sleeping (1995) and The Truth about Cats and Dogs (1996), which
centre upon schemes initiated by the woman alone. In each case, she
assumes a false identity in order to realise her wish not simply for the
man himself but for the baggage he brings with him: a ready-made
family for orphan Lucy Moderatz (Sandra Bullock) in While You Were
Sleeping; a secure bourgeois lifestyle for urban nomad Gwen (Goldie
Hawn) in Housesitter; a glamorous affirmation of self-worth for Abby
Barnes (Janeane Garolfo) in The Truth about Cats and Dogs. Lucy, Gwen
and Abby engineer masquerades that permit them access to forms of
imaginative (and sometimes material) empowerment which may
ultimately be accommodated within the bounds of a traditional het-
erosexual union but which are by no means fully contained by it. The
subterfuge is an adventure which transports the desiring woman into
an alternative realm of self-imagining. As mistress of the fabrication, she
can reinvent herself as a wife (Housesitter), as fiancee to a handsome
high-flyer (While You Were Sleeping), as a model superblonde (The Truth
about Cats and Dogs). Although the heterosexual resolution inevitably
requires the woman to renounce dissimulation, the ritualistic embrace
of Truth leads not to the abandonment of her wishes but to their ful-
filment, albeit with a degree of compromise. Thus, Lucy Moderatz
gains access to her beloved Callaghan family but ends up not with
Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher), her initial object of desire, but with
his brother Jack (Bill Pullman).
The extended play with masks and dissimulation in these films
makes it difficult to accept the formal resolution as unproblematically
'authentic'. Even if they do ultimately posit 'real' relationships growing
out of pretend ones, the deception narratives overtly frame romance as
the construction of a representation, consolidating the couple through
32 FRANK KRUTNIK

a blatant manipulation of signs and identities. For Lucy, Gwen and

Abby heterosexual unification is not the goal so much as the alibi, a
cover story for other forms of satisfaction. These are not wide-eyed
innocents questing idealistically for the perfect match but women who
know that in order to get what they want they must lead others to
believe they are other than what they are. This is illustrated by an espe-
cially provocative scene in When Harry Met Sally. In a crowded restau-
rant, Sally takes Harry to task for the lies he tells women when he
sneaks from their beds in the morning. Responding to her accusation
that he is'a human affront to all women', Harry argues that the sexual
pleasure he provides makes everything fair ('I think they have an okay
time'). But Sally points out that he has no way of gauging the veracity
of the evidence he invests so much faith in. She wins her point by
acting out a convincingly demonstrative orgasm that climaxes with her
shouting and banging the table - a performance that stuns Harry and
the other diners into silence.
Sally's impromptu simulation of female ecstasy challenges Harry's
unquestioned belief in his own sexual prowess. But the implications of
the scene cut much deeper: as Pam Cook puts it, 'Why fake orgasms
should even exist is the awkward question lurking beneath the film's
light-hearted veneer' (1989: 377). Sally reveals to Harry that the
expression of female pleasure he so treasures may be little more than
a manipulation of signs.'You don't think I could tell the difference?', he
asks incredulously just before she demonstrates the art of faking
orgasm. But Sally's masquerade of erotic self-transcendence makes it
plain that he cannot know, he can only believe that his female partner is
not performing. Norman Denzin argues that this scene from When
Harry Met Sally points to the falsity at the heart of the film's embrace
of traditionalist heterosexual union:

Underneath this system of romantic love and its renewal of the

traditional meanings of family and marriage lurks the hyperreal,
the lie, the simulation, the faked orgasm, and the sexual truths
about male and female sexuality ... The new sexual order is based
on lies. It is a marriage of convenience. It reflects not what is real,
or truthfully felt, but what is pretended, what is thought to be
appropriate, not what is. (Denzin 1991: 122)
 Love Lies 33

Denzin's protest echoes Brian Henderson's complaint about 'false

presences in the sexual dialectic' (1978: 19), but he neglects to pay suf-
ficient heed to the very fact that, even if it is ultimately to be dis-
avowed, 15 the lie is flaunted instead of being simply ignored. The Truth
about Cats and Dogs presents a similarly daring scene which goes even
further in parading the aporia that lies at the heart of postmodern
romance. Abby and Brian conduct a highly charged telephone conver-
sation that culminates in their synchronised orgasms. 16 As they mastur-
bate, stimulated by one another's voices, the other is rendered a prop,
a trigger, for an erotic satisfaction that is self-fulfilling. Although Brian
is enticed by Abby's voice, as he masturbates he envisions Noele (Uma
Thurman), the alluring blonde Abby has persuaded to impersonate
her. False presences do not necessarily signify the decay of the sexual
dialectic, of romantic comedy. Post-liberationist new romancers, these
films suggest, must learn to love, learn to lie, learn to love the lie.

NOTES

1 As Steve Seidman points out, the post-liberationist critique spanned the

ideological spectrum but was hijacked by a conservative sexual politic
which readily scapegoated the sexual and social liberalism of the 1960s
for provoking the decline -economic, moral, cultural- of the United
States (1992: 59-63).
2 The following discussion of the nervous romance reworks arguments
from Krutnik 1990: 63-70.
3 Steve Neale (1992: 287) dates the emergence of the new romance to
1987, with the release of Blind Date, Roxanne, Who's that Girl?, Moon-
struck and Overboard; he also points to significant post-liberationist
precursors like Splash! (1984), The Sure Thing (1985) and Murphy's
Romance (1985).
4 When Harry Met Sally was a critical and commercial success, and many
of those associated with the film went on to further work in the romantic
comedy genre: scriptwriter Nora Ephron directed the equally successful
Sleepless in Seattle (1993); Meg Ryan starred in Sleepless in Seattle and
French Kiss (1995); Billy Crystal directed and starred in the remarkably
conflicted Forget Paris (1995); Rob Reiner directed The American President
(1995).
5 Some sampled moments: 'Reiner borrows a lot of his style from Mr.
Allen, including a sunny view of New York City and a bouncy jazz-and-
pop score' (Sterritt 1989: 11); 'This is the year's best Woody Allen film
34 FRANK KRUTNIK

made by somebody else' (Buckley 1989: 484); 'this Manhattan-based

talkfest, with Gershwin on the sound track and upscale, self-scrutiniz-
ing New Yorkers on the menu, has a distinct Woody Allen flavor' (Benson
1989: 1); 'WHMS will be immediately recognizable as directly out of
Woody Allen' (Brown 1989: 68).
6 For a consideration of this narrative model, see Neale and Krutnik 1990:
26-38.
7 When Alvy visits Los Angeles, he is horrified to discover that his actor
friend Rob (Tony Roberts) is prostituting his talents to the television
industry by dubbing an artificial laugh-track over an unfunny sitcom
scene.
8 Harry's run through the streets evokes the endings of both Manhattan
and The Apartment, Billy Wilder's 1960 precursor of the nervous romance.
9 Sinatra recorded this Isham Jones-Gus Kahn composition for Capitol
Records in the 1950s and for his own company Reprise in the 1960s. The
film selects the Reprise Records version, rather than the more swinging
Capitol take. With a voice that seems gravelled with experience, Sinatra
exudes the mellow romantic authority he exhibits on other Reprise nurn-
bers like 'It Was A Very Good Year' and 'My Way'.
10 In Play It Again Sam (1972), based on Woody Allen's play, Allan Felix
(Allen) is obsessed by the Humphrey Bogart hero from Casablanca as an
ideal of romantic masculinity. When Harry Met Sally, by contrast, is more
concerned with the choice that Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) faces, between the
bruised romantic she loves (Rick/Bogart) and the political idealist
(Victor/Paul Henreid) to whom she is married. The film thus rearticulates
Casablanca as a romantic drama rather than a template for individualis-
tic hero-worship, substituting Ingrid Bergman for the Ingmar Bergman
beloved of both Alvy and Woody Allen.
11 In Frankie and Johnny (1991), Johnny (Al Pacino) offers a similar warning
to Frankie (Michelle Pfeiffer): 'Chances like this don't come along often.
You gotta take 'ern. Because if you don't, they're gone. Forever. And you
may wind up not only ... screwing some other person you meet, think-
ing you're in love with this person, and marrying him.'
12 Village Voice reviewer Georgia Brown identifies' couple envy' as one of the
film's principal obsessions (1989: 68).
13 Evoking the empress of bargain-basement romance as the prime signi-
fier of a degraded 'already said', Eco's meditation on postrnodern irony
privileges a regime of self-reflexive 'cultivated' discourse at the expense
of the 'baser' articulations of the popular. His theorisation implicitly
excludes and demeans the cultural experience of those consumers of
Cartland's fiction whose social disernpowerrnent effectively blocks their
access to such literate language games.
 Love Lies 35

14 The exclusion of ethnic difference is a general feature of the new

romances. Old-fashioned romance is often invoked alongside a nostalgia
for a more orderly, whiter America- most explicitly in the Capraesque
small-town communities of Housesitter (1992) and Groundhog Day
(1993). Green Card provides an especially blatant testament to ethnic
containment. The film starts with a black youth pounding a drum in an
urban market: a signifier of the vibracy and emotional 'primitivism'
resisted by the self-repressed heroine, Bronte (Andie MacDowell). These
positively valued connotations of otherness are subsequently transferred
to a much safer embodiment of alien culture, the French musician
Georges Faure (Gerard Depardieu). Georges usurps the signifiers of
racial otherness: he first meets Bronte in the Afrika Cafe; he pretends to
have returned from a field-trip to the 'dark continent'; and African
rhythms accompany the build-up of sexual tension as he sleeps in
Bronte's apartment.
15 After Sally sleeps with Harry the camera shows her aglow with sexual
satisfaction. This scene of post-coital rapture, a still from which adorns
the cover of the film's videocassette release, amounts to a significant
containment of the implications of her expertise at 'faking it', implying
that she will not have to do so with Harry.
16 The sequence's use of split-screen knowingly riffs off a moment from
that earlier phone/sex movie, Pillow Talk: Doris Day and Rock Hudson
speak to one another while taking baths in their separate apartments,
and the film splices the two together so it appears as if they are sharing
the same tub.

WORKS CITED

Benson, Sheila 1989. 'Review of When Harry Met Sally', The Los Angeles Times
'Calendar', 14 July: 1
Brown, Georgia 1989. 'Review of When Harry Met Sally', Village Voice, 18 Oct-
ober: 68
Buckley, Michael 1989. 'Review of When Harry Met Sally', Films in Review,
October: 484
Cook, Pam 1989.'Review of When Harry Met Sally', The Monthly Film Bulletin,
57, 671 (December): 377
Denzin, Norman K. 1991. Images ofPostmodem Society: Social Theory and Contem-
porary Cinema. London: Sage
Eco, Umberto 1985. 'Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable'. In Modernism!
Postmodernism, Peter Brooker, ed. London: Longman 225-8
Henderson, Brian 1978.'Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?',
Film Quarterly, 31, 4 (Summer): 11-23
36 FRANK KRUTNIK

Krutnik, Frank (1990): 'The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The"Nervous"

Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes', The Velvet Light Trap, no. 26 (Fall):
57-72
Leo, John 1984. 'The Revolution Is Over', Time, 9 April: 48-53
Maslin, Janet 1979.'Review of Starting Over', The New York Times, 5 October: C8
Neale, Steve 1992. 'The Big Romance or Something Wild?: Romantic Comedy
Today', Screen, 33, 3 (Autumn): 284-99
Neale, Steve and Frank Krutnik 1990. Popular Film and Television Comedy. Lon-
don: Routledge
Rowe, Kathleen 1995. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter.
Austin: University of Texas Press
Seidman, Steve 1992. Embattled Eros: Sexual Politics and Ethics in Contemporary
America. NewYork: Routledge
Shaw, Arnold 1970. Sinatra. London: Hodder
Smilgis, Martha 1987.'The Big Chill: Fears of AIDS', Time, 16 February: 26-9
Sterritt, David 1989.'Review of When Harry Met Sally', Christian Science Monitor,
2August: 11