20/02/2024
Um. Interesting this popped up.
The classic rom-com invented the “high-maintenance” woman. Its reductive diagnosis lives on, Megan Garber wrote in 2019. https://theatln.tc/NJcIgBZD
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. In a scene from the film, Harry describes Sally as “the worst kind … You’re high-maintenance, but you think you’re low-maintenance.” The term “high-maintenance,” Garber writes, “serves as an indictment of women who want. 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 … The designations are often unfalsifiable, because they live in the eyes of their beholders. And they are often popularized in the context of comedy, which gives them another kind of impunity: Calm down, we’re just telling jokes.”
“When Harry Met Sally,” courtesy of the brilliant mind of Nora Ephron, insisted that Harry’s assessments of things were not callous, but simply reflections of how things were. “‘When Harry Met Sally’ is ultimately the story of Harry’s arc: The question it asks, in the end, is not whether women and men can be friends, but whether a guy who hates almost everyone can open himself up to a single someone. That he proves able to evolve suggests an absolution,” Garber writes. “Sally may have gotten a happy ending; she waited so long for it, though. And waiting is not as romantic as her movie believes it to be. Maybe there were times along the way when she almost said something to Harry but didn’t, understanding how easily her preferences could be dismissed as inconvenient. Maybe she questioned herself. Maybe she knew that, despite it all, women who just want it the way they want it are still assumed to be wanting too much.”