5. Nora Ephron, Media Theorist — an overview of Sleepless in Seattle, Julie & Julia, You’ve Got Mail, and how each of those movies capture a particular snapshot of a particular media environment, each of which no longer quite exists anymore

I want to talk about several ephron movies here. Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, Julie/Julia. I want to point out that they all are remarkable snapshots of very specific moments in media-and-culture. I need to rewatch You’ve Got Mail and Julie/Julia to make this post really good and feel good publishing it

✱

I finally watched Sleepless In Seattle (1993) for the first time today, on a bit of a whim while browsing Amazon Prime Video on our TV after lunch while the baby was napping. I liked it! My favorite thing about it is actually that it’s such a good snapshot of a the particular media environment of its time– but I’ll save that for last.

The dialogue is well-written in a natural, organic way that feels very ‘lived in’, where characters have interests that aren’t necessarily relevant to the plot. This makes it feel very much like you’re actually stepping into a ‘real world’ rather than watching a fake scenario that’s made up purely to serve the author’s ‘message’. I also enjoyed the many references to other movies– particularly An Affair To Remember (1957), which starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr plotting to meet at the observation deck of the Empire State Building. I’m fascinated here by how multiple movies and tv shows have built upon this mythos, turning the Empire State Building into something like New York’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower, at least for romcom aficionados. There’s a self-awareness about Sleepless in Seattle– at one point Annie’s friend Becky remarks to her, “You don’t want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie.” Ephron

I liked how Annie (Meg Ryan), the female lead, is herself a writer1. These are the sorts of things that I think particularly pander to authors and creatives– I’ve been keeping an eye out for these ‘stand-in’ characters in media lately, where the author gets to use a character in their work who talks about the struggles and challenges of being a creative. (Most recently I’ve loved how, in the video game Hades II, one of the boss encounters is with a rock band called Scylla and the Sirens, and Scylla talks about things like dealing with creative struggle.)

A interesting to to examine about Sleepless in Seattle is the pacing. It takes its time, and yet it doesn’t feel tedious or plodding. The main romantic leads bump into each other a couple of times, but they don’t actually properly meet until the very end of the whole movie. Apparently several movie studios rejected the script because they were deterred by this: how can you have a romantic film where the leads barely even meet? But it turns out that you can. Sleepless in Seattle was 8th highest grossing film in 1993!

How did they do it? I think a lot of it has to do with the quality of conversations that everyone is having. Sleepless in Seattle is widely considered one of the greatest rom-coms (I haven’t yet looked at other reviews while writing this so far, but I might later). It’s interesting to think and talk about the job-to-be-done of a romcom. The purpose. What do people see romcoms for? What are they hoping to get out of the experience? A lot of people watch them with their romantic partners, new and old– and single people watch them too, I think usually hoping for some sort of emotional experience, resonance, some insight, possibly even a breakthrough in one’s understanding of relationships. And Sleepless in Seattle delivers quite a bit of that, even before the lead characters meet, via the many conversations characters are always having. It strikes me as kinda like Sex And The City in that regard. At their best, in both cases, you feel like you’re eavesdropping on some really good conversations that real people are having about their lives– and it’s better than that, because the conversations are edited and tidied up in good ways. (This can also be done in bad ways, which is when things feel forced and fake.)

I think the most interesting thing to me about the movie, actually, is how it’s a snapshot of a particular media environment. And looking at Nora Ephron’s body of work, I find myself thinking that it’s likely that this was something she explicitly thought about, too. I’ll explain.

The film opens with the funeral of Sam (Tom Hank)’s wife, and he is obviously devastated by the loss, leaving us to wonder how him and his son Jonah are going to piece their life back together. They move from Chicago (where everything reminds Sam of his dead wife) to Seattle, and Jonah calls in to a radio station to ask for advice getting his father a new wife.

Roger Ebert: “When people meet via computers or personal ads or phone-in radio shows – when their first sight of each other is through a communications medium – isn’t it still possible that some essential chemistry is communicated? That the light in an eye can somehow be implied even over thousands of miles? That’s the hope explored in Nora Ephron’s “Sleepless in Seattle,” an unapologetically romantic movie about two people who fall in love from opposite sides of the continent, through the medium of a radio program.

✱

list of funerals: The Wire, Game of Thrones, Desperate Housewives, Sense8, The Last of Us, Attack on Titan, Andor, Arcane. It makes a lot of sense to do this – death comes for us all, we all witness the deaths of others, and deaths are always times of change. Superhero origin stories too: Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Black Panther, all experience the untimely deaths of family members. In Frozen, Elsa and Anna lose their parents early on. Old Major’s death kicks off Animal Farm. Harry Potter. In God of War, the death of the mother is what sets off the father-and-son roadtrip. A lot of the plot of Mass Effect 1 is downstream of the killing of the Spectre, Nihilus. Franz Ferdinand’s assassination set off WW1. The Bear. Disco Elysium. This should maybe be a standalone post: Death as a change agent?