Emotions and Sentimentality

At the beginning of the movie, Harry says that no man can have an attractive female friend because the sex that he inevitably wants to have with her would ruin the friendship.
Harry thinks he has everybody and everything figured out. All men think this and all men think that. As  Sally listens she is somewhat offended - generalizing people and the relationships between men and women. Although his statements are funny, sometimes we can't help that Harry is a wise-guy who secretly just want to have sex with Sally (as we can predict a foreshadowing in some form). As they separate and get involved again, the two do become friends - being there to talk on the phone at night, double-dates with friends, and enjoying each other's company. Finally, after sleeping together, the two decide that having sex really did complicate things and grew apart again. In each others' absence they realized that they have fallen in love.
The audience needs, as Plantinga says, "a language and a method to enable us to understand better the specators involvement in movies" (151). Plantinga suggests emotion and a certain cognitive undertaking by the audience. I think this is quite appropriate because how we think is directly related to sentiment and sentimentality. If we are able to connect on a level not only with human characters but also their "inferences, appraisals, judgements, hypotheses, etc" we can experience this sentiment and deeply connect to the situations the characters are in. For example, the judgements that Harry makes at the beginning pan out into the relationship between himself and Sally. These cognitive inferences arouse sentiment in the audience by comparing to real life situations. In other words, we are forced to judge on our own whether we think that "sex really does prevent friendship" or any other wise words from Harry. It is the audience's cognitive responses to the characters' judgements that arouse sentiment and aid in the success of the film's bringing about emotion. But! As Plantinga also says, and as many of us know, emotions cloud judgement. How does this complicate what we've just read and watched? Are there fundamentals to our cognitive interests and connections? Or are their only subjective experiences because each person has is or her own relationships qualities, that may differ from others?

Harry, Sally, and Plato

This movie is a classic. When Harry Met Sally (1989), is a romantic comedy about two friends who are try and figure out the age old dilemma, “can a man and a woman be friends and have sex??”

            The movie takes place over a number of years and follows Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) as they become friends, drift apart, and then eventually drift back together at a cliché New Years Eve party. It all starts when the Harry and Sally share a ride from Chicago to New York City. This is the first time that they discuss if men and women can be friends and have sex. They decide that they can’t, and eventually they go their separate ways. However, years later, Harry and Sally meet again on a plane and they discuss the same question. Both are now in relationships and Harry is about to get married. Harry ends up exclaiming that men and women can’t be friends even if they are in relationships with other people. Eventually they part ways again. THEN Harry and Sally meet again a few more years later, after Sally broke up with her significant other and Harry was left by his wife. This meeting happened in a bookstore and eventually led to dinner. Eventually, Harry realizes that he has a woman friend (Sally) and it stands against what he originally thought about men and women being friends. Their friendship develops and through complicated twist and turns they eventually grow apart BUT they do end up together in the end. (Hopefully that isn’t too confusing of a synopsis).

            Overall, the film made me think of Plato’s Symposium, specifically Aristophanes speech. In his speech, he delivers the story of two halves. “When a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether its to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another not even for a moment” (192C). This quote seems applicable to When Harry Met Sally because when the two met, they seemed connected and the fact that they just kept running in to each other seemed like a work of the gods.

            Though Harry and Sally met long before they became friends or even fell in love, they dated others and married others before they realized their true half. Aristophanes exclaims that, “if love is our guide and our commander. Let no one work against him. Whoever opposes Love is hateful to the gods” (193B). It took Sally and Harry ten years to realize that they were each others “halves” and because it took them so long it caused heartbreak and destruction (Harry’s divorce).

            The last quote that I want to point out from Aristophanes’ speech is, “these are the people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another. No one would think it is the intimacy of sex-that mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in being with the other” (192D). Harry and Sally do end up living their lives together and eventually getting married. Though their relationship was built on an ongoing friendship, not merely on sexual interest.

Speaking of sex, this is one of the funniest moments of the film: