A Films With Great Backstories special, featuring a silly and probably useless thesis: that Normal People is the When Harry Met Sally of 2020.
Maybe it’s the Aquarian in me, but I love veering to extremes on social media.
Last week, I could feel a new revelation: Normal People is the When Harry Met Sally (WHMS) of 2020. I tested the water by adding the suggestion to my Instagram Stories.
My friend Laura messaged soon after:
“Isn’t Normal People a bit more hostile and combative than WHMS’s gentle quips?”
Hear me out.
That’s why it’s for 2020.
So, in the interest of Having The Time, and also seeing if I can put some reason behind some silly contrary thing I said on Insta Stories (the least culpable of all social media platforms), I decided to have a go at arguing this point.
Below, I’ve delved into four reasons why this film and TV series form the major and minor keys of the same subject.
Why not have some music to join you in this diversion. If you’re in the mood for WHMS’s upbeat spin on things, get the film’s brilliant, jazz-packed soundtrack playing.
In you’re feeling more reflective, I highly recommend this playlist, featuring all the BBC adaptation goodness of Normal People.
WHMS was not meant to be such a resolutely positive film
Better Call The Calling Off, Off
Before we go any further, it’s important to note that the WHMS film that lives on in popular culture was not the rom com Nora Ephron originally intended it to be.
There are two main points in which it veers off from her original screenplay, which started off much closer to the territory Normal People occupies. In fact, beneath WHMS’s surface is a complicated film that was never intended to have a clear happy ending.
In the foreword of her screenplay for the film, Ephron says that when she began writing WHMS, the subject “was not, by the way, whether men and women could be friends. The movie instead was a way for me to write about being single - and the difficult, frustrating, awful, funny search for happiness in an American city where the primary emotion is unrequited love”.
Ephron’s original screenplay featured Harry Burns and Sally Albright drifting apart only to run into one another on the street several years later, catching up about where their lives went before walking away. Ephron recalled that it only took up seven pages of the script.
Instead, director Rob Reiner had recently fallen in love, and while the film was shooting, decided to change the ending so that Harry and Sally end up together.
Ephron details in her introduction: “As Rob and [producer Andrew Scheinman] and I worked on the movie, it changed: it became less quirky and much funnier; it became less mine and more theirs.”
And in Reiner’s eyes:
“I was single for ten years and making a mess of my personal life, in and out of relationships and not being able to make anything work. The first draft of the script --- or the draft we were going to shoot --- Harry and Sally weren't going to get together. They meet each other years later and then walk separate ways.”
That changed when Reiner met his future wife, Michele Singer, whilst shooting the film. As he recounts in this super cringe clip with James Cordon ruining a great quote from the film.
You know what? I’ve always felt like those two could have gone either way. Have you ever noticed the ellipses at the end of WHMS’s official title? In my mind, it suggests that there never really is an ending. Even if we leave that couple on a positive note.
Throughout WHMS, Harry and Sally themselves are shown the different paths they could have taken (“Six years later you find yourself singing Surrey with a fringe on top in front of Ira!”). Their worlds are constantly colliding with each other, ex partners and other possible lives.
We open with two mirroring scenes: the leaving from the University of Chicago on the mammoth drive to New York, and the flying from La Guardia Airport out to Washington: Harry and Sally are travelling from the same places, in the same direction, sat next to each other. But it’s not the right time for them. Sally Albright as a would-be journalism student and Harry Burns as a law graduate didn’t work. Neither did it work five years later, with Sally as a journalist at the News or Harry, a political consultant engaged to Helen Hillson.
They were only suited when both had finished other long term relationships (they each view these as a failure of sorts but I think all viewers see the growth of each of those relationships to lead to the next one), and finally realising, on some level, what it’s like to be accepted for who you are.
Only after their break-ups did they find each other for the third time, this time neither character is going anywhere in particular. In fact they’ve both arrived at a dead end - Sally has broken up with Joe (she’s “FINE!”) and Harry is now getting divorced from Helen.
In Nora’s explainer for the screenplay, she explains how the lead characters were intended to show a friendship that allows two people to transform, taking them from their first major relationship to their second, without becoming it.
Instead, Reiner’s influence gives the story a much clearer case for fate and finding The One.
Not least through the voices of the (absolutely beautiful) couch couples peppered throughout the film (played by actors but based on true stories), but also because at the end, we are finally treated to Sally and Harry’s version.
In Normal People, we happen to get off the ride just as Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan have separated once more. However, in the final minutes of the series, Marianne says one of my favourite lines of the adaptation:
“We have done so much good for one another”.
Which, whether the ending frustrates Normal People viewers whilst watching, is about as close as you can get to finding meaning or a “couch couple moment” in this incredible coming of age story.
So yes, back to the end of the 1980s: filming finished, and WHMS was given a resolutely happy ending. But for those of us that don’t need a ‘happy ever after’ to know something was worth our time, I like to think that maybe Harry and Sally did drift apart in another reality.
WHMS asks more from its characters than that awful tagline
“You look like a normal person, but actually you are the angel of death.”
I hope we can all agree “Can men and women ever just be friends” should have been retired before it even got out the gates. Unfortunately, out of the hands of Ephron and into a life of its own in pop culture, it endured. So powerful and reductive, it’s gone on to be the question most aligned to the film, simplifying a lot of other brilliant, thought-provoking discussion into one gender binary idea.
However, you are allowed to read this film in different ways that doesn’t pin point one throw-away line Harry says during an 18 hour road trip when he is supposedly 26. We’ve all said stupid things on road trips in our 20s.
What is an alternative reading of WHMS all about?
I remember being much younger, and reading an article in a magazine, written for the ten year anniversary after When Harry Met Sally came out, one man pitted against a woman’s opinion on the apparently-fascinating age-old debate of if men and women can be friends. I remember thinking then, what a neat, if not narrow, view to think of those relationships.
It spawned numerous pointless articles that come out every time this excellent film reaches a new milestone essentially shouting once again, into the abyss, “WELL ?!!?! CAN MEN AND WOMEN EVER BE FRIENDS?”
There is so much more to this film and its subjects than this line of inquiry.
Instead, as that brilliant Vulture article explains (the slideshow is sadly no longer online. but you’ll get the gist with the article), WHMS is also about distance. People coming together, leaving and coming back again. In minuscule ways and in massive ways. In the way that you’ll miss them when they’re in the shower, and in the way that you’ll break their heart too many times and they’ll be out the door for good.
In Normal People, we’re also continually shown all the other lives for Connell and Marianne to lead. We leave them in yet another transition: on the floor of Marianne’s packed-up Ballsbridge, Dublin flat. And you can tell from watching, from knowing, that soon the memories of this period of their life will fade a little. They will lose some of the sting and the intensity. The details will blur. Which isn’t to say they won’t be together again, or that the times they were together are wasted.
Normal People asks new questions
“It's funny the decisions you make because you like someone.”
Of course, we’re comparing different beasts. Normal People dredges so deep into its characters, conjuring so many personal memories for the people that watch it, that it’s far easier to feel like you could be examining any connection under this microscope. We’re not being forced to see the world through binaries in the same way we were with WHMS, even though yes, we are considering it through the eyes of a heterosexual couple.
What’s resonated with me, with Normal People - through the book and now the adaptation - is that it asks for more than a romantic comedy. Scenes are difficult and painful. A glare says as much as ten minutes of dialogue, which was an essential feat to achieve, in order to properly adapt Sally Rooney’s speech mark-less source text.
Somehow, aeons of completely gripping interior monologues are translated into hunches, silence, oppressive kitchens and laptop screens lighting up desolate bedrooms. Honestly, bar Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, I don’t feel like I’ve ever been further into the head of any other fictional character. Perhaps that’s another reason why our collective reaction to Normal People’s adaptation has been so visceral: this is personal now.
In one look I’m reminded of handfuls of ex boyfriends and breakups and the what-could-have-beens and the oh-my-god-I-am-so-pleased-they-weren’t and how close all those paths fitted in next to each other at the time. You were one person one day and another the next and the choice of it all was often the scariest part.
And at its heart, of course, Connell and Marianne do align, despite being so different. Both flung from County Sligo into the world of academia in Dublin, Marianne finds her stride just as Connell flounders as her plus one. We’re shown again and again that neither can quite seem to have it together at the same time. Marianne hosts her friends at her Dad’s Italian villa complete with coupe champagne glasses, but years later it is Connell bringing Marianne home for Christmas in Sligo, where we finally see the tables turned.
It’s not in the material then, that they find common ground - it’s somewhere else. Marianne’s flat is taken away from her just as Connell is given a place on an MFA course in New York. Their luck changes once again, for the final time. We’ll never know if they keep that connection forever - we’ll only know that they did, and that it was wonderful and that it is rare.
As much as I will always advocate for the power of the much-derided romantic comedy genre, Normal People opens up a slew of new questions we can ask each other. And from there, endless possible answers.
Can men and women ever be just friends? I don’t care.
How about:
“Who are we without anyone else?”
“Do people ever change?”
“Can you ever really know anyone?”
WHMS’s line of questioning inspired decades of reductive copycats on screen. I look forward to Normal People opening up the discourse for more complicated stories. More stories without clear endings. More gloriously complicated relationships no label will come close to.
Normal People is so right for right now
“Alexa, play ‘Only You’ by Yazoo”
And hey, the year is 2020 and WHMS is over 30 years old. The ENTIRE INTERNET was invented after WHMS began filming. I don’t know if you caught this one but we’re in the midst of a pandemic. The topics of intimacy and connection were already alarmingly prescient when Normal People was being made, let alone now, as we sit in lockdown, devouring episodes of Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal’s incredible portrayal of Connell and Marianne. No-one could have known how right for right now Normal People would be.
Because no matter how hard it tries, the internet cannot fake intimacy. And we’re feeling that tenfold right now.
With Normal People, we experience a new getting together. A new guide on gender politics.
The series has a poetry in its pace that starts off as jarring before becoming transfixing. No whirl of quips and witty repartee. In the first episodes especially, we’re shown so many empty corridors, deserted football pitches or unoccupied seats. We hear those snatches of conversation when everyone else has stopped talking. Or no words at all.
We don’t have to have a happy or sad ending to know Marianne and Connell’s relationship was phenomenal. We don’t even have to understand it. It evolved, saw both of them through awful times, likely saved their lives more than once. It doesn’t have to be forever to be life changing.
Break apart, grow, meet again, break apart, grow, meet again.
Just as Harry, Sally, Connell and Marianne do. Thankfully, as they reside in the realms of fiction, they get chance after chance with their partners. Rarely in life do we get so many with someone.
If you were going to make an updated WHMS for 2020, what would it be?
“Well, have a nice life!”
Away from the financial comfort and prosperity of the 1980s, now with global recessions and depressions experienced twice in a generation, it would likely be darker, and reach further into the psyche. Post #MeToo, you’d bring in a discussion of consent, maybe of domination and control.
You would go further into mental health than the clean cut ‘dark side’ Harry mentions once or twice. It’d have to shake off the godawful heteronormative conceit of When Harry Met Sally’s well known tagline.
You’d look deeper than that. You’d likely end up not far from Normal People’s territory, with a discussion on becoming you, and who gets a say in it.
A discussion on distance, perfectly formed into 12 roughly-half hour episodes spanning Connell and Marianne’s coming of age.
So finally…
“You say either, and I say either, you say neither, and I say neither”
Writing this all out made me think about why I love both television show and film so intensely: one moment in your life can change it forever. Taking Rachel to the Debs or bumping into Harry in Personal Growth can be what your life hinges on. Actually, it’s not even can be - that’s what’s already happened to all of us. Every day. The mass of chaos we know as reality is already been decided in an infinity of chances.
And these programmes and films live on, they change our behaviour, they make us take those leaps.
And like that, the world changes.
Why don’t we build on WHMS’s mistakes with something new: What it’s like to be recognised by another person.
When do you know you’ve found that connection. What do you do with it? How do you grow from there, if someone tells you they love you at 18, or 30. Or even if it’s purely a connection, not Love At First Sight at all, but one of those incredible sparks you know you’ve hit when you do.
I suppose the real difference I now see in each of them, happy or sad endings aside, is that WHMS argues for fate, and an eventual goal of truly knowing one another. In its beautiful couples-on-the-couch sessions, in Marie’s “tell me I'll never have to be out there again”.
Normal People posits that the opposite is true. And that that’s okay.
Who is to know, in any capacity, the change Marianne and Connell were capable of in the first place.
Whether on page or on screen, it reminds me that we’ll never really know another person like we can ourselves. Other people will always be a mystery.
WHMS gave us incendiary searing remarks, chic, wine-fuelled discussions on gender politics and wonderful knitwear.
But Normal People arrives with a new, tender darkness. A new way of being closer than before.