Winter in Nora Ephron’s world
Anna McKibbin, writer for One Room With a View, discusses loneliness, family, and the affects of changing seasons
In Nora Ephron’s New York, the passing of the seasons is not just an excuse for long scarves and picturesque snow, it is a fundamental part of how her character dynamics are shaped and reshaped. Days are condensed in winter and as the sun makes briefer and briefer appearances, people’s relationships to the city and to themselves are quietly revised.
Autumn is maybe Ephron’s most beloved holiday.
The poster for When Harry Met Sally captures Ephron’s perspective on the season — it’s an iconic image, cleverly captured by the director, Rob Reiner. Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) are the only people pictured, floating on a sea of orange and gold, stranded amongst the fullness of colour and vegetation. Cold light animates a swirl of warm colours and the interaction between Harry and Sally is brimming with unrecognised longing. Ephron’s autumnal paradise is on full display.
But each season is tied to the next, and winter is hovering over each golden-flecked autumnal scene. In her work, romance is something born of chance encounters; wandering into the other’s bookshop, stuck on the same flight. As autumn disintegrates and winter simmers in the air, people begin to hunker down with family. Sheltering from the cold means that there are less chances of wandering into the same place.
The loose openness that defines space in sunny New York is frozen over. A singleton’s Christmas is spent reckoning with the flimsy future, with encroaching loneliness. As a result, winter is presented as isolation, a time when loss is keenly felt.
In Sleepless in Seattle Annie (Meg Ryan) and Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) are watching An Affair to Remember; “winter must be cold for those with no warm memories” they echo back at the screen. This idea quietly runs through all of Ephron’s work, whipping emotions into the air with the flourish of a winter wind. This is obvious when Kathleen (Meg Ryan) in You’ve Got Mail is “unwrapping ornaments made of popsicle sticks and missing my mother so much I almost couldn’t breathe.” Christmas is a time for families, so, without them, the cold seeps in and these characters are confronted with their loneliness, and everything about them which is incomplete.
This is encapsulated in the moment where Sally painstakingly drags her Christmas tree down an icy New York street, an homage to the Christmas before, when Harry and Sally carried a similar tree down the same street. Winter is defined by a perpetual harkening back, but this kind of remembering is reshaped in the midst of loneliness. Memories once pliant under the glow of nostalgia are brittle when faced with the chill of confinement.
But seasons are not without promise and Ephron also understands that. Her commitment to the romanticised happy ending suggests that winter is the last frontier, the final moment the single person must mould their lives around before they achieve contentment. There is joy in the piecing together of found families. While it snows outside, Kathleen and her co-workers stand around the piano and sing, in between giggles and self-aware nudges. Harry and Sally forge a physical intimacy with one another on New Year’s Eve, dancing “cheek to cheek”. The hubbub of the party is irrelevant to these two people cocooned in their bubble of physical connection. In short, everything only seems dead in winter; it is really waiting for the ice to thaw, ready to grow.
Winter, spring, summer, and autumn roll in and the growth that these characters need to be good partners is as inevitable as the gentle marching on of the seasons. Protagonists get older and adapt new perspectives, but it remains implicit rather than explicit, tied to the unassuming fluctuation of weather patterns. While most romantic comedies rely on an incident to thrust characters forward, Ephron uses the seasons to make character progression feel subtextual, a natural extension of the time trudging forward.
Winter seems to be a threatening presence, washing out the orange contours of a New York autumn with blankets of snow. It buries her characters, reminding them of the totality of what they don’t have. But it is also the quietude necessary to give them time to reflect before they commit to a future. The icy New York which feels so limiting to a tired Sally dragging her huge Christmas tree, is the same frosty setting which Harry wanders around, pondering the years spent forging an intimacy with her before rushing across the city to declare his love. The snow that covers them in winter is also soothing, needed for the characters to figure out what they want from one another.
Romantic love in Ephron’s films boils and sizzles, love is mulled over and written about, love lingers silently on long car journeys and clumsily builds in awkward airport encounters; in short, love takes time. Moreover, love is time in her world — it takes years to appear between Harry and Sally, self-aware and fully formed. There are months of Kathleen and Joe (Tom Hanks) waiting, while their love for one another swells in the breaks between online dialogue.
Love is time, and as such it relies on the turning of the seasons. The falling of leaves, the flurry of snow, the patchwork of newly blossomed flowers: all work to construct an unspoken timeline, a way to tangibly chart the months that have passed and the love that has grown.
Ephron’s vision of love is so powerful because it is so authentic. The truest love grows as naturally as the changing of seasons until it settles, inevitably, just like winter snow.
