Sleepless in Seattle, the starry-eyed, bi-coastal love story written and directed by Nora Ephron in 1993, is a strange bird. It’s the story of two people who have never met but who are destined to fall in love—finally drawn together, cross-continentally, by a collection of disparate forces, some cosmic, some synthetic. It is a movie designed to be charming (due to the presence of such universally charming elements as houseboats, twinkle lights, Rob Reiner giving dating advice, women crying hysterically while watching An Affair to Remember, and a soundtrack chock-full of Jimmy Durante). But, twenty-six years after its release, the consensus on Sleepless in Seattle is that it is not so charming, after all.
For most of the romantic comedy plot, as well as the detective story plot, truth and love do not actually exist: they are sought. This is because some of the connections between these two characters are forged through dubious, sometimes privacy-violating methods. Our own era, which is rife with means for stalking crushes as well as specific social protocols governing the stalking of crushes, is primed to tackle the film’s corresponding themes—perhaps more so than the zeitgeist that first received it (the film charmed Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert and nearly melted Vincent Canby at The New York Times). Probably you know this already, but the story follows Annie (Meg Ryan), a reporter at the Baltimore Sun who is engaged to a boring but nice publisher named Walter (Bill Pullman). Concurrently, it follows Sam (Tom Hanks), a widowed architect living in Seattle with his precocious young son Jonah (Ross Malinger). On Christmas Eve, Jonah phones a therapy radio call-in-show, telling the host that he wishes for his heartbroken dad to find a new wife. Annie, thousands of miles away, hears the broadcast, and grows increasingly moved when Sam begrudgingly comes on the phone and begins to talk about his late partner. Sam and Annie’s simultaneous, identical responses to the nosy radio shrink establish the two of them as kindred spirits despite their distance, but in the coming days, Annie finds herself dreaming of Sam—doubting her decision to marry Walter, horrified at “having all these fantasies about a man [she has] never even met.”
Days later, Annie’s conspiratorial boss and general bad-idea-factory of a friend Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) tells the obsessed reporter to do a story on the broadcast, which by now has become a national phenomenon. Becky also mails a discarded letter Annie has written to Sam, which Jonah singles out amid the thousands of letters they have received from enchanted women. Determined to make his father meet Annie, Jonah hatches a plan to lure him Eastward, to meet Annie on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day.
“What if someone you never met, someone you never saw, someone you never knew was the only someone for you?”
Annie, for her part, has cleverly figured out Sam’s identity using various journalistic resources, and hires a PI to gather information about (including photos of) him—additionally permitting Becky to send her to Seattle to work on the piece. She goes to Sam’s house, finds that he has just left home, and then tracks him to the beach, where she watches him play with his son from a distance. The movie finds all sorts of ways to justify her behavior, including that when Sam sees Annie in the distance, he is enraptured and even tries to follow her. Because of all this watching, shadowing, and creeping, Sleepless in Seattle has lately been jokingly compared to a horror movie (and its trailer has even been helpfully modified to reflect this). Which is all well and good, except that Sleepless in Seattle’s particular surveillance and reconnaissance plot points aren’t exclusively, necessarily constitutive of a horror movie. They’re chiefly hallmarks of a detective story.
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The romantic comedy genre vastly precedes cinema by several hundred years. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the specific phrase to 1748, but the concept reaches at least as far back as the English Renaissance, qualifying plays like Much Ado About Nothing or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By definition, a “romantic comedy” is “a film or other work with a light, comedic tone and a plot centering on a romantic relationship (often viewed in a sentimental or idealized way).” Lots of romances are comical and lots of comedies have romances (if you want to go into the weeds with this, Dana Schwartz will go there with you), but generally speaking, in order for a film to be a rom-com, the romantic relationship must be the main focus, and it must end on the related triumph of some sort of love.
This long genealogy means that the romantic comedy also significantly predates the detective story—the first official tale of which, the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe, was published in 1841. The two genres have little to do with one another historically, but much, actually, to do with one another, formally.
The central conceit of the romantic comedy—any romantic comedy—is discovery. Its secondary conceit is identity.
The central conceit of the romantic comedy—any romantic comedy—is discovery. Its secondary conceit is identity. The genre demands that that two people will somehow manage to find one another amid the evanescent confrontations, constant miscommunications, and the general muck of the everyday (usually urban) world, thereby acquiring a satisfactory answer to two biggest, haziest unknowns in their lives: who they are meant to be with, and what this revelation reveals about themselves and what they truly want.
Some films internalize this discovery-identity relationship in material terms, as a restoration: “you complete me,” says Jerry Maguire to Dorothy Boyd. Other films explain it as an unveiling of an answer in plain sight: “I wanted it to be you” says Kathleen Kelly to her frenemy Joe Fox when discovering he is her pen-pal in You’ve Got Mail: “I wanted it to be you so badly.” Others focus on self-realization—that the puzzle at hand has been internal more than external: “You make me want to be a better man,” Melvin Udall tells Carol Connolly in As Good as it Gets. In other words, by the end of the romantic comedy, something evasive has been clearly solved.
“Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”
This is also, relatively speaking, the orbit of the detective story—that the investigator must find someone, must find the truth about someone, and in doing so, learn the lengths he or she will go for what they believe in (which is usually justice, but as Martin Luther King Jr. has famously articulated: “justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love” anyway). Usually the detective grows personally invested in this search, one way or another, needing its truths to become public and known. The detective’s search will ideally transform the world, by making it somehow better, more honest.
I’m not waging that to solve a mystery in a detective story is to somehow add love into the world, but simply to say that the romantic comedy and the detective story operate in parallel—motivated by truth and disclosure, for goodness’s sake. But lots of genres bleed together, and the fact that the rom-com and the detective story might not seem, at the outset, to particularly resemble one another is not justification enough for a particular exegesis observing that they actually do. Except that somewhere along their respective journeys, they seem to have done more than overlap—they seem to have collaborated.
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The 1990s saw a particular rise in a new kind of film—romantic comedies, yes, but ones which specifically interrogate what it means to live, and fall in love, in a specific technological moment: the beginning of the Information Age. Suddenly, in addition to characters figuring out how to get close to one another, they are faced with an entirely new set of resources that might facilitate this, with few sanctions. As such, the 90s rom-com uniquely draws relationships between, say, crushing on someone and following them, or liking them and tricking them. To fall in love in a 90s romantic comedy resembles tracking down a suspect or trying to crack a case.
This is not to say that the 90s/millennium rom-com is the first leg of the genre’s existence to allow interplay between love and manipulation, trust and deception. Indeed, many romantic comedies, from Shakespeare through modern ones, play with the essential themes of discovery and identity through disguise or some other form of deceit or subterfuge. In Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, from 1940 (the basis for the 1998 Nora Ephron film You’ve Got Mail), for example, a man learns that his lovely pen-pal is his real-life nemesis, and uses his knowledge of her real identity to ensure that she falls in love with him. In Frank Capra’s 1934 It Happened One Night (and many thematic-sequels, including Roman Holiday in 1953 and 27 Dresses in 2008), a journalist learns the true (newsworthy) identity of a young woman he meets and grows close to her to try to acquire an inside scoop, inconveniently falling in love with her along the way. In Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955), the outfoxing of a thief becomes a metaphor for snagging a husband.
In order for films to properly be romantic comedies, though, true love cannot really be achieved unless all involved parties acquire all the relevant knowledge and illumination. To truly love someone, in a romantic comedy, is to uncover the whole truth, but also to expose yourself for who you truly are and what you have done.
“The moment I wake up…”
In this way, the detective story is revealed to be so essential to the fabric of the modern romantic comedy. As with Sleepless in Seattle, 90s and early 2000s rom-coms similarly pretend to depend on fate, but require a preposterous amount of clandestine research and other labor by their characters in order for things to happen. Even the romantic comedy actually called Serendipity (2001) is about characters using various resources (including databases at The New York Times headquarters) to track down others’ whereabouts. In My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), the protagonist uses forged emails to sabotage the relationship between the man she loves and his fiancée. Then there are films which take the theme of “tracking down” to a more serious level of underhandedness: While You Were Sleeping (1995) is about a woman who falls in love with a stranger, saves his life, and while he’s in a coma, accidentally convinces his family that they are engaged, which necessitates that she then learn everything about him to keep up the charade. And, certainly, There’s Something About Mary (1998) is about several men who are so obsessed with a woman that they hunt her down and conceal their real identities or motivations in attempts to make her love them. Never Been Kissed (1999) and Hitch (2004) play with the long-standing journalism scenario, with the former about an adult journalist who literally embeds in a high school to get a story, and then falls in love with her English teacher, with the latter about a journalist who discovers that she is dating someone whose secret identity is her professional obsession and who weaponizes the media against him. Notting Hill (1999), which is ostentatious about books and appears to be decidedly anti-technology (about two people in an on-again-off-again romance who have apparently never traded phone numbers, and so have to labor to locate one another when the romantic impulse strikes again) still, without technology, matches the energy of its 90s cinematic compatriots, with characters having to do a lot of sneaking around, lying, and a combination of the two, just to make things happen.
To truly love someone, in a romantic comedy, is to uncover the whole truth, but also to expose yourself for who you truly are and what you have done.
These films’ settings in the dawn of the Information Age allow many of them to update analog approaches to finding people, incorporating remote research possibilities into the overall practice of falling in love. “I looked you up on the internet,” brags Harry Sanbourn to Erica Barry in Something’s Gotta Give (2003), explaining why he now knows her middle name. “Do you know that there are more than 8,000 websites that mention you?” He adds “I know everything about you now, and,” (referencing that they have just had sex) “not because of last night.” Erica responds in kind: “actually, I looked you up too,” and recites his biography to him. In this film, the internet is given a greater intimacy, and provides greater access to someone’s identity, than even the most intimate physical relationship.
The increasing participation of informational technology in old-fashioned dating circa the millennium dovetails with the increased digitization of the dating sphere, itself, many years later (and the corresponding development of protocols that permit stalking crushes and dates with the justification of personal safety). I would argue that, starting at least a decade later, as our culture grew more aware of the problems with invading someone’s privacy for the sake of love, the romantic comedy on the whole retreated from an interest in internet stalking as diegesis. But this millennium-era body of film reflects a larger cultural preoccupation with increased access to resources that can bring people closer together—repurposing these resources not merely to find suspects, but to find suspected lovers. Generally speaking, though, in the 90s and millennium rom-com, to love someone is to flout reasonable boundaries to have a chance at being with them. To be in love, in the 90s and millennium rom-com, is, simply, to be a detective. Which almost makes sense, actually, because what is love if not a mystery?
“You make a million decisions that mean nothing, and then one day you order take-out and it changes your life.”
Fundamentally, Sleepless in Seattle is about an investigator who has few leads, but creatively and subtly figures out a way to locate a person-of-interest twenty-five hundred miles away. The romantics in Sleepless in Seattle (Annie, Becky, Annie’s mom, Jonah) are constantly labeling tiny events as “signs”—providing otherwise meaningless moments and gestures with symbolic meaning in a larger unknown. In other words, they are searching for clues. Even its insomniac title connotes the obsession and torment germane to the detective genre. That Annie, our detective, blends her professional and personal lives is no matter—it is also characteristic for the detective to fall for the subject he (or she) is tailing, and this love becomes the detective’s new motivator. By Sleepless’s conclusion, Annie-as-detective manages to confront the person she’s been tracking down—providing a happy ending to a search that, in its regular genre, might not end so well. In the detective film, the willingness to pursue something/someone and the doggedness to see it through are virtues, and Sleepless, which participates in a genre which endows happy endings, rewards these qualities.
In this way, the increased presence of detection in the Information Age romantic comedy not only reveals the ease with which the desire for romance might slip into the kind of investigative schema we have been watching in detective films for so long, but also the ease with which the detective story, itself, might become a romance. The detective film, which often features unfulfilled and unattainable love, longs for it to manifest just as much as the rom-com. For most of the romantic comedy plot, as well as the detective story plot, truth and love do not actually exist: they are sought.
Indeed, Sleepless in Seattle, with its romantic ending in which a fantasy is fully brought to reality, might very well have ended on the famous line that wistfully concludes The Maltese Falcon: that the whole pursuit has been to bring a tangible existence to “the stuff dreams are made of.”
