When Harry Met Sally: Communication Failure

Communication is part of everyone’s life and is essential for humans to survive. There are needs that must be fulfilled for humans to live and be happy all of these are fulfilled through communication channels. With this in mind we will look at how these and other communication concepts are illustrated in the movie “When Harry met Sally”. The specific concepts we will be looking at are how non-verbal adds to verbal communication, defensive and supportive climates (certainty vs. provisionalism), nature of friendships (emotional closeness i.e. closeness through doing) communication is irreversible, and speech communities (gender men/women).

First off is non-verbal adds to verbal communication this is true in almost any case. In the movie Harry and Sally are talking about the night they slept together, Sally gets upset and says “F*ck you!” then slaps him. This is a classic example of how non-verbal adds to verbal communication. What we see is the fact that Sally thought the verbal communication was not enough to get her point across so she proceeded with a slap. We come away from this feeling that she was greatly upset, and the slap illustrated this perfectly.

Next, we are going to look at how no matter what communication is irreversible. In the movie Harry tells Sally she is attractive, Sally takes it the wrong way and becomes upset. Harry sees this and says “Well I take it back.” But Sally already has heard it and the damage is done and she even tells Harry he can’t take it back. This shows quite nicely how communication is irreversible. We see with the reaction of Sally that she didn’t take it the right way and at that instant if Harry could have he would have taken it back. No matter what communication has an impact, and once we say something to another person it becomes part of the relationship.

Another part of communication is the relevance of speech communities. Once again there is a classic example of this in the movie. One of the most prominent speech communities is the gender based one that being men and women. In the movie we see different shots of Harry and his friend walking down the sidewalk talking then we cut back to Sally and her friend walking down the street. As we listen to them talk we can hear the different styles of the communities coming out in there speech and actions. Harry’s friend interrupts often and very directly tells Harry his friend (Sally) must be ugly because he said she has a great personality. Likewise, Sally’s friend talks about her problems with other men and looks for comfort in Sally through her hard times. This is one of the best examples I have seen of the differences of speech communities.

Defensive and supportive climates are always going to be a part