The year was 1989. The hair was huge, the eye shadow was electric blue, and women all over this great nation were inexplicably wearing ties with their femme corporate attire (according to the pictures of my mom in the ’80s that I’ve hung onto, anyway). Most importantly, though—at least to an inveterate rom-com viewer like myself—that was the year that When Harry Met Sally hit theaters, making permanent megastars of Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal and posing one of the all-time great rhetorical dating questions to a rapt audience: Can men and women ever just be friends?
While Harry and Sally’s New Year’s Eve kiss is obviously up there with the greatest romantic-comedy moments of all time (as is the wagon-wheel coffee table fight), I have to admit that the movie’s main idea has always irked me a little bit. I remembered why recently, as I surveyed the bevy of breathless fangirling surrounding Jeremy Allen White being caught on tape rubbing Ayo Edebiri’s back as they watched a baseball game at Chicago’s Wrigley Stadium.
Is there PSE—potential sexual energy—in this video? Sure, maybe; Edebiri and White are both attractive and famous people, and attractive and famous people have been known to find love (or, at least, a mutual PR slay) with each other from time to time. The Occam’s-razor explanation, though, seems to be that they’re just coworkers-slash-friends, and friends should be able to make physical contact without a federal case being made of it. Also, unlike Harry and Sally, Edebiri and White aren’t both single; for months, White has been seen out and about with Rosalía.
As cute of a couple as Edebiri and White would be, the outsized fan investment in their bond is also a useful reminder that celebrities actually aren’t zoo animals and we don’t get to choose who they share their food rations with in their walled-off enclosures. Recall, if you will, the strange case of John Mulaney: When the comedian split up with his wife and announced he was expecting a baby with his new girlfriend, actor Olivia Munn, the internet’s most annoying denizens absolutely couldn’t wait to deliver harsh pronouncements about how a 41-year-old man they’d never met should be living his life. (And thus the term parasocial was issued into the zeitgeist.)
Ultimately, it’s easy to become overly invested in the lives of famous people—after all, the airport-tabloid industrial complex kind of encourages it—but when it comes to Edebiri and White, I really just want them to be able to enjoy their Bear fame and all its attendant spoils without too much judgment. At the end of the day, to me, Edebiri will always be a Letterboxd reviewer before she’s a star, and I mean that as the deepest of compliments. Let’s leave her and White alone and agree not to take the bait even if she joins him for one of his farmers-market flower-buying expeditions, shall we?
