Harry and Sally Have a Fight, Explained

What happens

Harry and Sally turn a night out into a fight. Harry accuses Sally of never getting upset, especially about Joe, and asks how she can be over him if she is not seeing anyone. She tells him to stop dumping his anger on her, and the argument ends with a grudging apology before they move on to a party game.

What's really going on

What looks like Harry worrying about Sally is Harry unable to sit with his own feelings. His questions are all about her — "If you're so over Joe, why aren't you seeing anyone?" — but the charge is that she refuses to hurt the way he does, and he takes it personally. Sally names the move precisely: "I don't have to take this crap from you." The fight is the closest they come to admitting there is something between them, because the only reason her love life should bother him this much is that he cares. It ends, as their fights do, not with a resolution but with an apology and a joke, the pattern the film keeps returning to.

Key lines & what they mean

“If you're so over Joe, why aren't you seeing anyone?”

Harry's cross-examination of Sally's grief, which is really a way of asking why she is not available to him.

“I don't have to take this crap from you.”

Sally's line that ends the argument: she refuses to absorb Harry's temper and names exactly what he is doing.

“Don't you experience any feelings of loss?”

Harry's accusation that Sally is too composed, which lands as an attack on how she mourns.

“Oh, but "baby fish mouth" is sweeping the nation. I hear them talking.”

Sally's deadpan mockery after the game, pretending a nonsense phrase is a national craze.

Theme

• Romance — The fight is really jealousy: Harry grills Sally about Joe because he cannot name what he wants from her.
• Heartbreak — Both are nursing a breakup, and the argument shows how grief they cannot express turns into anger at each other.