While sitting in my Tallahassee apartment, incense burning, lights cut out, I learned that Tom Hanks’ wife died. Not in real life, but in the 1993 romantic comedy, Sleepless in Seattle. Hanks’ character, Chicago architect Sam Baldwin, tells his coworker he needs “a real change, a new city. A place where every time I go around a corner I don’t think of Maggie.” At this point, I’m screaming at my laptop: “SEATTLE! SEATTLE!” Finally, he utters the three syllable names of that majestic, rainy city. The movie begins.

    This is an undoubtedly American film. Even without counting the opening credits — a majestic unfurling of the sun across a miniature model of the country, the likes of which is used as a travel map throughout the film — hardly ten minutes pass without the mention of a large Midwestern city or geological reference point. It almost feels like a shoutout to viewers in their own little Cineplexes across the nation. When Duluth was mentioned as a city in North Dakota, the Minnesotan in me began (again) to yell at the characters through the screen. With the Cold War barely over at the time of the film’s release, a victory lap of this sort, a mixtape of the many states, probably felt like a good thing to do.

    Sleepless in Seattle is endlessly referential, besides talking about the lines on a map. Baldwin’s secret admirer, Baltimore-based Annie Reed (played by Meg Ryan), finds her engagement lacks the magical luster that she so dreamed of. She watches the film An Affair to Remember countless times, getting her heart broken by the tragedy known to producers as “love.” She sees herself in this film, and it parallels her brief correspondence with Baldwin as an act of the universe, something so predestined it hurts.

    This sort of meta-romanticism is one of the most interesting aspects of Sleepless in Seattle. As a film which views love as a sort of prophecy, something known from the first touch, it is perpetuating Hollywood’s ingrained ideas and acknowledging that it does so. It is doing this in a new context, where a situation as unexpectedly coincidental as tuning into a radio show can lead to such an impalpable feeling. In combining this incomparable reach with the universality of the plot, where someone living in Seattle can meet someone from Baltimore and beat the odds, a sense of inevitability is pushed onto the viewer. It is possible to fall in love, and nothing is going to stop it from happening.

    Through these motifs, the film conjures the feeling of perfect confidence in fate, a reminder that these feelings are not exclusive to the silver screen, but burst out of them into the hearts of everyone in that cineplex. It is a layered understanding of how life becomes art, and art facilitates life. There is a scene early on where Annie’s mother describes a love at first touch, and how magical it was to fall in love with and marry her father. This idea of magic comes from how we diagnose our feelings and put them back into the world; a beautiful loop of conversation that will roll forward forever.

Sleepless in Seattle will be shown at the SLC at 6:30 PM and 9:15 PM on Friday, 11/12.

Written by: Rory Donohue
Art by: Cassidy Elibol