Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

Hamad, Hannah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8949-7206 2026. Sleepless in Seattle (1993). Needham, Gary and Johnston, Nessa, eds. Screening American Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 334-343. (10.4324/9780429346538-36) Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Nora Ephron’s 1993 romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle tells the story of widowed single father Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) who is placed on a path to finding love again with Annie (Meg Ryan) after his young son Jonah (Ross Malinger) calls a radio phone-in show therapist on his father’s behalf. It was extraordinarily successful for a film of its kind, and it resonated with some of the era’s most hot-button cultural trends concerning the cultural politics of gender: the “backlash” against feminism, the “widower fantasy” of ideal manhood, and the soft masculinity of the so-called “new man.” The impact it made at the box-office and on audiences saw it stand above many of its contemporaries as a cultural touchstone of American cinema of the 1990s. Hollywood fantasies of widowed single fatherhood abounded in the years that followed, as Hollywood hit upon a winning formula for the negotiation of its new formation of hegemonic masculinity: via emotionally charged appeals to victim status that conveniently wrote mothers out of the picture. As this chapter illustrates, Sleepless in Seattle is an urtext of the romantic comedy and one of the most commercially successful films of its time to be directed by a woman.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	Routledge
Related URLs:	Publisher
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	11 November 2025
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2026 10:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/182055

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