Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the 1995 film While You Were Sleeping. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it first. I mean it came out literally before I was born, so I feel like a spoiler warning isn’t really needed, but the ridiculousness of the film is better experienced than explained. Also, it’s a rom-com, so spoilers don’t really matter. The plot is always predictable. You’re watching for the vibes.
This Shouldn’t Work
The entire premise of While You Were Sleeping is built on what, in multiple instances, would constitute some form of identity fraud. It’s stupid, or perhaps a kinder descriptor would be silly, and yet I loved every second of it.
Set in 1990s Chicago, the film follows Lucy Moderatz (Sandra Bullock), a lonely Chicago Transit Authority fare collector who’s developed a massive crush on Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher), a handsome lawyer who passes through her booth every morning.
She knows his schedule. She knows what he wears. She knows where he prefers to sit. She knows he gives up his seat to older passengers. She watches him intently, collecting tiny details and using them to imagine an entire life with him.
Yet, they’ve never actually spoken.
In Gen Z lingo, which I can only barely claim, having been born in literally the first year of the generation, it’s giving Every Breath You Take by the Police.
An Aside: If you’re like me, floating culturally between the generational boundary of Gen Z and Millennial, there’s a digital place for you. Join us over at r/OlderGenZ.
I only learned while writing this post that there’s a word for what Lucy experiences. Limerence. It’s an intense romantic fixation on someone marked by intrusive thoughts, idealization, and a longing for the other person to feel the same way. In Lucy’s case, it’s fueled less by who Peter actually is than by the version of him she’s built in her head. Like Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character in 500 Days of Summer.
That limerence might’ve remained nothing more than a crush if Peter hadn’t been pushed onto the train tracks. Lucy saves him, and a chain of hospital misunderstandings that one honest sentence from her could’ve cleared up leaves his family believing she’s his fiancee while he’s in a coma. It’s the aptly named Poor Communication Kills trope in action.
His family is surprised he’s never mentioned her, but they haven’t seen much of Peter lately. He’s a very busy, very successful, very wealthy Chicago lawyer, so a secret engagement isn’t entirely unbelievable. They embrace Lucy almost immediately. Lucy, who has no living family and no close friends, lets them. Somewhere inside the lie, she falls in love with the Callaghans and eventually with Peter’s brother, Jack (Bill Pullman).
So yeah. The mechanics are ridiculous, but the emotional beats aren’t.
My Girl Was Lonely
While You Were Sleeping predates social media, but make this same film today and Lucy would absolutely be a doomscroller.
She’d work her dead end job, go home to her cat, and lie alone in her empty apartment, scrolling for hours through other people’s ostensibly perfect lives. She’d watch family Christmas reels, engagement announcements, vacation videos, and couples wearing matching pajamas while having nothing even close to that in her own life. Nobody to even share her jealousy with. Misery without company.
Lucy isn’t just lonely. She’s stalled. She carries a passport with no stamps in it, just in case she “suddenly needs to leave the country”, and dreams of going to Florence, Italy. But she never follows through. She plans vacations she doesn’t take and always finds some reason why now isn’t the right time.
Which, upon viewing, left me feeling like:
Because I’m guilty of the same. My passport is equally as pathetic. And like Lucy, I can always produce a perfectly reasonable explanation for why I still haven’t visited that one place I’ve always wanted to see. There’s always something. At a certain point though, a collection of reasonable explanations starts to look a lot like a life on pause.
The only friends we see in Lucy’s life are people she works with in some capacity. Outside of work, she has her creepy neighbor Joe Fusco Jr. (Michael Rispoli), her landlord, and her cat.
The film never hides Lucy’s loneliness, but Sandra Bullock’s charm throughout makes it easy to overlook. Lucy is funny, warm, and endearing, so her isolation can register as cute rom-com quirkiness rather than something genuinely painful.
Her mother died when she was young. Her father died about a year before the movie begins. As far as the film shows us, she has no siblings, no living family, and no close friends. Her boss asks her to work on Christmas specifically because she’s the only employee without family plans (been there myself, it sucks).
How seriously that loneliness lands may depend on how much experience you’ve had with it yourself. I’ve spent holidays alone on account of being too broke to travel, and it can be deeply isolating. Calls help. FaceTime helps. But when you’re alone during a holiday, a screen isn’t the same as having another person in the room. There’s no replacement for being physically present with people.
My girl was lonely. She’s just like me fr.
Falling In Love With Family
When Lucy walks into the Callaghan home on Christmas and finds a loud but loving family eating together, exchanging gifts, telling stories, and making room for her, I understand why she can’t bring herself to tell the truth and leave it all behind.
She goes from having nobody to having an entire family overnight. Literally. She spends the night. It was crazy. It was wrong. But I get where she was coming from.
The real love story in While You Were Sleeping isn’t only between Lucy and Jack Callaghan. It’s between Lucy and the entire Callaghan family.
The Callaghans fully embrace Lucy, and before long, she feels like family. Peter’s godfather discovers that Lucy and Peter were never engaged. But he keeps her secret anyway because the lie gives the Callaghans hope that Peter has something worth waking up for. Meanwhile, Lucy fits so naturally into their lives that she already feels less like a stranger and more like a daughter. They need her, and she needs them.
Peter might be the reason she enters their lives, but the family is the reason she stays.
An Aside: The family dynamic here reminds me of the Crawleys from Downton Abbey. As a proud Anglophile, I’ve seen every episode and all the movies. I love Downton Abbey, and Peaky Blinders, and The Crown, and just about any British culture centric show or movie out there. Except Bridgerton, I could never get into it.
The Commute Crush
Public transportation is at the heart of this story. It takes place in Chicago, one of the great American cities and a personal favorite of mine. Great food, great public transportation, and good old Midwestern kindness.
An Aside: National coverage too often reduces Chicago to gang violence in particular neighborhoods. The city most residents and visitors experience is far removed from Chiraq. Like, you won’t accidentally end up on O’Block. I promise.
Public transportation is woven into Lucy’s life. The train station is more than her workplace. It’s her ecosystem, her town square, and the center of her stifled social life. It’s where she first sees Peter, where she saves him, and where the film eventually brings everything full circle.
What Lucy is doing is certainly creepy. Building an entire romantic fantasy around a normal every day person you don’t know is strange behavior. Or…is it? Is it really? Social media has made us all weird. And I mean, if you’ve spent years commuting by bus or train, as I have, having a commute crush isn’t weird at all.
In cities like Chicago and New York, everybody takes public transportation. The high and mighty, the working class, everybody. When your daily commute makes you a passenger rather than the driver, your mind has time to wander. You have time to get bored. You notice the same people every day and start building stories around them based on observations.
Sometimes, you even develop a crush.
The problem with a commute crush is that if you shoot your shot and get rejected, you still have to see that person every day. Neither of you can avoid it. You both have jobs to get to, and now you’re back on the same train the next morning thinking, man, I wish I hadn’t done that.
But if you never say anything, you’ll never know if they feel the same. Shooters shoot.
An Aside: I miss the years when I commuted by bus or train instead of driving everywhere. Charlotte, North Carolina, is a great city, but like much of the South, it’s lagging behind the coasts when it comes to public transportation. I tried living here for a year without a car, but I couldn’t make it work without basically limiting my life to neighborhoods along the Rail Trail.
Seen through the rhythms of a daily commute, Lucy’s crush on Peter doesn’t feel all that strange to me. He’s a recurring character in the quiet story that is her daily life.
The creepy part is everything that happens after Peter falls onto the tracks. Lucy never takes her shot. The accident takes it for her, pulling her into his life before she’s ready. She doesn’t scheme her way in so much as go along with each misunderstanding, staying passive when the situation desperately calls for honesty and assertiveness. She falls into Peter’s life both literally and figuratively.
As the film goes on though, the real romantic story reveals itself, and it isn’t with the man on the tracks. Lucy slowly falls for Peter’s brother, Jack (Bill Pullman), who actually spends time with her and gets to know her. So, a love triangle. Standard rom-com stuff.
My Girl Was Starving
A ridiculous part of this film is what happens when the lie is finally exposed.
Lucy confesses that she was never engaged to Peter, had never spoken to him before the accident, and had spent the previous several weeks deceiving the entire family. She also tells them she’s in love with Jack (Peter’s younger brother).
But she goes beyond just admitting the lie. She opens up about how alone she was and how, for a little while, the misunderstanding allowed her to feel like a fiancee, a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, and a friend. She essentially tells them, “I’m a lonely loser and I let this continue because it finally gave me a family.”
The Callaghans are stunned. They ask why she never told them, but before anyone can fully process what she’s saying, the wedding descends into even more chaos and Lucy slips away. Their forgiveness becomes clear later when the entire family helps Jack propose to her.
In reality, any reasonable family would be livid. Some of them would probably be considering legal action. Peter is a wealthy, well connected lawyer with court side Bulls tickets, lofty investments, and an apartment in Paris. Jack even jokes that if Peter were really engaged, he would’ve announced it in the Chicago Tribune. Yet here is Lucy, a complete stranger who let everyone believe she was his fiancee while the man was in a coma.
In response to this revelation, instead of outrage, the movie has the family basically go, “Well, we like you, so don’t worry about it. Let’s get you married to our other son!”
It’s absurd, but it works because of how honest Lucy was about her motivations. She never intended to hurt anyone. She just wanted to feel loved.
The way the family reacted reminds me of a Bible verse.
People do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his hunger when he is starving.
And boy, was Lucy STARVING.
She was starving for connection, relationship, companionship, family, and love. The Callaghans can see that what she did was wrong without believing she did it maliciously. Lucy might have saved Peter’s life on the tracks, but the Callaghans saved hers by giving her somewhere to belong.
That doesn’t erase the lie, but saving their son’s life buys her some grace. They can only be so mad at her. Legally, their forgiveness makes little sense. Humanly though, I get it. A little bit of mercy goes a long way!
Some Movies Aren’t Meant For Deep Introspection
There’s a great song by Hannah Jadagu called Think Too Much that could be the theme song to my life. I think entirely too much, too often, and constantly pray for the grace to sometimes just let it go and let God handle it.
Silly movies help me get into that mindset, and While You Were Sleeping is exactly the kind of film where you can turn your brain off, smile, and enjoy yourself. Which I did, even if I immediately ran to write this overthought blog post afterwards.
I’ve grown to appreciate that kind of escape. I spend all day doing cognitively demanding work. Logic, systems, rules, reason, edge cases, use cases, blah blah blah. I love that stuff. God made me that way. I think too much, and I’m fortunate to have a career in software engineering where what is often a weakness is viewed as a strength.
But when I’m unwinding after work, I don’t want entertainment that demands too much processing. Make it simple. Make it silly.
For example, I enjoy the Transformers movies because I want to see robots fight and things blow up. The plot makes no sense, and I don’t care. Just fight.
Same with Dragon Ball Z. Nobody watches it for nuanced storytelling. We watch to see Goku get stronger, overcome his limits, and beat the bad guy in epic fashion. Nothing fancy. Just going Super Saiyan and throwing hands.
And as much as I love science fiction and fantasy with deep lore, there’s a time for everything. Sometimes it’s time to just chill. While You Were Sleeping isn’t one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s probably not even in Sandra Bullock’s top ten. But I smiled like an idiot the whole way through.
I’m not handing out Oscars over here. Movies are about enjoyment. Sometimes that’s enough.
An Aside: For whatever reason, Sandra Bullock is beloved by the Nigerian auntie community. She’s routinely listed among their favorite actresses, with comments like, “She’s an honorable woman, a real queen, not like these other ashawos gallivanting about Hollywood.” It probably helps that she adopted two Black children in the least white savior way possible. She’s genuinely an amazing mother to them. I can’t prove this is a Nigerian cultural phenomenon, but I know what I’ve seen. Sandra Bullock has the Nigerian auntie seal of approval. I would love to see a PhD level research paper on this. It probably goes beyond Nigerian aunties. Why is Sandra Bullock so beloved by middle aged West African women? Lol.
Quite Alright Indeed
Apparently, I’m not the only person who was surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie.
Roger Ebert was one of the most influential film critics in American history. In his 1995 review of While You Were Sleeping, he describes almost the exact experience I had. Ebert calls out the movie’s obvious flaws, but by the end admits he was “still a little astonished how much I was enjoying it.”
Same, Roger. Same.
If you’re reading this and want to smile and maybe shake your head at something ridiculous, check out While You Were Sleeping.
It’s quite alright.
Quite alright indeed.
