You’ve Got Mail (1998)
You’ve Got Mail’s anonymous online relationship between two professional rivals served to normalise the internet as a space for forming genuine romantic attachments.
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Spoiler alert: This is an analysis of the film You’ve Got Mail and its themes, rather than a review, and as such reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.
This week marks the 25th anniversary of the original cinema release of You’ve Got Mail, the 1998 romantic comedy directed and co-written by Nora Ephron, and starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in its lead roles. It is a film that has a double charm for me. Firstly, it is as enjoyable a two hours’ entertainment as you would expect from a film involving those three people in their 1990s pomp. Secondly, with its focus on an anonymous relationship conducted via email, it is very much of its precise moment, when the internet began to change the nature of social relations, but was not yet utterly integral to them.
There had already been several films made in the 1980s and 1990s that involved computer networks and then the nascent World Wide Web in their central premise. These tended to be thrillers with dystopian elements, such as the 1995 film The Net starring Sandra Bullock. You’ve Got Mail, by contrast, is about the internet becoming routinised: a component of a pleasant present, not a frightening future.
You’ve Got Mail
Nora Ephron, with her sister Delia, based the film’s screenplay on Miklós László’s 1937 Hungarian play Parfumerie. It had already been adapted by Hollywood for the 1940 film The Shop around the Corner, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring James Stewart, and then in 1949 as the Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime.
Set in contemporary New York, You’ve Got Mail introduces us to whimsical Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan). She runs an Upper Westside Manhattan children’s bookshop, ‘The Shop Around The Corner’, which she took over from her late mother, with assistants Christina (Heather Burns) and George (Steve Zahn), and her mother’s best friend, Birdie (Jean Stapleton). She is in a relationship with intensely serious newspaper columnist Frank Navasky (Greg Kinnear), but is simultaneously involved, under the pseudonym ‘Shopgirl’, in a burgeoning anonymous email correspondence with a man she knows only as ‘NY152’. They share no real details about their respective lives, save that NY152 has a dog called Brinkley.
NY152 is in fact cynical Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), who runs bookstore chain Fox Books with his father Nelson (Dabney Coleman) and grandfather Schuyler (John Randolph). He too is in a relationship about which he is ambivalent, living with hardnosed book editor Patricia (Parker Posey). Joe, with his best friend and right-hand man Kevin (Dave Chapelle), is in the process of launching a branch of Fox near The Shop Around the Corner. Kathleen’s colleagues are anxious about the new competition, but she remains bullish.
Kathleen and Joe meet when he visits The Shop Around The Corner with his aunt and brother (both of whom are children, products of his grandfather’s and father’s still active love lives). They get on well but Joe feels obliged to conceal his full identity after hearing Kathleen speak dismissively of Fox Books. She discovers who he is when the two meet again at a party with their respective partners. They clash, and subsequent accidental encounters are equally prickly.
Meanwhile, the opening of the local Fox branch has an immediately deleterious impact on The Shop Around The Corner’s sales. As Shopgirl, she asks NY152 for advice about her business troubles (remaining vague about the details), and he advises her to take the fight to her rival. She does so, with the help of Frank’s crusading journalism, successfully casting Joe in a negative media light.
Shopgirl and NY152’s correspondence brings them closer. They agree to meet in person at a restaurant, but when Joe arrives and sees Kathleen sitting there and realises that is who Shopgirl is, he decides not to reveal his own online identity to her. Instead, he shows up as himself, as if by chance, and continues to antagonise her. Fearing she has been stood up, and angered by Joe’s presence, she brutally puts him down, causing him to leave. Kathleen subsequently emails NY152 to express her sadness at his nonappearance, and her remorse at having so callously treated her rival; NY152 apologises and expresses the opinion that whatever she said was probably deserved.
Admitting to each other that they are not in love, Kathleen and Frank amicably separate. Joe also tires of Patricia’s mean self-centredness, and moves out. With the media campaign having done nothing to stymie its falling sales, Kathleen is forced to close The Shop Around The Corner. Joe, feeling remorseful, visits Kathleen, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship. At the same time, she and NY152 continue to communicate via email and agree again to meet up in person.
When Kathleen tells Joe about the planned meeting, he expresses his sadness that under different circumstances, she and he might have stood a chance of romance. Kathleen is visibly moved, torn between her feelings for him and for her anonymous correspondent. When she later arrives at the park where she had arranged to meet NY152, Joe appears with Brinkley. Kathleen is overjoyed to realise that Joe and NY152 are one and the same person, and the two embrace.
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