Why can't a romantic comedy just be a romantic comedy? In Friday's New York Times, Amanda Hess had to make it about being haunted by late-stage capitalism. You've Got Mail is now twenty years old, yikes:
You’ve Got Mail, which was directed and co-written by Nora Ephron, is about opposites attracting, the glory of fall foliage and the transformative possibilities of cybersex. But it is also about capitalism, and it’s this aspect of the film that haunts me.
Kathleen Kelly is caught between two love interests and two approaches to the written word: Her live-in boyfriend, Frank (Greg Kinnear), who is absorbed in his own pretentious writing, and her professional rival Joe [that's Tom Hanks], who sees books as mere products to be pushed.
Kathleen, in the middle, has devoted her life to selling accessible, adorable books: books for kids. By the end, Fox Books successfully shutters Kathleen’s independent shop, she submits romantically to her capitalist subjugator, and one little corner of the Fox Books store is dedicated to mimicking her old shop’s story hour for children.
Even 20 years ago, we could have argued the "villains" of this film are the American consumers, who responded to books being 20 or 30 percent cheaper and valued that more than one fine young lady's literary advice. Hess notes today, big-box bookstores like Barnes & Noble are being crushed by Amazon. Now you can get your cheap book dropped on your porch with "free" Amazon Prime shipping.
Hess revels in the karma of this idea: "I have spent many minutes daydreaming about an imagined sequel, wherein Joe Fox is usurped by the very internet that delivered him the love of his life." Amazon is also funding The Washington Post, but why should capitalists get credit for that?
Hess just keeps complaining like a Frankfurt School socialist scold:
Is this a frothy romantic comedy or a dark commentary on how capitalism absorbs its critiques? Could that reading explain the bizarre choice to make Kathleen, Miss Independent, an unabashed lover of the coffee chain Starbucks? (Horrors!)
Did You’ve Got Mail, in fact, predict the rise of Amazon, which has demolished bookstores and then sadistically replaced them with its own algorithm-curated brick-and-mortar shops? All I know is this: You’ve Got Mail is a secret tragedy, too.
The tragedy in this film -- the loss of Kathleen's mother's bookstore/legacy -- is not a secret. The tension in the romance is that Joe knows exactly how his business has caused it.
PS: Being haunted by Trump also just has to pop up:Hess wrote the film occurred "when dial-up internet connectivity was just powerful enough to spark a relationship between two strangers, but not so powerful that it could burn democracy to the ground."
Esquire pulled the same muscle: "In 1998, when the Upper West Side was battling the influx of chain stores rather than bracing for potential martial law, I’m sure that [a bookstore closing] seemed like a bigger deal."
