It came out 20 years ago, and I still think about “You’ve Got Mail” all the time.
The film’s dated premise — real-life rivals fall in love over AOL — could easily have extinguished its chances for repeat viewings. Instead its nostalgic warmth glows from HBO GO accounts and airplane-seat screens.
Starring Meg Ryan as the children’s bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly (internet handle: Shopgirl) and Tom Hanks as Joe Fox (NY152), the heir to a big, bad chain of bookstores, the film crystallized a fleeting moment in online culture, 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.
There’s something soothing about these ‘90s people and their ‘90s problems. The central conflict of the film — an independent bookseller is big-footed by a chain — feels quaint now. Today’s chains are fighting for survival against Amazon. (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.)
But this is the kind of movie that can make even ‘90s style look timeless: Ryan with her impish haircut and her layers of sweaters; Hanks with his billowing blazers and his normcore dog.
“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, 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.
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?
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.