"You've Got Mail" came out in 1998. That means it's now 17 years old, which means that it has earned a level of cultural relevance. Time is like that; even the cheesiest romances acquire significance when years enough have passed over them. After all, William Shakespeare was the writer of pop-culture entertainment for the masses!
So, we always watch "You've Got Mail" around Valentine's Day, along with a few others ("Sleepless in Seattle," "Just Like Heaven," "Much Ado About Nothing"...); but this year I am noticing all kinds of interesting things. Now I'm really no authority on culture or cultural relevance, or New York City (a central character in the movie), or multimillionaires, or store ownership. But I have opinions.
For instance, it's horribly fascinating how the mega-chain store Fox Books (modeled after Barnes & Noble and Borders, etc.) puts the tiny Shop Around the Corner out of business, and now Borders is gone and Barnes & Noble is struggling. The book business has changed - even in 17 years! Also - have you looked at the tech?! "You've got mail!" says AOL (ungrammatically); is AOL even around anymore? No one thinks twice about online relationships anymore! Nowadays, Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) would be a blogger, and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) would look down on bloggers - while probably having a founding and definitive blog of his own. And with all the billionaire secret-vigilantes we have running around these days (I've been watching "Arrow" a lot lately, and of course Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark come to mind), I catch myself wondering what Tom Hanks would look like in a green hood.
But what is really interesting to me is the way the world of books, book selling, publication, is portrayed. I am an aspiring writer, and in the past year I have learned a great deal about what it takes to get published. The publishing world has changed a lot since "You've Got Mail". Now we have massive self-publishing, e-books, and the kind of social media that requires an author to build her own platform. It's a world that the makers of "You've Got Mail" could have never imagined - and yet which is built on the one they were exploring. And also, there are the attitudes of the book-people involved - which are quite often dismaying to me as an author: The Foxes are scornful of both authors and readers. Patricia, an editor, is ruthless and disposes of people without regret if they are no longer useful - and yet is also insightful about Kathleen's knowledge of the book world. It is only in The Shop Around the Corner that books, writers, and readers are respected; and yet that respect comes at a cost, for their books are too expensive to allow the store to stand up to the retail of Fox Books.
It is a crazy and upside-down sight; a little terrifying for somebody who is trying to enter that business. That things can change so much - and hopefully for the better! And yet for all its faults Fox Book was the place where books and reading survived, even if now the Barnes & Nobles it was fashioned after are struggling. It's amazing, isn't it, how something so mass produced and generic can become beloved, and even classic?
