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If you are looking for escapism, trying holding space for You've Got Mail. The opening montage alone has become a sort of soothing tonic for me in times of stress — a fail-safe recipe to lull me into a state of calm and, at least for a moment, whisk me away into a world of fantasy.
It goes something like this: as the cheery, nostalgic beat of “Dreams” by The Cranberries picks up, Meg Ryan skips serenely out of her Upper West Side brownstone, gazing contentedly up at the autumnal leaves that line her perfect little street — never has anyone been so happy to walk to work!
As she strolls through her charming little neighbourhood, a cheerful bounce in her step, businesses are opening their doors around her: the bagel shop, the bakery, the pharmacy, the locksmith, the shoe repair, the nut shop. Finally, she makes to her shop — an utterly adorable children's bookshop that is oh so whimsically named The Shop Around the Corner.
Since You've Got Mail's release (26 years ago this week), the film has only become more and more popular. In fact, in the past few years, the rom-com has found a new cult following. As of this year, it counts Joni Mitchell amongst its fans. As one of the core films of the social media phenomenon Meg Ryan Fall, You've Got Mail has come to symbolise a certain kind of romanticised retro aestheticism. Each autumn, fans tout out stills of a happy Meg Ryan with a pumpkin. In the winter, the stills are swapped out and a wholesome Meg Ryan with a Christmas tree.
For days when your Meg Ryan Fall blazer just isn't cosy enough.
Directed by Nora Ephron and starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, the film is actually a remake of the Jimmy Stewart-led Shop Around The Corner (an excellent, often overlooking Christmas classic, by the way), which was in turn a 1940 adaptation of a Hungarian play. While the original saw two bitter enemies falling in love over snail mail, Ephron updates the story for the dawn of the digital age: Kathleen (Ryan), aka ShopGirl, and Joe (Hanks), aka NY152, have been chatting online. The only problem? She runs a delightful children's bookshop and his family owns Fox Books, the Barnes & Noble knock-off that is determined to put her out of business. When they meet in the real world, unaware that they are, in fact, internet pen pals, they become instant sworn enemies. Joe's nonchalance about the caviar at a party is the last straw. As they continue to feud in the real world, online, they each help each other with their mysterious "work problems".
As the shop-filled opening montage hints, You've Got Mail is, at its core, a film about commerce — even the enemies to lovers romance between Kathleen and Joe is about two types of businesses finding common ground. Ultimately, it's about how we can maintain our humanity within the capitalist world — the answer, Ephron seems to suggest, lies in something that is now all but extinct: the small life and the local neighbourhood.
Meg Ryan both directs and stars in the forthcoming holiday rom-com.
Ephron spends a lot of time painting a picture of Kathleen's happy existence within an ecosystem of little shops. Kathleen's world is small. She walks to work at her little bookshop passing other charming local shops on the way. She knows everyone. At her own shop, she runs weekly reading sessions for local children, dressing up as the “Storybook Lady". At Christmas, she puts up infinite strings of fairy lights with her tiny team. She buys pumpkins from a local grocer. She browses the stalls at an outdoor market. And Joe operates within this perfect little world, too, taking his young family members to the idyllic fall fair, stopping by the local bagel shop with his dog, and, like Kathleen, shopping at the family-run deli, Zabar's (now, of course, a New York institution).
In a neighbourhood like this one, the act of buying and selling isn't purely transactional — it's personal.
But this world of characterful local businesses is slowly disintegrating alongside the rise of the soulless conglomerate box store — in You've Got Mail, the villain is Fox Books, the company owned by Joe's family. When Kathleen's shop goes out of business, it's heartbreaking. “It's not personal, it's business," Joe tells her. "It's personal to me, it's personal to a lot of people. What's wrong with personal anyway?" she replies.
The film really should be a tragedy — after all, Kathleen's charming shop vanishes. But somehow, Ephron finds a way to embrace the shifting face of commerce: her happy ending sees Joe and Kathleen falling in love and, in doing so, she glosses over the ominous neighbourhood transition happening around them.
But this happy conclusion is, of course, a fantasy — a fantasy that tries to find a new type of personal charm in the chain store. It's worth noting that Meg Ryan's lovely little walk to work includes a very jarring stop at Starbucks that, like the romantic ending of the film, doesn't feel quite right if you think about it too hard. As Ilana Kaplan, author of Nora Ephron at the Movies, wrote, “[Ephron] encapsulated a nineties New York City intellectual glamour that everyone craved and she brought to life. I believed wholeheartedly in the fantasy: my Prince Charming would stroll into the indie bookstore I worked at and sweep me off my feet, or maybe a sweet story on the radio would lead to a meet-cute with me and my future husband.”
The Meg Ryan renaissance is now officially underway.
Kathleen and Joe live in a dying world where the family-run book shops and cute little fall fairs are fading away to make room for box book stores filled with impersonal staff and a sea of green Starbucks awnings. Simultaneously, the way people are interacting is becoming less personal, too — they're moving online. But Ephron finds a resolution: Kathleen and Joe can still live their little lives. An AOL chat room can lead to real love. And Fox Books and Starbucks can manage slot into the neighbourhood without destroying the people within it.
But Ephron didn't realise how far it would all go. She could not have foreseen that AOL chat rooms would morph into an entire toxic world of social media. She couldn't have known that even Fox Books would eventually be doing most of its business online and would start to fade from the high streets like the little shops that came before it. In our world — a world that feels less and less personal with every passing day — Ephron's neighbourhood fantasy feels more picturesque and out of reach than ever.
Viewers today, who live in an increasingly isolated world can't help but fall in love with Ephron's Upper West Side as a form of escapism. TikTok trends like “quiet luxury”, “soft girl” “very demure” and “romanticising your life” are on the rise. Kathleen doesn't always see the value in her little life. She says, “I lead a small life — well, valuable, but small." But twenty five years later, in a world where our lives tend to feel increasingly invaluable and large, it has become the ultimate fantasy.
