Austin, Ephron and Jobs

The other day a friend of mine mentioned watching You’ve Got Mail on the television. I hadn’t thought about that movie in a long time but I know it well, as it was one of the ten films that my family owned on VHS. Thinking about it now, it occurred to me that this particular artistic endeavor has much more to say in 2013 than it did in 1998, though I’d imagine most people won’t be bothered much to think about it because let’s face it: You’ve Got Mail was so 15 years ago, and as far as artistic efforts go it wasn’t exactly Sundance fodder or Oscar bait. One of three movies starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, it was just another light hearted rom-com, though executed better than most.

You’ve Got Mail was also the first movie in which I recognized reverent reference to other art. I was familiar with parody, of course, but You’ve Got Mail borrowed from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice without mockery or plagiarism, and I felt very smart for seeing it. Not that it was hard to recognize. Joe blatantly says to Kathleen, “You are just like Elizabeth Bennett, from Pride and Prejudice” in the third act, and the similarities between Joe and Mr. Darcy are not exactly subtle. The parallels do not end with the key players, however. Austin’s Mr. Collins has a  striking resemblance with director Nora Ephron’s Frank Navasky; both have similar relationships to the leading ladies, both are unnecessarily verbose and not a little socially awkward, but each of them enjoy an implied happy ending off page/camera. It turns out that many, though not all, of the characters in You’ve Got Mail borrow heavily from Austin’s most popular novel. What I didn’t know until just last week was that the plot also heavily borrows from a play by Miklós László called Parfumerie, a tale in which a man discovers that his anonymous pen pal is really a rival coworker. Added to that are the multifarious handwaves to all manner of art and artists, including but by no means restricted to Joni Mitchell, The Godfather, and many children’s books and authors, not to mention the fabulous soundtrack ranging from Billy Williams and Stevie Wonder to The Cranberries. It cannot be doubted that Ephron intended You’ve Got Mail to be a virtual tour de force in artistic, literary, and musical culture.

The film became more than that, though, almost certainly more than Ephron could have known. In addition to being a fun, slightly silly flick featuring more culture than a night at Carnegie Hall, it is also a hilariously tragic timestamp indicating that no one, least of all Hollywood, understood this strange phenomenon called “Internet” in 1998. The characters use dialup and AOL, which are quaint reminders of how far we’ve come in technological and software development, but most telling is what the characters use them for. Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox think of the Internet as a fun and safe way to talk to strangers, which isn’t odd because that’s pretty much what everyone used it for at that time. While the curtain closes on the kissing couple and Harry Nilsson croons a wistful cover of “Over the Rainbow,” it never occurs to Joe that his Big Box bookstore, which is clearly modeled after Borders and/or Barnes and Noble, is in imminent threat from this silly little “pen pal service.” Neither does Kathleen realize that, angry as she is that Big Box is crushing her tiny, personal bookstore, she may soon be supporting them as they battle E-books and Internet retailers. At least Fox Books had actual, physical books being sold by living, if a little incompetent sales staff. These are quickly being replaced by electronic copies with artificial expiration dates and web pages declaring “20 results, see more?”

Of course it all seems so obvious now, after Apple has reengineered our expectations for technological mobility and interface, after the advent of w-fi, streaming and continuous access to the cloud, after we have begun a second Industrial Revolution. Like cavemen using fire only for warmth, we never understood the applications and consequent implications of what we had in front of us. It makes me wonder what we have now that we don’t understand, and where we will be in another 15 years.