Meditation at Riverside Park
A look back at one of the first takes on internet romance.
By Whitney Rio-Ross
Longing, we say, because desire is full
Of endless distances.”
– Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”
Two weeks ago, I learned that I have nearly memorized the script of Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. I am far from alone in this confession. Its charm seems ubiquitous. Twenty-four years after its release, the story of two anonymous email correspondents falling in love is a familiar and still largely beloved piece of nineties nostalgia.
You’ve Got Mail is a story of nostalgia from its origin. The film is based on the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner, a story of two coworkers who can’t get along but are secretly pen pals. That film is also a remake, based on the 1937 Hungarian play Parfumerie. Viewers can’t seem to get enough of this story of enemies who are falling in love via letters. Nora Ephron was smart to know that; she was smarter to know that those of us at the dawn of the Internet were yearning for a movie where old-fashioned love letters and trendy screensavers could co-exist.
Watching the movie again, I saw how a quarter of a century changed parts of the movie for me. For a while I thought the main ethical issue in the movie was if it was okay for Joe to manipulate Kathleen by wooing her but not telling her that he’s behind the NY152 handle. But that wasn’t my issue this time. Now that we date in a world where hiding, divulging, and seeking others’ information online is such a given, it feels like part of the dating game. Today, the major plot point of Joe putting Kathleen’s bookstore out of business feels more problematic than his romancing tactics. That store was everything to Kathleen, and only on this latest viewing did Joe’s actions strike me as truly evil. I credit this revelation to living across the street from the famous Parnassus Books and having a dear friend who runs a fantastic bookstore of her own. I chose not to think about this issue when the story didn’t feel personal. When Joe tells Kathleen, “It’s not personal; it’s business,” she retorts, “All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you.” For the first time, I felt like she was chastising me.
Be it his dishonesty or his corporate sins, Joe Fox has some serious flaws. Surely the charm can’t outdazzle the glaring faults. But it’s Tom Hanks! A Tom Hanks who loves children and his golden retriever! What won’t we forgive him? And apart from being played by Tom Hanks, Joe shows promising character growth by the end as he pursues a relationship with Kathleen and feels remorse for his actions and attitude. We don’t know if he’ll abandon his inheritance and redistribute his wealth to the struggling independent bookstores of New York City. But we watch in hope. I turned off the screen feeling the warmth I’ve come to associate with the film. Warmth and a question I’ve see posted on social media for years: Is You’ve Got Mail possible anymore?
A long-term romantic relationship needs and yearns for more than carefully composed sentences.
The brilliance of You Got Mail’s nostalgia is that it manages to look back and ahead all at once. In our world of sleek MacBooks and tinkling ring tones it’s easy to forget that in 1998 the opening title’s boxy graphics and that dial-up internet cacophony were innovatively sexy. Chat rooms, email, and instant messaging were still exciting; the Internet was a new way of connecting, a way that could simultaneously mimic the charming practice of letter writing and imagine a world of new possibilities. It seems unlikely that we’d remake this story again with our current dating tech. Online dating sites essentially made an industry of the idea of an email romance. Dating apps made it even more “efficient” with swiping and to-the-point profiles. I know some friends who have had long conversations on apps before meeting the person they matched with, but I know more who have deleted Tinder after too many “What’s up” messages or been heartbroken when ghosted by a guy they were messaging because (as is the deal with dating apps) he was having a better conversation with someone else. In 2014, a BuzzFeed writer tried to prove that the kind of witty correspondence we see in You’ve Got Mail doesn’t go well on Tinder by sending her matches bits of emails from the movie. Some matches went along with the conversation, but many were confused and turned off by the messages. Admittedly, though, it is a little weird for a woman to follow up an introductory “Hey” with an anecdote about a mysterious neighborhood bagel truck.
But when I re-watched the movie, I was struck by how little I thought about the correspondence premise. The scenes I most looked forward to were not when the characters were typing adorable musing on their computers or telling their friends about their dreamy email buddy. The best parts are when Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly are on the screen together—usually arguing and eventually falling love. No matter how clever the script or romantic the plot, this movie wouldn’t be so beloved were it not for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. By 1998, America knew their chemistry was unmatched. Nora Ephron knew that she needed that chemistry for her leads, and not only for box office appeal. The audience had to root for Kathleen and Joe to end up together, not just the disembodied Shopgirl and NY152. In the last twenty minutes of the movie, when Kathleen and Joe are becoming friends, it seems inevitable that they would have fallen in love with each other without the emails, had they not been professional enemies. That’s what makes the story feel serendipitous.
I have loved writing letters my whole life. I find it far easier to write my feelings than to say them aloud, and I cherish receiving others’ words that I know they took time to craft. But a long-term romantic relationship needs and yearns for more than carefully composed sentences. It’s why NY152 and Shopgirl want to meet each other. It’s why even as she’s about to meet her mystery correspondent, Kathleen is falling in love with Joe while looking for produce or “spontaneously” having coffee together. There’s a safety and romance to their disembodied anonymity, but there’s another level of tenderness when they become familiar.
The longing in this story isn’t simply for a past way of life but a home.
After Kathleen is first “stood up” by NY152, she writes to him, “The odd thing about this form of communication is you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings.” I’ve always loved that line, but now that I’m married and spend way more time running errands with my husband than I do writing him letters, I love it even more. A lasting love is days of nothings meaning something. Maybe that’s what makes the You’ve Got Mail correspondence so great, what makes it believable that a relationship could move from the computer to Riverside Park. Joe and Kathleen were reveling in the kind of everyday conversations they’ll end up having as a couple.
The pandemic has been a perfect situation for anyone hoping for the You’ve Got Mail love story. But only the first part. As I watched the film this time, I felt most nostalgic for nonhazardous dates at crowded cafes. I felt a nostalgia for presence. Yet I know I had a similar feeling when watching the movie before 2020. That’s because as much as You’ve Got Mail is a throwback to letter writing, the original stories on which it is based had the same kind of longing. “Nostalgia,” after all, is a compound of Greek terms for “homecoming” and “sorrow.” The longing in this story isn’t simply for a past way of life but a home. The delight of all its versions is that the correspondents are not strangers after all, but people they already know. It’s a miracle of familiar presence. Maybe that’s why people keep returning to this movie—not because they’re nostalgic for love letters but because they long for the kind of presence Kathleen and Joe find in each other. Maybe that part of the fairytale isn’t so impossible in the age of dating apps. The second act of You’ve Got Mail begins with Joe typing, “Do you think we should meet?” I think that line can still work.
Whitney Rio-Ross holds a Master’s in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Reflections, America Magazine, LETTERS JOURNAL, The Cresset, St. Katherine Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Birthmarks and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband.
You’ve Got Mail was released by Warner Brothers on December 18, 1998.
