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Soooo, Meg Ryan Week on Filmosophy has begun, and this is probably The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Written. It is insane. I hope we can still be friends.

filmosophy:

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT EMAIL.

by Meaghan O’Connell

Turn on You’ve Got Mail now, over ten years later, and if you are anything like me, and if so I am sorry because this means you are at a family reunion and your sister has just announced this to be Option B or, “Meaghan’s Life Story,” your uncle has just muttered, “Oh, Nora Ephron. She hates men!” and this has given you more than a little pause but not so much that to keep you from pointing at your television as the screen changes from late 90s attempt at computer animation to real fall New York leaves and yellow cabs and brownstones, to Harry Nilsson’s “Puppy Song,” and happy, bouncy shots of the Upper West Side— that you, overcome with glee and the two glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon you downed when you saw the DVD case on the coffee table- you will point and you will shout, equal parts proud and sad and nostalgic, “I’ve been there!”

If you are from New York you will mean it quite literally— with your heart clutched to your chest, your wine-flush just settling in. You’ll say that you’ve been there and you know where that bunch of Christmas trees is sold and They’re already up again, you know? and you’ll think how you mark the passage of time with the putting up and taking down of Christmas trees— how this used to be done in your home, your mother fastidious, your father mildly annoyed, but now is something you notice reflected on sidewalks and in the faces of small children. You’ll be so proud and nostalgic you won’t even stop yourself, the way we all know we should when we are watching movies with other people and trying to be decent, trying not to shout out things like, I have been there and, oy, it is a total nightmare and ten times more crowded but they really do wear those shirts! Hah! I have that matchbook! And your Aunt or somebody will be kind and patient and say, “Really?” but not much else because what else is there? And you’ll know you’ve violated some New Yorker law involving the nonchalant Shrugging Away of Things. But look, one could argue, you aren’t really from here anyway, you just heard about it from the movies.

From this movie.

If you are not from New York but are also of a certain age and a certain sentimentality, you may also think, I’ve been there, but mean something more like, I remember that AOL sound! (That Aol. sound?) The anticipation, the staredown with the (now ironically?) triumphant red flag— Will it be up? Will it be down? Will my life be ruined? Will Wade Forman ask me to Homecoming through it? Or maybe you will think: I have been there, I have had that haircut, or I have asked for it and gotten something far worse. Or, I have also thought disparaging things about Corporate America! I, too, am surprised to see Dave Chapelle in this movie! Or, in my case at least, I have been at some point in my growing up, so in this movie, so in love with the whole thing of it, that I wanted to buy armfuls of white t-shirts and olive green cardigans from The Gap and be that skinny, be “a lone reed”, wear a strappy wristwatch and go to Starbucks and maybe aim for bigger breasts and low-rise Dockers instead of pleat-front, but still, to this day, imagine he is walking just behind me on city blocks unnoticed, ordering me bouquets of sharpened pencils for Fall and stealing my business out from under me and making plans to ruin my life. Or something. Because that is love, we have learned, are reminded: we earn it, through unrelenting patience and saintlike forgiveness and cute-meet, Hollywood coincidence and E-MAIL.

And really, email does seem to be a lot of what this movie is about. Or that Moment of email. Here was something new we hadn’t figured out yet, hadn’t discussed the ramifications of in conferences yet, because we were too busy doing the damn thing. We were still in love with email and no one had yet developed careers out of solving the problem of it. There were no listicles. In the original, called The Shop Around the Corner (which makes for an arguably much more charming movie poster), the leads write love letters. You remember those, right? Those things we write now if we are very twee or trying to impress a boy from the Internet with our stamp-buying capability? Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan’s characters fell in love in the grand tradition of Abelard and Eloise, of James Joyce and Nora, of John and Abigail Adams— otherwise known as, you know, all lovers for all time. But Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks- they are different! They have to grapple with not only their star-crossed lovership but also, Technology, And Is It a Good Thing? (greater question: Is Tom Hanks hitting backspace intermittently for two straight minutes instead of selecting and deleting ever a good thing?)

Despite the fact that the phrase, “the end of civilization as we know it,” is tossed around twice in the first ten minutes, it seems that yes, Email is your friend (if not only because AOL/Aol. has financed the whole operation). Meg Ryan carries herself down city streets and through her bookstore and across her apartment (“that she could never actually afford!” we yell) like a woman who is in love, not like a woman who is internet dating. I have no idea because I was 12 in 1998, but I think maybe this was before all that? We hadn’t thought about all of it yet. We hadn’t condemned anything yet. We didn’t have rules like, Don’t let a man from The Internet email you without a link to some online presence and then stand you up and not say anything! We weren’t jaded yet, or at least I wasn’t, and we let Meg Ryan voiceovers do the bias-confirming reflections for us, because, well, don’t they sound nice?

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 of this nothing has meant more to me than so many— somethings. So, thanks.

“You think that machine is your friend but it isn’t,” the boyfriend-Meg-Ryan-doesn’t-love says. He works at The Observer or something like it— in a time where everyone in the city says things like, “Saw that article!” and we knew what they meant, even without a link (and even without meta-enabling). He’s in love with his typewriters (plural) and thinks VCRs are oxymoronic and is presented in a way that makes us hope very much that all of our boyfriends are Tom Hankses and not Greg Kinnears, even though they are probably all Greg Kinnears which is awful but in a different way and maybe for the best because, GUYS, and this is what I thought now, on my family reunion, all off the 3G network and reevaluating every romantic interaction I’ve ever had through the lens of “my mom is making me go to church and I don’t want to’ and ‘my family constantly disparages me for wearing purple Keds’, WE DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE TWO AFTER THE CREDITS ROLLED.

Tom Hanks asks Meg Ryan (come on, we all refer to them by their actor names in our heads, right?) to forgive him for this, “tiny little thing like putting you out of business,” when she is— as far as she knows— going to meet another men with whom she is Internet In Love and, if my a posteriori (pun intended) knowledge is worth anything at all here, she is probably quite worked up about it.

But growing up I never saw any of that. Growing up, email was how I got dates to Homecoming from shy boys. It was (and still is) how I sent 7k emails to lost loves late at night.

Growing up I spent most of at least two summers of my formative years watching this movie on a little tv at the beach with my best friend and we’d come in for the day and shower and compare sunburns and watch parts of it— the second half, mostly (less failing bookstore, more witty will they/won’t they)— while we experimented with eyeliner.

“Youuu’ve Got Mail,” I’d say. “Yess,” she’d say. “Very powerful words,” (I was always Tom Hanks). “Yeessss.”

We’d fall over dramatically onto the bed and sigh, satisfied in some long ago-discovered place of longing, longing for drama and lines like, “I so wanted it to be you,” and a big old muppety dog to jump on you while you are trying to make out with someone who bought you daisies in exchange for the previously-mentioned ruining of your life, I mean, opportunity to write a children’s book, “for as long as we both shall live.”

I didn’t yell, “Ugh, what a dick!” when he stands her up and says he is sorry for causing her ‘any additional pain,’ and I didn’t almost cry yet when she, sitting across from him on the couch, newly unemployed and sick with the flu, tells him with sadness and conviction, “Because whatever anything is, it oughta’ begin by being personal.” But I did, and still do, get such joy from it— from the chemistry and the witty repartee, back when that was all there was, it seemed; when love meant pitch perfect dialogue (“What is that? What are you doing? What is that what are you doing?”), even in a movie about email.

It fills me with joy and television-pointing when I watch it now, to see New York before I had been there, email before it was something I had to keep up with, and love, when it still worked out beautifully in the end and you didn’t think twice about what happened to poor Meg Ryan after the credits rolled.

(Watch the entire film, via YouTube, HERE)

Meaghan O’Connell is a writer living in Brooklyn. She works at Tumblr, and blahhgs here.