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Mar. 15th, 2019 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretYou've Got Mail
ghost_lingering tricked me into watching this movie with the promise of interesting economics meta. It is not a good movie and for some reason it's over two hours long. A romantic comedy should not be two hours long. Certainly not one this banal. Although perhaps I should note that most of the interesting parts of the film are the parts an editor trying to shave it down would cut first- the Ephrons pepper the script with witty rants about literary figures that are utterly unnecessary but extremely charming.
But I don't want to talk about the movie, because it was at times boring and at times infuriating. I want to talk about the socioeconomics of You've Got Mail.
ghost_lingering links the narrative to the rise of big box stores and eventually their subsumation into the maw of Amazon.com's e-commerce. And I think she's right to see the connection, but I also think that the thematic connectivity between Joe's background and Kathleen's complicated some of that. Just as The Shop Around the Corner was passed down to Kathleen by her mother, Fox and Sons is a family business and we see the tight albeit ambivalent connections between Joe and his father and siblings. The new wave of corporate entities that will replace Fox and Sons are emphatically not family businesses. If we, as the movie clearly does, see value in the idea of building a business with love and passing it down to people you have taught to love it the way you do, this is an idea of business world that is in the process of being challenged. but nobody in the movie challenges it.
I textedghost_lingering while watching to say that the Protestant Work Ethic really did a number on both Joe and Kathleen. The weirdest scene in the film, IMO, is the upbeat music montage set to Joe overseeing the construction workers completing Fox and Sons's new Upper West Side store. See, this scene says, even evil corporate drones find satisfaction in their work and meaning in their worlds if they work hard. Joe and Kathleen are linked because the most important thing in their lives is not any person, but their stores. Both are theoretically in serious romantic relationships at the start of the movie, when they begin their secretive AOL-driven flirtation, but the movie never contemplates it as infidelity for one moment, because neither of them cares more about their romantic partner than their work. Kathleen's relationship with Frank and Joe's relationship with Patricia are just placeholders that nobody involved takes seriously because work is the most important component of identity for all involved. Who is Kathleen Kelly, at her core? She is the owner of The Shop Around the Corner. When she loses that, she spirals into a depression, turning down a host of seemingly exciting and satisfying new career opportunities to wallow. Who is Joe Fox? He is a self-identified genius businessman. Creative destruction is actually a moral truism for him.
Their surrender to their love for each other at the end is a repudiation of the value of their work. Falling in love with the owner of Fox and Sons is a betrayal of everything Kathleen Kelly stood for, because all she was was her economic identity. Committing to NY152, as Shopgirl, is about choosing to devote herself to a deeper emotional inner life as the center of her identity in place of that work-oriented identity.
It's also, economically as well as sociologically, significant that the place where Joe and Kathleen meet is AOL's over-thirty chatroom. The Gen-X Yuppie version of anxiety about aging is very much embedded in the film's themes. Both Joe and Kathleen are economically stable thirty-somethings who are living adult lives. A Millennial remake of You've Got Mail would have to confront the economic inability of the single over-thirty Millennial to attain this kind of stable but emotionally unsatisfying adulthood. The word 'adulting' would have to appear a lot. The financial instability of the 2010s, and the fading commitment of employers to their employees, has made the idea of emotionally identifying with workplace so much more fraught.
Hmm... what else? Comments onghost_lingering's post:
However, resolving the story in a tidy love match absolves the violence that corporations inflict on individuals and communities in the name of profit.
Definitely the article should mention that AOL still has a ridic number of users and also posit that the hypothetical sequel film would have Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks divorcing after Hanks' big box retailer goes out of business because of Amazon.
I don't believe they last that long and I feel bad for Kathleen if they do. Joe Fox is just such a loathsome person, and the way he connects his ability to have a romantic relationship with Kathleen to her no longer being an economic competitor and threat is really telling about where their relationship is heading. I do agree that if Joe loses his fortune, he would be unable to stay married to a woman who is financially supporting him. I'm not sure there's any great macroeconomic truth behind this, though. Oh, I know! I believe with all my heart that when Joe "Mr. Creative Destruction" Fox's company is driven out of business by Amazon, he will complain bitterly about the unfair playing field of sales taxes all the way to his grave.
Kathleen voiceover Soon we'll just be a memory. In fact, someone, some foolish person will probably think it's a tribute to this city, the way it keeps changing on you, the way you can never count on it, or something. I know, because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying. But the truth is, I'm heartbroken.
This is You've Got Mail's deepest economic truth, that things we see as macroeconomically valuable are often inherently cruel at a microeconomic level.ghost_lingering notes the 'violence' corporations inflict on communities in the name of profit, but at some level in capitalism (sometimes a very attenuated level) profit is a measure of value created. Even self-centered work-oriented Kathleen is capable of stepping outside herself and recognizing the value provided by Fox & Sons- it has a bigger, more spacious, and more affordable children's book section than her store was able to provide, is that really worth less to people than her passionate knowledge and advocacy? And change, she reluctantly admits, has value in itself.
So in a way You've Got Mail's ambivalence about capitalism is the only thing in the movie that has any staying power. It's not happy with the pain capitalism can cause, but it's unwilling to criticize it with any teeth, and its conclusion is the rare film of its ilk that does not end with the community able to rally behind the plucky upstart to defeat the evil corporation.
ghost_lingering tricked me into watching this movie with the promise of interesting economics meta. It is not a good movie and for some reason it's over two hours long. A romantic comedy should not be two hours long. Certainly not one this banal. Although perhaps I should note that most of the interesting parts of the film are the parts an editor trying to shave it down would cut first- the Ephrons pepper the script with witty rants about literary figures that are utterly unnecessary but extremely charming.But I don't want to talk about the movie, because it was at times boring and at times infuriating. I want to talk about the socioeconomics of You've Got Mail.
ghost_lingering links the narrative to the rise of big box stores and eventually their subsumation into the maw of Amazon.com's e-commerce. And I think she's right to see the connection, but I also think that the thematic connectivity between Joe's background and Kathleen's complicated some of that. Just as The Shop Around the Corner was passed down to Kathleen by her mother, Fox and Sons is a family business and we see the tight albeit ambivalent connections between Joe and his father and siblings. The new wave of corporate entities that will replace Fox and Sons are emphatically not family businesses. If we, as the movie clearly does, see value in the idea of building a business with love and passing it down to people you have taught to love it the way you do, this is an idea of business world that is in the process of being challenged. but nobody in the movie challenges it.I texted
ghost_lingering while watching to say that the Protestant Work Ethic really did a number on both Joe and Kathleen. The weirdest scene in the film, IMO, is the upbeat music montage set to Joe overseeing the construction workers completing Fox and Sons's new Upper West Side store. See, this scene says, even evil corporate drones find satisfaction in their work and meaning in their worlds if they work hard. Joe and Kathleen are linked because the most important thing in their lives is not any person, but their stores. Both are theoretically in serious romantic relationships at the start of the movie, when they begin their secretive AOL-driven flirtation, but the movie never contemplates it as infidelity for one moment, because neither of them cares more about their romantic partner than their work. Kathleen's relationship with Frank and Joe's relationship with Patricia are just placeholders that nobody involved takes seriously because work is the most important component of identity for all involved. Who is Kathleen Kelly, at her core? She is the owner of The Shop Around the Corner. When she loses that, she spirals into a depression, turning down a host of seemingly exciting and satisfying new career opportunities to wallow. Who is Joe Fox? He is a self-identified genius businessman. Creative destruction is actually a moral truism for him.Their surrender to their love for each other at the end is a repudiation of the value of their work. Falling in love with the owner of Fox and Sons is a betrayal of everything Kathleen Kelly stood for, because all she was was her economic identity. Committing to NY152, as Shopgirl, is about choosing to devote herself to a deeper emotional inner life as the center of her identity in place of that work-oriented identity.
It's also, economically as well as sociologically, significant that the place where Joe and Kathleen meet is AOL's over-thirty chatroom. The Gen-X Yuppie version of anxiety about aging is very much embedded in the film's themes. Both Joe and Kathleen are economically stable thirty-somethings who are living adult lives. A Millennial remake of You've Got Mail would have to confront the economic inability of the single over-thirty Millennial to attain this kind of stable but emotionally unsatisfying adulthood. The word 'adulting' would have to appear a lot. The financial instability of the 2010s, and the fading commitment of employers to their employees, has made the idea of emotionally identifying with workplace so much more fraught.
Hmm... what else? Comments on
ghost_lingering's post:However, resolving the story in a tidy love match absolves the violence that corporations inflict on individuals and communities in the name of profit.
Definitely the article should mention that AOL still has a ridic number of users and also posit that the hypothetical sequel film would have Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks divorcing after Hanks' big box retailer goes out of business because of Amazon.
I don't believe they last that long and I feel bad for Kathleen if they do. Joe Fox is just such a loathsome person, and the way he connects his ability to have a romantic relationship with Kathleen to her no longer being an economic competitor and threat is really telling about where their relationship is heading. I do agree that if Joe loses his fortune, he would be unable to stay married to a woman who is financially supporting him. I'm not sure there's any great macroeconomic truth behind this, though. Oh, I know! I believe with all my heart that when Joe "Mr. Creative Destruction" Fox's company is driven out of business by Amazon, he will complain bitterly about the unfair playing field of sales taxes all the way to his grave.
Kathleen voiceover Soon we'll just be a memory. In fact, someone, some foolish person will probably think it's a tribute to this city, the way it keeps changing on you, the way you can never count on it, or something. I know, because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying. But the truth is, I'm heartbroken.
This is You've Got Mail's deepest economic truth, that things we see as macroeconomically valuable are often inherently cruel at a microeconomic level.
ghost_lingering notes the 'violence' corporations inflict on communities in the name of profit, but at some level in capitalism (sometimes a very attenuated level) profit is a measure of value created. Even self-centered work-oriented Kathleen is capable of stepping outside herself and recognizing the value provided by Fox & Sons- it has a bigger, more spacious, and more affordable children's book section than her store was able to provide, is that really worth less to people than her passionate knowledge and advocacy? And change, she reluctantly admits, has value in itself.So in a way You've Got Mail's ambivalence about capitalism is the only thing in the movie that has any staying power. It's not happy with the pain capitalism can cause, but it's unwilling to criticize it with any teeth, and its conclusion is the rare film of its ilk that does not end with the community able to rally behind the plucky upstart to defeat the evil corporation.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 04:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 04:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 04:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 05:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-16 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 04:52 pm (UTC)Have you considered watching the film it was a remake of? (See, you don't 'need' an English Ph.D ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-16 01:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-16 02:27 am (UTC)Nice LEGO icon!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-16 03:16 am (UTC)The black and white is really good. The color version stars Judy Garland and is less good, IMHO.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 05:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 05:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 07:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-15 07:45 pm (UTC)