It’s Nothing Personal: You’ve Got Mail

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan reunite in yet another bubble gum romantic comedy for the masses. Ryan is still her old cute mussed-up hair self like she’s always been, but Hanks comes in having picked up a couple of gold statues and having lost his sense of humor. Remember when this guy used to be a cross dressing mermaid smooching comedian? Now he’s just a smug and slightly overweight uber-capitalist.

Unlike the surrealistic satire Joe Versus the Volcano and the sappy Sleepless in Seattle this movie quickly reveals itself to be a tragedy devoid of either romance or comedy. Ryan, the owner of a small children’s bookstore that serves a neighborhood with personality and intelligence, is excruciatingly driven out of business by Hanks, the owner of a super chain of mega-bookstores featuring brainless minimum wage employees and three-dollar-a-cup cappuccinos.

Meanwhile, these two arch-enemies, one representing the best of small scale American entrepreneurialism and the other representing the worst of large-scale corporate egoism unwittingly fall for each other in an internet chat room. We notice that Ryan is using an Apple Macintosh, the computer of choice for the creative minority, while Hanks is using a Microsoft Windows PC, the dominant computer of ubiquity and corporate monopoly.

At one point, as her life is being destroyed by the success of his economic steamroller, Hanks tells Ryan that “it’s nothing personal, it’s just business.” Indeed. Besides Ryan’s charming little children’s bookstore, nothing in this movie is personal. Hanks’s giant corporate bookstore is impersonal. The overpriced coffee bars are impersonal. The internet chatroom is the ultimate impersonal meeting place. And while Hanks drifts through the movie like a zombie drawn by money, power, and some ambiguous need for a mate, Ryan is slowly drained of any character she had in the beginning of the film.

In the end, Ryan presumably falls for Hanks. But then what? Is she to become the trophy wife of this detestable scum bag who epitomizes the American Corporate ideal of economy over people? Or will she soften his hard edges and make him into a caring human being? Unlikely. In the end Hanks is still the same character. He has won the battle with Ryan, the big corporation has defeated the small business owner, and he remains in a position of power. Ryan, on the other hand, is destroyed. Her career, her bookstore, and her life are gone. She seems more resigned to the inevitability of defeat than liberated by it. Hanks owns her.

This film is a classic Dickensian tragedy, and a warning of the excesses and abuses of the 1990’s strong economy. It illustrates in plain terms how people have been sacrificed for Borders Books, Starbucks Coffee, and AOL. Just as we laugh at how the American Indians sold Manhattan Island for some strands of beads, future generations will mock us for how we sold our souls for a handful of stock options.

But in the meantime it’s business as usual; it’s nothing personal.

- Dr. Mangrove