Culture  /  Film Review

The Romance of American Clintonism

The politically complacent ’90s produced a surprisingly large number of mainstream American rom-coms about fighting the Man.

It’s 1998. Sushi restaurants are the height of cosmopolitanism. The color palette of every café interior is putty, mocha, moss, and merlot. People are snickering about Monica Lewinsky and dabbling in cybersex. Across the nation, they’re parking between Borders and Gap and striding through outdoor malls, Tic Tacs and Nicorette rattling in their leather shoulder bags, into brand-new Regal Cinemas to see the Nora Ephron romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail.

To me, there is hardly any movie more comforting. When it comes to mind, I can almost taste candy apples and milky-sweet Starbucks. For that reason, I have watched this quintessential, late-’90s film many times. But it was only on this last viewing that I finally caught its drift. If you squint past the brownstone facades and cashmere turtlenecks and twinkle-lit shop windows, You’ve Got Mail reveals itself to have politics. Or, more accurately, it has anti-politics, and in abundance.

You’ve Got Mail stars Meg Ryan as independent children’s bookstore proprietor Kathleen Kelly and Tom Hanks as mega-chain corporate bookstore executive Joe Fox. The two fall in love anonymously online, via emails exchanged over AOL, while the latter is mercilessly driving the former out of business. He succeeds, and Kathleen’s store shutters, permanently scarring the cultural landscape of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As their improbable romance develops anyway, Joe asks Kathleen self-deprecatingly but sincerely why she “won’t forgive me for a tiny little thing like putting you out of business?” Against all odds, she does.

For Kathleen’s and our ability to forgive, we are rewarded with bouquets of daisies and a sugary Cranberries soundtrack. Perhaps, I realized on this last viewing, this is the ultimate source of the movie’s comfort for droves of viewers in 1998. You’ve Got Mail comes at the end of a string of mainstream anti-selling-out romantic comedies and dramas: popular films with subcultural themes like Reality Bites (1994) and Empire Records (1995) but also conventional blockbusters like Jerry Maguire (1996) and even Titanic (1997). In this lineage, You’ve Got Mail marks a profound departure. Here is a new fantasy: if we just stop resisting the inexorable march of corporate domination, everything will resolve itself in our favor.

In that sense, You’ve Got Mail is the ur-Clintonite film, a pure expression of the era’s liberal political defeatism masquerading as an optimism that politics are now disposable — indeed, that they’re only standing in the way of utopia. This is the ethos of Third Way centrism: that socialism versus capitalism is an outdated dichotomy, and that popular interests will be most broadly served through technocratic tinkering rather than conflict. Of course, big capitalists come out on top in the final result, but everyone else — from the proletariat to the petty bourgoisie — is also happier and more prosperous for having relented. We have no use for the old antagonisms, the movie seems to say. History’s over. Romance has defeated it.