Caught myself "lacking"; Sleepless in Seattle vs. You’ve Got Mail, Online Dating, and Magic
I was wrong and got caught up in "the lack", as Freud would say...Listen to the Voice Over to read along with me.
**Disclaimer before we get started** I did not intend for this essay to go in this direction, this week was supposed to be “The Academic Case for Rom Coms”. I started writing and made a cynical blanket statement, then had an epiphany in the reflection of it all. I realized I didn’t believe in the big statement I made and I wanted to discard this essay altogether. But life is about being wrong, learning, growing, and being vulnerable enough to do all those things. So bear with me.
While I had the dating app Hinge, one of my chosen prompts was something like ‘My controversial opinion is that Sleepless In Seattle (SIS) is better than You’ve Got Mail (YGM).
I tried to make myself like YGM by looking at it intellectually and reading academic texts about it, you know, to see the movie through a different lens. But, to no avail. I read the essay by Aimee Morrison, “Newfangled Computers And Old-Fashioned Romantic Comedy: ‘You've Got Mail’s’ Futuristic Nostalgia”. The essay is good, it’s mainly about how the movie is futuristic and nostalgic at the same time. But I think because the essay was written in 2010, to the author’s downfall, her praise for the futuristic romance that is online courtship is birthed from the weird technological era that was the late -aughts, when everything seemed possible and nothing was terrible (yet).
If you haven’t seen or heard of You’ve Got Mail, (where have you been?) I’ll give a brief summary. Kathleen Kelly is the owner of a small local bookstore in NYC, called “The Shop Around the Corner”. She also, in her free time, frequents AIM chat rooms (for my Gen Z readers, that’s AOL Instant Messenger). Eventually, she starts private messaging a man from one of those chat rooms and has a quasi-romantic relationship with NY152, Joe Fox. They never reveal any personal information, so neither knows they are rival bookstore owners. Joe as Goliath vs Kathleen as David. Joe is the owner and nepotism baby to FOX Books, the megastore and retail giant down the block from Kathleen’s store. They rival over capitalistic gains IRL and online they’re “exchanging ever more intimate confidences”.1 And then other stuff happens, there’s a golden retriever in it, Dave Chapelle is in it, and then Kathleen and Joe end up together.
If you haven’t seen or heard of Sleepless In Seattle, (again, where have you been?) I’ll give a brief summary. Also staring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, SIS begins by establishing that Tom Hanks’ character, Sam Baldwin, is a father and a recent widower. He moves to Seattle to give him and his 9-year-old son, Jonah, a fresh start. 18 months later, one night Jonah calls a talk radio station on his father’s behalf, in hopes of finding a new mommy. The host, with the commercialized therapy skills akin to Oprah, talks to Sam about being a grieving widower and the steps he needs to take to find a new wife. At the same time, across the continental United States, Annie Reed is listening to the same station in Baltimore, while she drives to the Christmas party of her fiancé. Annie is struck by Sam’s heartwarming and saccharine story about the love he had for his late wife and the “magic” they shared. Annie can’t stop thinking about Sam, she and hundreds of other women write to Sam. In Seattle, Jonah is taken by Annie’s letter, and Annie’s letter only, out of the 100s. Jonah’s fixation on Annie and Annie’s drive to find “magic” ends up getting the two adults together.
At one point Morrison states that urban life “may be alienating, [but] personal computing is intimate”. I had to CURB my eye roll at this. I do not agree, personal computing is not intimate, it’s anything but. In agreeing that SIS is better than YGM, a match on Hinge actually told me once: “There’s nothing romantic about falling in love online”. I laughed out loud at his irony. He then quickly followed up with “Except Hinge of course.”
“Ahaha, of course, except for hinge” I replied, (some reply along those lines, idk I deleted the app). So there we have it, two people said it so it must be true. Morrison goes on to talk about dating online or whatever the fuck you want to call what Joe Fox and Katheleen Kelly are doing. But, intrinsically, there is nothing romantic about falling in love online, and yet, people still like YGM. You have people like Aimee Morrison writing whole essays about it!
But I don’t blame her, my eye roll had no malicious intent towards my fellow academic. Morrison goes on to describe the “kind of computing that is valorized by the film[:] a highly personal and intimate set of communication tools that operate transparently and seem to transmit users' thoughts, emotions, and intentions without mediation.”2 Sure, yes, that does happen in this movie, but unfortunately, as much as I love Nora Ephron, the movie does not age well. Morrison calls “Ephron’s choice ahead of the curve”3, again :( I don’t agree. Nora could not have predicted that the world of dating online was going to spoil! How could she, she wasn’t a clairvoyant! (RIP)
Now you could say there’s a case to be made about Sleepless In Seattle being dated, Annie hears of Sam over the radio, but radio still exists and has been sublimated by podcasts. Morrison quotes Doug Willaims in noting “that romantic comed[ies] [solicit] escapism and utopianism— the satisfactions it offers its viewers [is] counterpoint to reality”.4
If you’re looking for a counterpoint to the reality that is dating in 2024, then turn to You’ve Got Mail. But honestly, I don’t like that movie one bit, Tom Hanks is a capitalist asshole to her before he knows Kathleen is “shopgirl” and then even after he finds out Kathleen is “shopgirl” he’s still a dick and doesn’t reveal himself as NY152. He’s only nice to her for the last 12 minutes of the movie! If you only require a man to be nice to you for 12 minutes, then you’ll love YGM.
But now that I’ve gotten my hate for YGM out of the way...
To really look into the academic & sociological importance and substance of romantic comedies you have to see that romantic comedies “point out the failures of society to fulfill the needs of its members.”5 Exactly. Because no one wants to laugh and fall in love anymore.
You know what..... I wrote the above on a Thursday, and I came back to this post days later to finish it and I can’t. I have to take back what I said. But I won’t delete it because I think it’s important still, to note the change in myself and my perspective.
There is something romantic about falling in love online.
I completely forgot about all of the beautiful examples I have in my own life, right in front of my eyes. But more importantly, the example that gives me the most hope is my beautiful friend who met her amazing boyfriend online. They were living on opposite sides of the country and started chatting and forming a connection for about 6 months. They built the foundation that I talked about in my last essay.
And a year later they live in the same city and have a thriving, loving relationship.
In the book Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman, author Mari Ruti6 presents Jaques Lacan and his interpretation of Freudian theory, in terms of lack, desire, and fantasy. There are a lot of preceding explanations that I don’t feel like mentioning, but to get to my point I’ll do my best to summarize Ruti, Lacan, and Freud. Although we as humans might not be able to consciously or physically recognize our “lack”, what we’re missing, we still experience the lack “in ways that we can’t fully name”.7 I think that “the lack” that I’m missing, romance, is what led me to forget the grand potential for falling in love online. My unconscious omission of the real-life examples of falling in love online was proof that I was experiencing “the lack” in a way I couldn’t fully name. I’ll quote Ruti’s summary of her breakdown: “We may spend much of our lives fleeing from our lack — finding various ways to distract ourselves from our deficiency— but there are moments in most human lives when it leaps to the forefront of our consciousness, particularly during times of suffering”.8 (would you call a loneliness epidemic a time of suffering?)
How could I let myself resign to a blanket statement? A statement that I know at my core is not true, just to try to flee from the lack. There can be something romantic about falling in love online. It depends on who you’re falling in love with, and the strength of the connection. I forgot that my friend’s story is an example I use to remind myself and other people that there is hope. I say “They can do it! So maybe it’ll work for you too”. My feelings about YGM have not changed, it’s not how they fall in love that makes me dislike the movie, it’s that Joe is mean to Katheleen for pretty much the entire movie. But now I really feel bad about my eye roll towards Morrison. Personal computing is not intimate, but maybe there’s a way you can achieve intimacy when there’s a person worth achieving it for. And if you don’t try, if you don’t take the risk, you’ll never know. (This is not to eradicate in-person intimacy building, but just if you have no other choice at that time.) Maybe we should be using dating online or getting to know someone online as the vehicle that takes us to intimacy, to reach something beautiful like what my friend has.
I don’t know....recently someone I used to know reached out after reading my first post. He said he didn’t know I was “such a romantic”. I thought i am, but i didn’t realize i was coming off as such. I just think there’s a case to be made for love.
What makes SIS better than YGM is how Annie forgoes any rationality on the matter of finding Sam, all for the potential “magic”. She uses her people-finding privileges as a journalist to find Sam’s information and pretends she’s reporting on him as an excuse to go to Seattle to find him. She tries to make sense of all her actions, asking her friend Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) if she’s crazy, and as a good friend, Becky says no. The romantic comedy doesn’t work in the rational, and in the real world, “we think of love, in other words, as a significant undertaking, an investment in our future well-being, that must be approached carefully and rationally.”9 Rational choice is not the reason we love these movies, it’s because of their lack of rationality and sense do we root for the characters, no matter how crazy the journey is.
I found the amazing essay “Dating Markets and Love Stories: Freedom and Fairness in the Pursuit of Intimacy and Love” by Nina Varsava and will be pulling a lot of quotes from her in my next paragraphs. She wrote her paper in 2013 during the rise of Tinder and amended it in 2017. I would suggest everyone who dates online to read the paper in its entirety, it is extremely relevant, insightful, and heartwarming.
Forgoing rationality is something we’re lacking in our search for love in real life. Dating online, using the help of filters and deal-breaker-like preferences allows for a “safe” and potentially risk-free approach to finding love. (By “risk-free” I am asking my reader to imagine we live in a world where men do not prey on and get off on the assault of women). Varsava quotes philosopher, sociologist, and legal theorist Renata Salecl, who asserts; “…as we know from psychoanalysis, rational choice is the last thing that guides our relationships.”10
Rational thought never has been too interesting a topic in movies, every nail-biting moment, every “DON’T GO IN THERE” you might yell at the screen, every irrational decision keeps you invested. If Annie had acted rationally, as in, not using her journalistic investigative privileges to find a man’s information and then fly across the country just to get a look at him when she’s already engaged to someone else, the movie would have ended 25 minutes in. In the real world that would be INSANE. But that’s why we love movies, right? It’s not the real world, but just an imitation of it.
Salecl recalls Freud who believed “that our decisions concerning love are made unconsciously, regardless of how we might try to bring them to conscious deliberation.”11 Could it be said that despite how carefully we might tread, how safe we try to be to find love and protect our hearts from hurt, none of it really matters? And if it’s not rational choice guiding our relationships, then what is it? Magic? Fate? Our gut?
“Love, I suggest..depends on a give and take between risk and security, doubt and certainty.”
Nina Varsava. “Dating Markets and Love Stories: Freedom and Fairness in the Pursuit of Intimacy and Love
I’m torn, maybe there’s nothing inherently romantic about the idea of falling in love online, but maybe I believe in using any tool possible to build romance. But what I know now is that I no longer believe in the “capitalist love economy [that] runs on the relentless consumption of love objects.”12 AKA the modern dating app. Sometimes I’m a cynic but I don’t think I am on this point. I’ve been enlightened, I’m seeing through the bullshit, I’m woke (if I may). Even I have had a successful long-term relationship come from a dating app! However that was in 2017, and I think the market has been oversaturated and soured. The dating app has turned into a spigot that can be turned on and off by those quenched for attention; a fast food drive-thru for affection. Dating profiles or “cards” have turned people into a playing game. A game full of “[love] objects; the idea is that, because we know there is an abundant supply of objects to love, we need not commit fully to any one of them.” 13 Dating apps that work on “hotness scales” (ugly people deserve love too, Hinge!) have constructed love into an output that can successfully be executed by an algorithm and data-hungry app moguls.
Looking at the data of my own life, 50% of my dates in 2023 came from dating apps (DA), and the other 50% of my dates came from meeting in real life (MIRL). I found that 66% of the DA dates caused me emotional stress after not working out. Out of the MIRL dates only 33% resulted in emotional stress by the end. At the end of the day, I know things just might not work out, no matter how you meet. But I think the emotional stress from DA dates, for me, comes from the idea that we were already a good “match”. So when it doesn’t work out, it’s a bit more disappointing. Whereas I know the random that approached me outside the bar is gonna be a complete toss-up because there isn’t the security of predetermined match-making already. The odds are riskier just going out with “a random”. (I think some guys think it’s risky to approach a woman and ask her out IRL out of fear of rejection. The worst she could say is no. The worst that could happen for a woman or any femme-presenting person rejecting that approach is murder so....) There are risks on both sides of the asker and the ask-ee, yes. I guess I’m thinking about it like this: if I saw a commercial for a really cool toy and the commercial made it seem like it was amazing and I had to have it, then getting it and finding out that it’s actually a really shitty toy would suck and be disappointing. But if you just handed me a toy with the notion that it “could be cool but idk you have to find out yourself”, well I’d be less disappointed to find out that the toy is actually shitty. Knowingly resigning it all to chance seems less risky to me.
I don’t want to alienate or marginalize anyone. I want to point out that I’m aware, and make others aware, that online dating can field the level of risk that comes with dating as a sexual minority and brings about more opportunities for queer people. Varsava quotes Lauren Berlant’s explanation in Desire/Love: “Gay, lesbian, transgendered and even less-standard sexualities have few generalized spaces or institutions of support”.14 Varsava goes on to say “in order even to approach a potential lover, or establish a relationship, LGBTQ people must confront many considerable risks that do not affect heterosexual people.” 15 I don’t want to dismiss the importance of online dating for the queer community.
Annie and Sam speak of “magic”, that’s what they’re both after. They say it at the same time as Sam is on the radio and Annie is listening in her car. The idea of magic is what makes Annie chase Sam. Sam’s first glance at Annie is shot by director Nora Ephron in order to suggest Sam’s first feeling of “magic” since his wife died. Magic, fate, and destiny are commonplace themes in Western love stories. With every “random encounter,” we’re looking to find “a construction that is resilient, as it had been necessary” as if it had been fate. Can you have random encounters in a dating world full of search parameters and calculated algorithms? Do dating apps remove the idea of fate?
That magic can be felt through the phone, through the webs of the internet. Hell, Annie felt it through the radio. Even within the last few months, I found a bit of magic on a dating app when I saw a super cute face and an obscure movie reference that made me laugh. I threw the phone across the room out of pure jitters. When I found it again, in between my bed and the wall, and unlocked the phone to send a “like”…the profile was gone. The app had refreshed. I threw the phone again and screamed (I love screaming. I wanted to buy a phone booth for 7 grand just to have a place to scream in NYC that didn’t cause anyone alarm). I tried to recall some of the criteria I saw on his profile and set all of my search parameters & “preferences” to match. I went through the “cards” and rapidly declined everyone who wasn’t him. No doubt Annie would understand. As Varsava brings her chapter to a conclusion, she reiterates that “the drive to transform a random encounter into a necessary one is often expressed to the point of absurdity, and yet the absurdity seems generally acceptable, given that the context is love.”16 I was being absurd! But, hey, you miss 99% of the shots you don’t take. (yes…I can use a sports reference…I’ve been to a basketball game before….)
Maybe what I believe —what I truly know— is that romance can be built anywhere, (anywhere that it’s consensual of course) you just have to be willing to commit to building it. (or maybe you just have to be a little delusional, idk) We’re all looking for the magic (hopefully), so I guess if the only tool that Joe and Kathleen have is “personal computing”, then so be it. But I still don’t think that once he found out Kathleen was whom he was chatting with he should have lied about it. But I wonder, if I watch the original I’ll like it better. (YGM is a remake of a 1940s film called The Shop Around the Corner.) And if I do like the original better, being that it’s from a time without the internet, maybe it will be because “Love is not in need of reinventing”.17 But maybe “our cultural moment does call for rethinking and reimagining the practice of love, considering the rapidly evolving and expanding services and tools that surround it.”18
This did not end up where I intended this essay to go. I had a whole thing about the birth of romantic comedies, second-wave feminism in the ‘70s, then third-wave postfeminism in the ‘90s, to where we are now. And how Hollywood after 2012 can only seem to put out a handful of decent Rom Coms... But now my mind is clouded by “lack”, the capitalist love economy that is obsessed with data collection, and the risk and irrationality that comes with trying to find magic and love.
Morrison, Aimée. “Newfangled Computers And Old-Fashioned Romantic Comedy: ‘You’ve Got Mail’s’ Futuristic Nostalgia.” Revue Canadienne d’Études Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19, no. 1 (2010): 41–58. Page 41.
Morrison, Page 50
Morrison, Page 50
Morrison, Page 43
Morrison, 43
Mari Ruti passed away in June of 2023 from Cancer.
Ruti, Mari. n.d. Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Page 26
Ruti, Mari. n.d. Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Page 26
Dowd, James J., and Nicole R. Pallotta. “The End of Romance: The Demystification of Love in the Postmodern Age.” Sociological Perspectives 43, no. 4 (2000): 549–80 page 552. https://doi.org/10.2307/1389548.
Nina Varsava. “Dating Markets and Love Stories: Freedom and Fairness in the Pursuit of Intimacy and Love.” Cultural Critique 95 (2017): 162–96. Page 165 https://doi.org/10.5749/culturalcritique.95.2017.0162.
Varsava 165
Varsava 166
Varsava 166
Vasarva 175
Vasarva 175
Vasarvas 186
Vasarvas 191
Vasarvas 191
Loved this so much. Thank you thank you thank you. As a hopeless romantic, this really helped.