I recently rewatched The Holiday, the 2006 Nancy Meyers rom com about two women who swap “houses, cars, everything” for two weeks over the Christmas holiday. I’ll save my thoughts on it for another day, but the main thing that struck me watching it was the innocence of a time when the internet was seen as a place where magic could happen; a place where two women nursing their respective heartbreaks could log on and find each other.
This past summer I rewatched You’ve Got Mail and was similarly blown away by the sort of charmingly naive premise of it. The two leads, we learn, met chastely in an over-30s chatroom and decided to continue the conversation through email and, eventually and with palpable sexual frisson, over instant messenger. The anonymity of their correspondence allows them to shed their attachments to their daily lives. They don’t have to pretend to find their jobs noble or interesting, or to enjoy their partners. Everything real that holds them in place becomes immaterial. They are only who they say they are.
The trope of lovers who can’t see each other is infinitely repeatable and rich with narrative potential. Consider Pyramus and Thisbe and their crack in the wall. For the lovers in the story, the absence of their bodies allows for an expansive erotic imagining of the other and raises the stakes of their connection: will it translate in person? For the audience meanwhile the story becomes an elaborate in-joke, layering tension over even innocuous scenes. We become students of their chemistry, looking for evidence that the characters might already be choosing each other long before the reveal.
You’ve Got Mail is of course based on another movie, The Shop Around the Corner, from 1951 (which I also recently watched) which itself was based on a Hungarian play. The latter revolves around two coworkers who have been writing letters to each other without realizing it – none of this is new to the internet. If you could strip away the physical constraints of your life, the argument of the unseen lovers seems to go, like your job, your location, and your appearance, you could get to the core of what matters. Underneath all those details of daily life, there is a real you. Someone more vulnerable, more honest, more you than you are in your everyday. The early internet movies believed in a kind of liberation through text, finding love through good dialogue.
But! But. Mysteriously, the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s (much like the letter exchange of the 1950s) always seems to pair you with a person… exactly like you. This is what got me. It’s odd that the person Meg Ryan met in a chat room would be Tom Hanks. Obviously it’s the prerogative of Hollywood to make everyone good looking, so that’s not my issue. But what are the odds that the person you meet on the internet, supposedly free from the constraints of your physical existence, would be… a white man also living in not only the US but in your exact city, from a comparable class background? (Same deal with the Holiday, although given the role real estate plays in the set-up, it’s perhaps more understandable.) What are we to make of this version of the internet? In its own way, it was maybe prescient, predicting the self-selecting approach of the filter bubble or the facebook group. When faced with the chance to meet anyone, we still might just choose the people who are exactly like us.
(I’m still thinking about it – it feels like there’s more here. Maybe the idea that internet anonymity itself would separate us from our real-world identities is its own kind of colorblindness. And maybe some of the joy is finding your people too. It just felt funny to look at the older version of the internet depicted in these movies and see how very local it is.)
655 words, Day 5/10 – halfway through!!
Ana Olson 