A man enters his psychoanalyst’s office and lies on the couch. Staring alternately at the ceiling and at the window in front of him, he begins to speak freely. At first he skims the surface of his private thoughts—ideas and experiences he has formerly kept to himself.
“Brinkley is my dog. He loves the streets of New York as much as I do, although he likes to eat bits of pizza and bagel off the sidewalk and I prefer to buy them. Brinkley is a great catcher, was offered a tryout on the Mets’ farm team, but he chose to stay with me so that he could spend eighteen hours a day sleeping on a large green pillow the size of an inner tube. Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. On the other hand, this not knowing has its charms.”
The man is Joe Fox, one of the central characters in the film, You’ve Got Mail. He is not lying on an analyst’s couch, but in certain respects he could be. He is “talking” via e-mail to someone he does not see and knows only as “Shopgirl.” He does it under conditions of absolute privacy. He has acted casual so as not to give away his eagerness while waiting for his girlfriend, Patricia, to leave for work in the morning, making sure she is really gone before he opens his computer to log on to his email session.
Joe’s e-mail partner goes through a similar ritual before she responds with her own e-mail. Her name, unknown to Joe, is Kathleen Kelly. Kathleen waits for her boyfriend, Frank, to leave for work in the morning, checking through the peephole in her door and then out the window to make sure he won’t come back before she turns to her secret, private relationship. She sends her message to someone (Joe) whom she knows only as NY152.
“Dear friend, I like to start my notes to you as if we’re already in the middle of a conversation. I pretend that we’re the oldest and dearest friends as opposed to what we actually are, people who don’t know each other’s names and met in a chat room where we both claimed we’d never been before. ‘What will NY152 say today?’ I wonder. I turn on my computer. I wait impatiently as it connects. I go online and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words—’You’ve got mail’. I hear nothing, not even a sound on the streets of New York, just the beat of my own heart. I have mail—from you.”
Psychoanalysts know from long experience that if you put someone in this kind of situation—talking freely to an unseen, relatively unknown person with conditions of privacy and confidentiality (in this case insured through mutual anonymity) that he will begin to develop fantasies about the listener, fantasies that transfer wishes and concern from earlier more basic relationships, childhood relationships with parents, and sometimes siblings (“oldest and dearest friends”). We call this “transference.”
These opening “sessions” suggest that Joe is cautious. Despite the lyrical quality of his message, his analyst might notice that he tends to use “displacement”. He talks about his own feelings, but attributes them to his dog. He tells us that he loves New York, the streets of New York. He is in love, but he is defended against the real object of his love, his anonymous, partly imaginary friend.
Kathleen is seemingly more direct and open, although it is not clear that she understands the significance of what she tells us. She tells NY152 her fantasies about him, alluding unknowingly to the transferential nature of her feelings when she tells him she pretends that they are “the oldest and dearest friends.” She is also quite open about her affection for “NY152”. She hears only her heart beating as she realizes she has not just mail, but mail “from you.”
As we follow each of them after their early morning session, we find them both in a state of euphoria. A smiling Joe acknowledges his co-worker, Kevin’s admonition that he is not listening by quoting Kathleen, “I hear nothing, nothing, not a sound on the streets, just the beat of my own heart, I think that’s how it goes.” Kevin thinks he’s become engaged to Patricia, his girlfriend, causing Joe to be confused and somewhat horrified. Kathleen opens her bookstore saying, “It’s a beautiful day.” Not noticing a traffic argument behind her, she repeats Joe’s words, “Don’t you just love New York in the fall?” Her friend tells her she’s in love. At first she says no, then as if remembering something, she says, “Yes. I’m in love with Frank.” Each of them has easily betrayed their euphoria and a sense of being in love.
These are lovers who have never met and who deliberately avoid revealing their identities. As Kathleen says, “We don’t talk about anything personal, so I don’t know his name or what he does or where he lives exactly, so it will be really easy for me to stop seeing him, because I’m not.” She and her friends playfully try to figure out his identity. This is transference love, and as it develops we can learn the nature of their transference wishes and why they cannot gratify them in “the real world.”
In the film, they soon meet, neither knowing that the other is their email partner. Kathleen owns and runs a children’s bookstore named after the film’s original model, ”The Shop Around the Corner”. (Other indirectly credited models are Pride and Prejudice and Cyrano de Bergerac.) Joe’s family owns a large bookstore chain that opens a mega-store, managed by Joe, around the corner from Kathleen’s shop, putting it into jeopardy.
We get a clue to Joe’s transference from his grandfather, who immediately recognizes the name of Kathleen’s bookstore, included in the list of competition for their new store. “Cecilia’s store … Cecilia Kelly, lovely woman. I think we might have had a date once or maybe we just exchanged letters . . . Mail, it was called mail . . . Cecilia had beautiful penmanship. She was too young for me, but she was enchanting. Her daughter owns it now.” It is clear that this was a special relationship that somehow never came to fruition. The relationship between Joe and Kathleen now has a ghost-like reflection in the past, a relationship from another generation that mimics the one in the original 1940’s film. Through this passing exchange, we are made to feel that Joe may be able to fulfill a relationship that his grandfather missed.
But Joe does not reveal this fantasy in his next e-mail. Instead, he gives us the negative of that relationship: “My father is getting married again. For five years he’s been living with a woman named Gillian, who studied decorating at Caesar’s Palace.” Having already seen Joe’s use of displacement, we can recognize his description of his father’s problem as his own. We know he is in a relationship with someone with whom he cannot be intimate, cannot share. We now also know that his hard-headed businessman father is in a similar relationship, and that his grandfather longed for something different, but let it slip away.
So far, however, Joe has let it slip away as well. He is in a relationship with a woman who is far too self centered and insensitive to threaten him with intimacy. Joe has his own defenses against intimacy. He uses the anonymity, distance and comfort of the email relationship to expose the aggressiveness he uses to keep a distance. “Do you ever feel you’ve become the worst version of yourself? That a Pandora’s box of all the secret, hateful parts—your arrogance, your spite, your condescension—has sprung open?” He wishes that he could give Kathleen his “zingers” and be free of the guilt. In the transference, he can let go of his sarcastic surface, directing some of it at himself.
But elsewhere, he avoids intimacy with sarcasm, nowhere more evident than when he finally arranges to meet with Kathleen. That meeting is closely modeled on a scene in the earlier film, The Shop Around the Corner. Kathleen arrives first, and sits at a table in a coffee shop with a book (Pride and Prejudice) and a rose to identify herself. When Joe arrives and sees that his rendezvous is with Kathleen, he cannot bring himself to tell her that he, her business rival, is her e-mail companion. Instead, they are drawn into a quarrel. When they resume their e-mail correspondence, she easily forgives NY152 for not showing up, directing all her anger at Joe Fox. She tells NY152 that instead of him, she met the man who had ruined her life. She confesses that she had said things to him that she regretted. In an apologetic e-mail, he tells her that she had expected to see someone she trusted, and met the enemy instead, assuring her that what she said must have been provoked. At a distance, he is kind, turning his aggression on himself. She deflects all her anger at Joe Fox, preserving her idealized image of NY152.
Joe’s email associations suggest that behind his confident aggressiveness, he is confused. He hides his confusion with his characteristic displacement, saying that coffee bars give people a chance to make decisions “so people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or who on Earth they are can for only two ninety-five get not just a cup of coffee, but an absolutely defining sense of self—tall, decaf cappucino.” In a later e-mail message, he confesses more openly to his personal confusion. “I came home tonight and got into the elevator to go to my apartment. An hour later [the elevator was stuck between floors], I got out of the elevator and Brinkley and I moved out. Suddenly, everything became clear . . . Let me just say, there was a man sitting in the elevator who knew exactly what he wanted, and I found myself wishing I was as lucky as he.”
The film tells us that Joe’s confusion comes from his family, in which relationships are poorly defined. Early in the film, we see him with two young children, clearly relatives. We learn that the girl, Annabel, about eight or nine, is Joe’s aunt, his grandfather’s daughter, and that Matt, a few years younger, is his brother. Joe sums it up with a touch of irony, saying, “We’re an American family.”
We learn more about that family when Joe and his father have a man to man talk on his father’s boat after both have ended another failed relationship. Joe’s father begins to reminisce: “You know, I stayed on this boat after, let’s see, your mother . . . Laurette, the ballet dancer– “ Joe interjects, “My Nanny.” “She was the nanny? I forgot that. How ironic. And then there was the ice skater.” “Also my nanny.” “Really! . . . And then there was Sybil, that’s an “A” word– “ “Astrologer, whose moon turned out to be in someone else’s house.” “Just like Jillian.” “Jillian ran off with someone else?” “The Nanny!” We get a sense that Joe was brought up by a series of nannies more interested in his father’s money than in him. The father asks Joe, “Who did you say you broke up with?” “Patricia. You met her.” His father asks, “Would I like her? . . . Just kidding son.” Joe’s expression suggests he is not sure he is kidding.
Joe’s father probably would like Patricia. He is a hard-headed, cynical narcissist in competition with his son for the affection of the boy’s nannies. Joe has never had a caring, loving stable mother for any period of time. Patricia, who is totally self centered and oblivious to Joe’s needs, fits the mold. Joe has left her after the epiphany in the elevator. When the elevator was stuck between floors, each of the trapped occupants talked about what they would do when they got out, except that when Joe was about to speak, Patricia interrupted to complain that she didn’t have any tic tacs. Joe has been with the kind of woman his father would like, but not what he feels he needs, someone who will listen to him.
Kathleen’s problems look very different from Joe’s. Where he is competitive and biting, she is somewhat passive and accepting. She tells her email companion that she has difficulty being aggressive, and he tells her he wishes he could give her some of his “zingers.” However, they have a fundamental similarity. Each of them is alone and lonely, and each is lost in an identity borrowed from another generation.
Katherine: “Confession: I have read Pride and Prejudice about two hundred times. I get lost in the language, words like ‘thither’, ‘mischievous’, ‘felicity’. I’m always in agony over whether Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are really going to get together. Read it! I know you’ll love it.”
Why is she in agony? No matter how many times she reads the book, the possibility of the two people really getting together remains elusive. Does she read it repetitively in the hopes of believing in such a love?
Her associations suggest that despite an outward attempt at optimism, she feels small and self-doubting in the presence of the new Fox superstore in her neighborhood. She first expresses her doubts to her boyfriend, Frank. “I’m wondering about my work . . . All I really do is run a children’s bookstore.” Frank, in his literary-theatrical manner tells her she is a “lone reed standing tall, waving boldly in the corrupt sands of commerce.” Not satisfied, she sends an e-mail, explicitly saying that she is not looking for answers, but for a listener, we might say a sharer. “Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life—well, valuable but small—and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around? I don’t really want an answer, I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So, good night, dear void!”
Kathleen’s life and her store, as well as the “void” of her transference, are intimately related to her relationship with the memory of her mother, the “enchanting” Cecilia Kelly of Joe’s grandfather’s memory. “I started helping my mother after school here when I was six years old and I used to watch her. And it wasn’t that she was just selling books, it was that she was helping people become whoever it was they were gonna turn out to be, because when you read a book as a child it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.” She tells us that she and her mother used to twirl (like dancers). “Anyway, she left the store to me, and I’m going to leave it to my daughter.” She is forced to backtrack immediately, explaining that she is not married and does not yet have a daughter.
The film has again subtly reminded us that it is about people trying to “become whoever it was they were supposed to be.” Kathleen, herself, will need this kind of help. We begin to understand Kathleen’s question about whether she is doing what she does because of a lack of courage. Running the store, valuable as it is, may be for her a way of continuing her mother’s life, a life which unaccountably did not appear to include a man. It is no wonder that what she sees reminds her of something she read in a book. She is not so much living as re-living.
As Kathleen’s store begins to fail, her mourning for her mother intensifies. She sends an email to NY152: “’It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees’. Do you know that Joni Mitchell song? ‘I wish I had a river I could skid away on’. It’s such a sad song, and not really about Christmas at all, but I was thinking about it tonight when I was decorating my Christmas tree, unwrapping funky ornaments made of popsicle sticks and missing my mother so much I almost couldn’t breathe. I always miss my mother at Christmas, but somehow it’s worse this year since I need some advice from her. I need her to make me some cocoa and tell me that everything that’s going badly in my life will sort itself out.”
Her desperation draws from Joe a counter-transference enactment. He offers to give her the advice and comfort she seeks, advising her to fight back against her business competition (not knowing that it is his company). When that battle fails, Kathleen again turns to her mother for help, wondering with an older friend what her mother would tell her to do. The friend whimsically makes believe she is speaking to Cecilia Kelly through a locket with her picture and comes back with the answer, “She has no idea, but she loves the display in the window.” Desperate, Kathleen goes back to the transference, pushing for a further “enactment,” She emails, “I need help. Do you still want to meet?” The meeting, scheduled outside the positive transference, fails, at least for now.
Finally, we see her leaving an emptied store, with images of herself as a little girl twirling with her mother. In her e-mail, she says, “ I feel as if a part of me has died, and my mother has died all over again, and no one can ever make it right.” Circumstances have forced her to leave the world that was made safe by her mother’s presence, the life that she has wondered if she may be leading because she has not been brave. The only remnant is in her e-mail transference, the “void” that provides the understanding and security of her mother.
By the time Joe has left Patricia, and Kathleen has left Frank (amicably) as well as her store, we, the viewers, have been thoroughly primed for the film’s resolution. We can empathize with their need for love and intimacy, a need no one goes through life without experiencing at least once. We can empathize with Joe’s desire to have a love affair with the world (“Don’t you just love New York in the fall?”), kept in abeyance by his absorption with competition and his identification with his cynical father, or with Kathleen’s dreams of romantic love that she finds so elusive. Each of them gives us a peek at whatever confusion we may feel about who we are and why we live the lives we do.
We are ready to see them leave the patterns that have trapped them. Even before the film’s final resolution, we learn, almost in passing, that Kathleen has begun a new career, writing children’s books. Joe has made a change as well. His father tells him that he’ll have to look for a new woman in his life, adding “That’s the easy part.” Joe retorts, “Oh right, yeah, a snap, to find the one single person in the world who fills your heart with joy.” His father answers, “Well don’t be ridiculous. Have I ever been with anybody who fit that description? Have you?” Joe’s eyes light up with realization. In fact, he knows that his father has not and cannot meet such a person, but that he has and can find happiness outside his father’s path.
The transference relationship was important in making change possible. Joe transferred to his e-mail friend his fantasies about a more supportive maternal figure, one at enough of a distance to allow him to lower his defenses. For Kathleen, her friend substituted for the fantasy of her mother that had captivated her, this time transferred to a man. But that transference is also the final obstacle to their forging a new relationship. The positive transference between Joe and Kathleen is confined, for the most part, to cyberspace. It carries over briefly to their first meeting, when Joe enters the store with the two children, but when she finds out at their next meeting that he represents Fox Books, they begin to argue. He is the enemy, the powerful conglomerate out to crush her. She is the competition that will be defeated. She insults him publicly in her campaign to save her store. There is, in essence, a split transference, highlighted in their e-mail exchange after their failed rendezvous. She tells him that instead of him, she met the man who had ruined her life and had said things to him that she regretted. He tells her that she had expected to see someone she trusted, and met the enemy instead.
To win her love, Joe must do battle with his own transference persona. I would not say that he helps her “work through” the transference. He attempts to modulate each of the transference images, de-idealizing her email friend and tempering her hostility towards Joe Fox. This calls for a change in Joe, as well. He must curb his own defensive sarcasm, showing her kindness and accepting her anger without firing back. He visits her with flowers and comfort, asking for her friendship. He acknowledges that she has reason to hate him, but asks forgiveness for “the small matter of causing you to lose your business,” blending humor and apology. He arranges to meet her “accidentally,” and when they meet, he begins to talk with her about her email friend, undermining his image by gently poking fun at NY152’s mystery, creating jokes about the email “handle”, NY152 (which we know is taken from his address). He reminds her that this friend had stood her up at their rendezvous, and suggests that he might be married, fat, or hiding some other calamity.
In his email persona, he arranges to meet with her again, this time in Riverside Park. Joe walks her home from a lunch date before the meeting, lightly discussing her rendezvous. Before leaving her, he prods her idealized transference one last time, telling her, “He’s waiting until you’re primed, until you’re absolutely convinced there’s no other man you could have loved.” As he goes on, he overcomes his own defenses against showing affection. “You know sometimes I wonder, if I hadn’t been ‘Fox Books’ and you hadn’t been ‘The Shop Around the Corner’ . . . I wouldn’t have been able to wait twenty-four hours before calling you up . . ;. for dinner or some drinks, a movie—for as long as we both shall live.”
When she goes to her rendezvous, she hears someone calling “Brinkley” and meets the dog before Joe appears. When he arrives she tells him, “I wanted it to be you, I wanted it to be you so badly.” They kiss to the tune of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” with Brinkley pushing up against their clothes and barking.
What they have found is what has been missing for each of them. They are lonely and isolated at the beginning of the film, drawn to people who cannot satisfy their need for intimacy. They gratify that need in a transference relationship, carried out anonymously at a distance. Joe has never had a mother. Like his grandfather, he has been unable to enter a relationship with someone who is “enchanting.” Kathleen mourns for her mother, but perhaps more telling is that, in parallel to Joe, she appears to have never had a father. He grew up with his father and grandfather, along with a succession of nannies. She grew up with her mother, no man apparent. At the end of the film, aided by circumstance and the ability to explore their desires through a transference relationship, they have found the loving family they secretly desired, with Brinkley giving us a sense of a complete family to come, a family made possible by greater freedom from the ties to the previous generation.
From Double Feature: Finding Our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein 2002: EREADS
Also published in the PANY Bulletin Fall, 1999 37:3