On the socioeconomics of Sleepless in Seattle
This was the movie people requested I write an absurd amount of silly economics meta about after I reviewed You've Got Mail, but the truth is a rewatch turns up not very much I found interesting in terms of economics. Everyone in Sleepless in Seattle is a middle class white professional, there's not a lot of contrast, and contrast is what reveals interesting realities. Tom Hanks is an architect, Meg Ryan is a reporter, Bill Pullman is, I dunno, something boring and corporate, and most of their friends are co-workers. Oh, there's one travel agent character who exists for plot reasons, but she seems to be married to a white collar professional.
Unlike You've Got Mail, nobody in Sleepless in Seattle is their own boss, but that doesn't seem to matter much. As a reporter, Meg Ryan sets her own story priorities without the apparent consultation of her editor. She can just fly off to Seattle to spy on a guy from a random human interest story and the Baltimore Sun will apparently pay for it. Meanwhile, Tom Hanks quits his job as an architect in Chicago after his wife dies and decides to pop over to Seattle and try his luck without so much as lining up an interview in advance, and he has no trouble finding a new job and providing for his son. I found this professional autonomy vaguely troubling, but not overly so. Maybe that's really how corporate life was in the '90s. These days, the only people with professional lives like that are tech bros.
Meanwhile, An Affair to Remember, the ur-narrative that animates Sleepless in Seattle, is intensely about class, so much so that I've never seen it but I can tell it's about class and wealth just by reading the wikipedia page. Moreover the core romantic idea of the movie seems to be that the Empire State Building rendezvous never happens. Sleepless in Seattle is determined to rewrite An Affair to Remember in the most anodyne possible way. What if there were no barriers between the lovers, what if there were no real differentiation between the lovers, what if the only thing keeping them apart was the simple fact that they'd never met each other... Sleepless in Seattle's central question about love is, are we as viewers still transfixed by the romance of the Empire State Building gesture on its own, bereft of all context? Upsettingly, the answer is more yes than no.
Other than the grief of Tom Hanks and his son, this is a soulless movie. Tom Hanks's grief is the only thing that is real in the movie and it is therefore the only thing that can draw Meg Ryan to him. She does not know him as a father. She does not know him as a lover. She does not know him as a communicator, a partner. She is simply drawn to the realness of his grief in contrast to the void of her own life, which merely has friends and family and a job that gives her autonomy. Meanwhile, Meg Ryan has nothing to offer Tom Hanks but her transfixing beauty. When he sees her on the Empire State Building, he feels a sense of wonder that she is the mysterious beautiful woman he saw across the street stalking him in Seattle. There is no there there. There is simply the romance of the gesture, of two attractive people meeting on Valentine's Day at the Empire State Building. It ought not to be enough.
I guess if I have an economics question at all, it's Doylistic. Why make Hanks an architect, why make Ryan a journalist? What truth about their personal and professional identities is Ephron trying to communicate in these choices? Admittedly Ryan being a reporter gives her a plot reason to visit Seattle and check out Hanks, and admittedly we get a scene where Hanks flirts with his doomed alternate love interest while they try to decorate a house, but ultimately these are insubstantial reasons. Ephron could have gotten Meg Ryan to Seattle otherwise.
I think the answer is that Ephron is circling around a fundamental emptiness in the creative and emotional lives of these ostensibly creative people. As an architect, Tom Hanks summons buildings out of thin air and his imagination. As a journalist, Meg Ryan takes the raw material of lives and turns them into a storytelling art through her craft. These are awesome feats! This is a professional life to be proud of, if one is good at it, and nobody in a romantic comedy like this is ever bad at their job. But they're doing it for hire, not for themselves. What they are missing is a partnership in their private lives that spurs them to create with the same enthusiasm that they create for their jobs. Without love, their creativity is solely channeled into serving the corporate interests of their bosses. So I think my idea of Tom Hanks's grief as the raw material of reality that draws Meg Ryan to her has an economic truth behind it. If she marries him, his grief will be a story all her own, not one that she serves for others. That is what she is looking for. What Tom Hanks is looking for is vaguer and yet simpler. He had the partner who completed him creatively, and she is gone and what he needs, as his son intuitively senses, is someone to replace that void in his life, because for some reason his son is not enough.
Unlike in You've Got Mail, I don't think you can fault him. It is not out of cruelty or misplaced priorities that his son is not enough. it's simply the emotional distortion of grief. If Hanks had the time and space to heal himself, his son could be enough, but that's not the series of tumbles of fate that his life happens to take. Instead he meets Meg Ryan, eventually. But I do think there is an entanglement of love and the economics of social class here. The shape that both Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are trying to find for their lives is a shape prescribed by their social status as upper middle class white professionals. Everything, and especially the media they consume, is telling them that what they need is a nuclear family to serve as the counterbalance to their fulfilling professional lives. But not just a nuclear family, right? For their parents, it would have been enough to find a nuclear family at all, but they need a nuclear family with a true partner they love and who complements them, who will let them flourish professionally. The media have told them it's possible to have 'it all'. And if there is a cynicism in Ephron's giant hug of a movie, it's that it ends with their first meeting, so we don't see the development of any flaws in the partnership. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/387773.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
Unlike You've Got Mail, nobody in Sleepless in Seattle is their own boss, but that doesn't seem to matter much. As a reporter, Meg Ryan sets her own story priorities without the apparent consultation of her editor. She can just fly off to Seattle to spy on a guy from a random human interest story and the Baltimore Sun will apparently pay for it. Meanwhile, Tom Hanks quits his job as an architect in Chicago after his wife dies and decides to pop over to Seattle and try his luck without so much as lining up an interview in advance, and he has no trouble finding a new job and providing for his son. I found this professional autonomy vaguely troubling, but not overly so. Maybe that's really how corporate life was in the '90s. These days, the only people with professional lives like that are tech bros.
Meanwhile, An Affair to Remember, the ur-narrative that animates Sleepless in Seattle, is intensely about class, so much so that I've never seen it but I can tell it's about class and wealth just by reading the wikipedia page. Moreover the core romantic idea of the movie seems to be that the Empire State Building rendezvous never happens. Sleepless in Seattle is determined to rewrite An Affair to Remember in the most anodyne possible way. What if there were no barriers between the lovers, what if there were no real differentiation between the lovers, what if the only thing keeping them apart was the simple fact that they'd never met each other... Sleepless in Seattle's central question about love is, are we as viewers still transfixed by the romance of the Empire State Building gesture on its own, bereft of all context? Upsettingly, the answer is more yes than no.
Other than the grief of Tom Hanks and his son, this is a soulless movie. Tom Hanks's grief is the only thing that is real in the movie and it is therefore the only thing that can draw Meg Ryan to him. She does not know him as a father. She does not know him as a lover. She does not know him as a communicator, a partner. She is simply drawn to the realness of his grief in contrast to the void of her own life, which merely has friends and family and a job that gives her autonomy. Meanwhile, Meg Ryan has nothing to offer Tom Hanks but her transfixing beauty. When he sees her on the Empire State Building, he feels a sense of wonder that she is the mysterious beautiful woman he saw across the street stalking him in Seattle. There is no there there. There is simply the romance of the gesture, of two attractive people meeting on Valentine's Day at the Empire State Building. It ought not to be enough.
I guess if I have an economics question at all, it's Doylistic. Why make Hanks an architect, why make Ryan a journalist? What truth about their personal and professional identities is Ephron trying to communicate in these choices? Admittedly Ryan being a reporter gives her a plot reason to visit Seattle and check out Hanks, and admittedly we get a scene where Hanks flirts with his doomed alternate love interest while they try to decorate a house, but ultimately these are insubstantial reasons. Ephron could have gotten Meg Ryan to Seattle otherwise.
I think the answer is that Ephron is circling around a fundamental emptiness in the creative and emotional lives of these ostensibly creative people. As an architect, Tom Hanks summons buildings out of thin air and his imagination. As a journalist, Meg Ryan takes the raw material of lives and turns them into a storytelling art through her craft. These are awesome feats! This is a professional life to be proud of, if one is good at it, and nobody in a romantic comedy like this is ever bad at their job. But they're doing it for hire, not for themselves. What they are missing is a partnership in their private lives that spurs them to create with the same enthusiasm that they create for their jobs. Without love, their creativity is solely channeled into serving the corporate interests of their bosses. So I think my idea of Tom Hanks's grief as the raw material of reality that draws Meg Ryan to her has an economic truth behind it. If she marries him, his grief will be a story all her own, not one that she serves for others. That is what she is looking for. What Tom Hanks is looking for is vaguer and yet simpler. He had the partner who completed him creatively, and she is gone and what he needs, as his son intuitively senses, is someone to replace that void in his life, because for some reason his son is not enough.
Unlike in You've Got Mail, I don't think you can fault him. It is not out of cruelty or misplaced priorities that his son is not enough. it's simply the emotional distortion of grief. If Hanks had the time and space to heal himself, his son could be enough, but that's not the series of tumbles of fate that his life happens to take. Instead he meets Meg Ryan, eventually. But I do think there is an entanglement of love and the economics of social class here. The shape that both Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are trying to find for their lives is a shape prescribed by their social status as upper middle class white professionals. Everything, and especially the media they consume, is telling them that what they need is a nuclear family to serve as the counterbalance to their fulfilling professional lives. But not just a nuclear family, right? For their parents, it would have been enough to find a nuclear family at all, but they need a nuclear family with a true partner they love and who complements them, who will let them flourish professionally. The media have told them it's possible to have 'it all'. And if there is a cynicism in Ephron's giant hug of a movie, it's that it ends with their first meeting, so we don't see the development of any flaws in the partnership. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/387773.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.