The film Past Lives spans decades and oceans and continents, and yet not that much actually happens. There is no sex, no violence, no action. Nobody ever fights. There is very little identifiable music besides the Leonard Cohen song at the beginning. This may be why my father slept through so much of it last night at the theater. After the movie, he told me he had found it (the parts he was awake for) a little depressing. Not a good film to see when you’re tired.
The film’s focal point is a relationship between two childhood sweethearts. Nora immigrates from Seoul at the age of 12, leaving her best friend and love interest, Hae Sung, behind. The two part almost wordlessly, clearly upset and unsure how to process the interminable distance to follow. 12 years later, they reconnect on Facebook and begin regularly, obsessively Skyping one another. Nora breaks it off with the intention to reconnect in a year — she needs to focus on her work, she says. Shortly after ending it, however, the two each find new partners. Nora meets her (eventual) husband, Arthur, at a writing residency in Montauk. They first kiss after she explains to him the Korean concept of “In-Jun,” the belief that the people we meet in this lifetime are ones we have met or been connected with in previous lifetimes. The more intimately you know someone in this life, the more times you have met in past lives. “The person you marry has eight thousand In-Jun with you,” we learn at two points during the film. “Do you really believe that?” Arthur asks her. “It’s just something Koreans say when they’re trying to seduce someone.”
12 years later, Hae Sung arrives in New York — to see Nora and to meet Arthur. Nora and Arthur have been married for 7 years at this point. Before Hae Sung arrives, the film has very artfully constructed Arthur as her white, corny husband, the kind of guy who published a popular book called Boner and who speaks broken Korean to tell her he’s hungry. He is insecure because she dreams in Korean, because they had, in part, a green card marriage, because they don’t have a good story (the way, he says, she would if she ended up with Hae Sung). “You’re forgetting the part where I love you,” Nora says. The viewer is only partly convinced. Arthur feels, maybe justifiably, like there is a whole part of Nora he can neither see nor access because of these linguistic, cultural, and temporal gaps. He only gets the part of her that he can understand, and he wonders aloud with us if that’s sufficient.
In this same scene, he wonders what might have happened if it had been another man at the writing residency who had read all the same books and who also lived in New York and had also been single at the time. Wouldn’t he be laying in bed with her then? Is their attachment predicated at all on some distinctive connection they share with one another, or is it a consequence of convenience and logic, and how much would either instance matter? Arthur is articulating the fear or possibility (a la Sartre) that love may be nothing more than a series of repeatable acts and events, and that the repeatability of these acts may rate him replaceable. “That’s not how life works,” Nora responds.
(There is also the interesting fact that they met at a writing residency where both were writing in English, and one of Arthur’s main insecurities is how she speaks in Korean with Hae Sung.)
The question becomes central to the film: how do we live with and make sense of our choices? And then, how do we make sense of them in ways that both employ and counter legible and normative ideals of “true love” as deeply erotic and potentiating towards utopia, as being qualified by its inexplicability and incoherence? What do we do when our love or desire for someone feels very coherent — does that make it somehow less true or valuable?
For the viewer, the arrival of Hae Sung in New York sharpens these questions, as the distinction between Nora’s respective connections becomes painfully clear. Hae Sung and Nora require almost no words, fall immediately back into childlike banter with scrunched faces and side eyes. Their connection has, by this point in the film, spanned two decades and hundreds of thousands of miles. As Berlant puts it in their essay Desire/Love: “the disturbance desire makes is usually forgettable, and yet even the process of forgetting specifics can transform sites into scenes, spaces laden with affects and feelings that something significant has happened.” Distance may make the heart grow fonder if only because it fosters gaps onto which we may project fantasy, to which we may then attach. (Did Hae Sung and Nora love one another, or was it pure, unbridled, childhood desire, the fantasy of which propels them continually forward in their implicit connection?)
In one of the final scenes of the movie, the three — Nora, Arthur, and Hae Sung — are at a bar. This is also the first scene of the movie, only now we have context. Nora and Hae Sung are speaking to each other in Korean, while Arthur sips his cocktail and looks a little distressed. Hae Sung says to Nora (please note that all my quotations are based on memory and therefore imprecise/not verbatim), “I didn’t think it would hurt so much to like your husband.” The two verge on tears as they talk about their past. Nora reminds Hae Sung at this point that he loved the 12-year-old girl she was in Korea, and that she left that 12-year-old girl there, with him. He responds in kind: “You had to leave because you’re you. And I liked you because you’re you. And you’re someone who leaves.” However, he notes, she is vehemently not that someone to Arthur. “For him, you are someone who stays.” It is a beautiful moment of realization that, despite or in spite of our attachments to desires-past, these desire and love events remain delimited by time and space. Sometimes, they supersede time and space by way of fantasy, in a way that can almost feel like time-traveling. But we then are given the challenge of organizing the disorganized characterizations of what is “real” or imagined in light of affects. “To be affected,” Berlant reminds us, “is to be disorganized.”
What Hae Sung loved about childhood Nora was her freedom and her ambition. Her staying in Seoul would have been impossible, because that would have made her a different person. Hae Sung articulates the extremely delicate experience of loving someone to whom you are attached, but with the awareness that were that attachment realized, it would change the nature of the object to which you’re attached and thereby change the attachment. It reminds me a little bit of quantum mechanics, wherein in order to measure the speed or location of a particle, you alter the particle. You can never measure a free-moving particle. It will always be changed by the nature of the attempt to measure it.
What we see is two different relations of attachment. Nora’s attachment to Hae Sung is palpable yet inarticulable, so deeply founded in possibility and potential. Her relation to Arthur, in contrast, is all about articulation (they met at a writing residency and both work as writers), about the realization of a certain logic. A conventional framing of the film’s question would be: Should Nora choose the exciting, thrilling, passionate possibility of romance? Or should she opt for the stable, secure, already-realized one? Does she obey the logic of love (incoherence, risk) or the logic of love (comfort, safety)? Does one foreclose another?
If anything, the film’s lack of “action” illustrated how few events have to materially transpire for emotions to become all-consuming anyway. Put another way, the film posits the power of fantasy in world-making and world-shifting. Nora and Hae Sung go twenty years without touching, and most without speaking. They sustain a connection based on memory and images on a computer screen. The connection is intense and deeply disorienting for Nora and her husband Arthur, who both seem to fantasize about Nora running away with Hae Sung someday. But the film wants us to reimagine the distinctions of multiple romances in a way that is nonhierarchical, that instead underscores difference as difference and not an indication of the strength or veracity of one connection compared with another. It is clear that Nora and Hae Sung have questions — could they have gotten married? Could they have had children? Who will they be when they meet in their next lives? But the film also makes clear that the quest to answer these questions does not eclipse the love that Nora has for Arthur. The same way Arthur only has access to a limited part of Nora, Hae Sung does too. And this is always true in desire and love — we get a person at a specific time and in a specific place, if we’re lucky we may get to move with them through time and space for a while, but even that contains the potential of being bounded and finite, subject to change.
In the book I’m reading on the physics of time, the author, Carlo Rovelli challenges us to think of time not as a thing but instead as an event. Rovelli writes:
The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an ‘event.’ It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.
The utility of conceptualizing love as an event instead of a thing is that it would belie love as static, generating a lot more space for the ways love and love attachments shift, transform, and refuse organization. More Berlant: “the minute an object comes under analytic scrutiny, it bobs and weaves, becomes unstable, mysterious, and recalcitrant, seeming more like a fantasy than the palpable object it had seemed to be when the thinker/lover first risked engagement.” The more we try to make sense of love, the more it refuses to be made sense of. But if we imagine it as a happening rather than an object we possess and share and dole out, then love becomes the nature of an attachment rather than the attachment itself. It becomes the act of expressing attachment or relationality. It becomes elastic, affirmed in and by its instability. The nature of the attachment may be subject to change, even if the attachment remains.
In the final scene, Nora and Hae Sung stare at each other for what feels like forever. I wanted so badly for her to approach him, to take him in her arms and kiss him. She doesn’t. As he is about to get in his Uber and go to the airport, he turns to her and asks: “What do you think we will be to each other in our next lives?” “I don’t know,” she says. “See you then.” And with that, he leaves. She walks back to her apartment, where she falls sobbing into Arthur’s arms. It was, by conventional measures for thrill, very un-thrilling. Yet, this finale reorients us towards Nora’s relationship to Arthur as one with deep trust and respect, where Nora is free to have feelings, even if they come into conflict with how he is able to conceive of himself and his relation to her. Her sadness about Hae Sung, her strong reaction to his coming and going, threatens to dislodge and disorganize Arthur’s notion of security in his attachment to Nora. Yet… yet he takes her in his arms, he walks her up to their apartment.
Nothing has really changed from the beginning of the film until the end. Nora chooses not to throw any wrenches or leave behind any countries or husbands. She sustains the life she has. Yet, so much has transpired over the course of the film. If life is not a series of stones but instead a network of kisses, where our whole life is comprised of events, finite yet not necessarily discreet, all touching and ricocheting all the time, all being reimagined in our minds retrospectively and proactively, then we can at least feel liberated to embrace the incoherence of how many paths we may take towards “happiness,” so often the ideal promised by love. And that we may make a choice and then we may change our mind, or we may make a choice and then sustain that choice, and that neither one is right (or wrong). They’re just the choices we’ve made, and the ones we have to live with. Or not.