You've Probably Never Heard This Take On 'Past Lives'
Migrating is complex. Melancholia is complex. Not for Celine Song.
Celine Song, a Korean-American filmmaker, took festivals and awards by storm in 2023 with her new autobiographical film Past Lives. The world loved it. It quickly made its way to the Letterboxd Top 250. My expectations were on the roof and I was eager to love it. Spoilers: I did not. And you probably haven’t read other reviews that didn’t either, so I’m taking a big risk by finally sharing this online after a year of having written it.
The film follows the story of Nora (previously known as Na-Young), a Korean girl who had a male friend named Hae-Sung when they were twelve years old. Their brief friendship was interrupted as Nora’s parents decided to move to Canada. She says she must leave because wants to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. She and Hae-Sung lose contact, until 12 years later, when she’s now migrated to New York, they reconnect through Facebook. They talk through Skype for what we assume are weeks, until it is clear that they are falling in love with each other, but Nora does not want to go back to Seoul. Hae-Sung, now an engineer, says he must go to China to take a Mandarin course, and Nora insists that they should stop these video calls. In the meantime, Nora meets Arthur, a white Jewish man her age at a writer’s residency. Then, we get another fast-forward. Twelve years again. Nora and Arthur have now been married for twelve years, and she and Hae-Sung reconnect again. He goes to New York to visit her. After hanging out for some days, and Arthur being worried that she might be falling in love with Hae-Sung, the film ends with Hae-Sung about to get into his cab back to the airport and get back to Seoul, he and Nora hold each other’s gaze for a long time as if wanting to kiss, but they end up just saying goodbye. Nora goes back to Arthur’s arms and cries out loud.
Opening shots in a film are usually crucial to understanding it. Past Lives’s opening shot shows three people: An Asian man, an Asian woman, and a white man, sitting together, but only the Asian man and woman are talking, while the white man is silent. We hear disembodied voices talking about them, with an American accent, guessing that the Asian woman is married to the white man, while the Asian man is her brother. The racially loaded assumptions about the three continue and the scene ends with Nora flashing a pretentious smile to the camera, which one could guess means an awareness of certain stereotypes about interracial relationships[1]. However, this self-aware moment doesn't hold up to the rest of the film which at most makes snide comments about Nora dating outside her race and isn't introspective about the uncomfortable questions as to interracial relationships, especially related to white men in relationships with women of color and, in Past Lives, a Korean-American woman with a white Jewish man.
This is crucial to my analysis, because Song tries to make us think in this scene that the movie will challenge these stereotypes, or that Nora will be a fleshed-out character with interesting insights about the Asian-American diaspora and dating world. However, this never happens, which this essay will explore.
PART I: MELANCHOLIA
I will base my analysis on the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation by theorists David Eng (University of Pennsylvania) and Shinhee Han (The New School). These are psychological and emotional responses people may develop as a result of navigating racial identities within societies marked by racism, discrimination, and societal expectations. These ideas contribute to understanding the multifaceted nature of racial experiences and the impact of societal structures on individual identities. They have used Freud’s concept of mourning and melancholia to understand their Asian American’s struggles with depression and anxiety. Immigrants usually mourn their homelands, so frequently and even permanently, that it turns to melancholia. But unlike Freud, Eng and Han de-pathologize melancholia—it’s not an illness, it simply describes a condition we face.
But what exactly is racial melancholia? Eng and Han define it as a persistent mourning or grief stemming from the loss of a racialized past that never truly existed. It involves an emotional attachment to an idealized, imagined racial identity that has been disrupted or compromised by experiences of racism, discrimination, or cultural alienation. Migrants might internalize societal biases and struggle with a sense of loss, longing, or a feeling of not belonging to either their heritage or the dominant culture. It seems like there is a little part of Nora that still wants to be attached to Korea, in fact, that might be the biggest reason why she feels a connection with Hae-Sung, considering the complete lack of chemistry or connection they had throughout the entire film. A theory I had for why Hae-Sung was so underdeveloped (and uninteresting, and unable to have a talk that is more than small talk with Nora) as a character was that the point of the film was that Nora was just romanticizing the idea of home, of Korea, wanting to see a connection with Hae-Sung, despite there not being any. She just fell in love with a Korean she used to know because it reminded her of home and her childhood, I had thought.
Sadly, Hae-Sung was just a narrative tool, and he could have still been used better by the Song. He is just a static stand-in for a generic 'Korea', who never changed nor grew throughout all those years. He is just a prop that Nora must leave behind, like leaving her Korean identity behind, to pursue her success fantasy in the US. He has no agency besides yearning for Nora for 24 years. We don’t even know what is so special about her that makes a guy think about his fifth-grade crush every day while he was in military training[AH1] . Why hasn’t he moved on?
However, I still had so many questions in my mind. Nora has been living for years in the most cosmopolitan city in the world, and she has never befriended another Korean? Not a friend at school, at work, anyone? There were 220,000 Koreans in New York in 2019, according to PewResearch. How could it be possible for no one else to come her way and remind her of home? Because let’s face it, she and Hae-Sung had no connection [AH2] when they were kids. They barely talked, and, again, twelve years later, she did not even remember his name when her mother mentioned him on the phone.
Another important concept of Eng and Han is racial dissociation. This is a disconnection or detachment from one's racial identity as a coping mechanism in response to experiences of racial trauma or societal pressures. This concept examines how individuals might consciously or unconsciously distance themselves from their racial or ethnic group to navigate situations where their racial identity could lead to marginalization, discrimination, or other forms of adversity. Think about suppressing or compartmentalizing aspects of one's racial identity in certain contexts to navigate societal expectations or to protect oneself from discrimination. They can’t reconcile their vision of themselves with that of society (think stereotypes here). This is the first thing I thought about while watching the film. Yes, I thought, this is Nora’s case, and I was excited to see how Song would tackle this dissociation. Credits rolled. She never did.
But we were fooled, or baited, into thinking she would[AVH3] . Many immigrants assimilate into white American culture this way, sometimes to the point of even hating their Asian traits—which was also felt in this film, with moments such as Nora saying she doesn’t want to get dragged back to Seoul, or Hae-Sung saying “It’s a good thing you immigrated here [New York] — Korea is a very small place,” or her saying multiple times that she can’t win prestigious literary awards in Korea. There is no problem with a character saying these things as long as the narrative challenges it. Sadly, that is her whole character. Immigration happened, and the old Korean Nora died. It’s like the narrative insists this is a net positive for her, and that if she had stayed in Korea and still been the Korean Nora, she would not be a fulfilled person. This notion of settling into a “better place” outside the homeland is neither challenged nor scrutinized, not by the narrative, nor by any other character. So, spectators must resign themselves to agreeing with Hae-Sung’s statement: It’s a good thing she immigrated to New York. Korea is too small for her.
People keep talking about the visual part of the movie, but there needs to be an aesthetic universe for these “beautiful” shots. It is not clear to me why Song chose to frame the characters in the cleanest, most stunning parts of New York City, when everyone who has been there knows it is never that clean, quiet, or free of crowds (or rats). It felt like she kept romanticizing the US even visually. Why doesn’t she show a single flaw in the US, even if it’s just a rat running between Nora’s legs?
Also, Nora’s ambition (which was not even shown—we only see her at work for around 30 seconds directing a play, and we never see her even writing) and insistence on winning one of the big literary prizes of the West, made me wonder if this film was going to explore the model minority myth of Asian Americans. Again, it never did. This film was one lost opportunity after another.
What about her emotions? The repression of her past life and culture, the Korean family relationships? The experience of being Asian in America and her predominantly white institutions and career? Even if we grant that it's easier to win these prizes if you're in a Western country, why are we placing so much importance on these institutions in the first place? Why not interrogate why Western institutional power means so much to minorities and how it shuts them out in the first place? Also, why are we ignoring the amount of Asian and even Korean writers and directors who have won multiple prestigious awards from the West? From Nobel Prizes to Palm d’Ors to Oscars? Is Song creating a multiverse where they don’t exist? Should we tell stories that say that Asian creativity is limiting?
Theorist Anne Anlin Cheng from Princeton University used Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” to construct her own theory of race. She capitalized on Freud’s use of cannibalism to coin the fact that the minority subjects in the United States are entrapped in a system that both excludes them yet includes them through a form of cannibalism. This has been happening to Nora from the moment she stepped into the States. She’s been writing plays that she apparently sells there, generating money for the US. I like how Cheng writes that racialization occurs "through the institutionalized process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion of-yet-retention of racialized others" (Cheng 10).
This sounds similar to Nora saying she doesn’t want to get dragged back to Seoul. However, there is no moment where Nora struggles to transition into American culture or to keep her Korean traits and values in her, besides the language, in which she is extremely rusty, according to Korean spectators. This film mentions the word Korea and Korean a lot without exploring it. So, it feels like the diaspora is the cornerstone of the film. But Koreanness is just an otherness in this film. It is a commodified version of the complexity of an entire culture. We never see anything with cultural importance that doesn't pander to white people (like Korean food and drinks). It is a fast-food diaspora story for white liberals.
Romance is a great way of analyzing Asian identities, especially when said romance is interracial. There was a huge opportunity in Past Lives to explore interracial relationships in a post-colonial world. People in the Eastern and Southern hemispheres migrate, searching for better jobs and a better life, in the white West. Past Lives is a tool for the white capitalist Western American (or Western European) to celebrate how diverse their country is, without acknowledging or even understanding that the reason behind all this “beautiful diversity” is how these countries have colonized, destabilized socially, economically, and politically, the developing world, to the point that millions of people must abandon their homeland, family, and culture. These characters operate for the white, and particularly liberal, gaze to feel as though watching this film is some sort of achievement in their political growth.
Also, the melancholia would make more sense if Nora even entertained the idea of having a life with Hae-Sung. But she callously leaves him again and again and again. They never had a chance. The West was Nora's only choice. So, why, then is the title fooling us? Past Lives and the concept of in-yun makes us think that there is a bond between Nora and Hae-Sung and that they could have had a life together, or might have been together in another life. But from their first re-encounter, Nora never allowed the slightest chance for that relationship.
Hence, there is no narrative tension, no urgency, no real risk. Even though immigrants have countless “what ifs” when they leave their home country: What if I had stayed with my whole family and friends in Asia? What if I had gotten a great job there? What if I still ate the food I loved every day, surrounded by my people at a round table? What if I kept speaking my native tongue every day? What if I felt at home every day? What if I go back and date this guy I have had a crush on for years?
It’s funny how the filmmaker refuses to challenge Nora’s reluctancy to go back to Seoul. Her parents live in Canada, after all, I thought at first. But what about the rest of her family? All her other childhood friends? What about her language, culture, and all the elements of Korea that could enrich her writing and, needless to say, her identity? In the brief glimpse that we get of her play about Korea, an actress says she “crossed the Pacific Ocean to be here. Some crossings cost more than others.” But what was the cost for Nora? A childhood friend with whom she barely had a connection back then? In fact, she didn’t even remember his name, twelve years later, when her mother reminded her of him. He didn’t really mean much to her, then.
Now, she says she doesn’t feel “Korean enough”, a feeling too common to immigrants experiencing racial melancholia. She tells Arthur that Hae-Sung is “Korean-Korean” (unlike her, we assume), and that “all his opinions are super Korean”. But never in the film is Hae-Sung saying any opinion at all. He and Nora don’t pass the small talk. All their dialogues are small talk and endless staring. So, what is it about each other that they like so much that they keep reconnecting every twelve years? This talk about him being Korean-Korean, though, makes us think that Nora values Koreanness over whiteness (her own adopted whiteness and her husband Arthur’s), however, as I will explain in a minute, her actions in this film shows us that no, she chose and keeps choosing neoliberal whiteness while bashing, and even insulting, Asian culture.
There is nothing wrong with Asian women dating white Western men, but Nora mentions multiple times in the film that she rushed the marriage with Arthur for a green card. And why does she want a green card? To win a Nobel prize (later she says she conforms for a Pulitzer, and later she says she conforms for a Tony). Many relationships in real life and in fiction occur for pragmatic reasons, like this one. However, in this case, there is no grief in Nora’s pragmatism. There is no melancholia. She loses home, her culture, her childhood crush, etc. but we get nothing of it throughout the film, except a cry at the end. This scene cannot recontextualize 24 empty years.
The one character who does have a certain feeling of otherness and interiority in this attempt of a diasporic story is the white character, Arthur. Not being able to speak Korean, Arthur expresses his fear of having no access to an entire aspect of Nora’s person. “You dream in a language I don’t understand,” he cries. I like how Lawrence Garcia from In Review puts it: “But one might consider a film that did not just bluntly state this in dialogue, but, in the manner of Career Girls (1997), for example, actually showed how this years-later reunion brings forth a side of Nora’s behavior that Arthur had never seen, and that she herself may have forgotten”.
Back to Arthur, while he feels jealous and insecure about Nora’s childhood friend (Hae-Sung was never even her boyfriend), he has a monologue in bed that is vulnerable and suggests interiority (again, why is the only character with interiority the white man? Are white men even famous for their vulnerability and deep interiority?). However, during this scene we are meant to empathize with him, to feel sad about how Nora dreams in a language that Arthur can’t understand, as he tells her crying. He had been married to a Korean woman for twelve years. Apparently, he loves her a lot. So if he has not put any effort into learning his wife’s native tongue, despite him having this pain of not understanding her dreams, why are we supposed to feel bad for him and his ineptitude? Again, Past Lives is for audiences for whom Arthur is the entry point. He is Song’s target audience[2]. An outsider to Korean culture. A white lens into Nora and Hae-Sung’s relationship. Going back to the opening scene: whose point of view is it in? Two white American women. Who is the film for? Clearly, white people.
It is worrying, really, that Song shows the Asian characters as almost mute, not being able to have a real conversation. Not when they were children, when they were in their twenties, or their forties. East Asians are real people, with worlds inside them, who love talking, eating together, etc. (especially considering Nora is a writer). So what is happening with this odd representation here? The only character who actually says something substantial, who connects with his inner feelings, is Arthur, Nora’s white husband (and even his monologue was problematic). Also, if the white guy is the only interesting character, if he is the best part of the movie, if his quotes are the ones going around all social media when people are recommending the film, don’t we have a problem?
Another problematic aspect of the film, from a feminist standpoint at least, is that we know nothing about Nora outside her two love interests. We only know who she is through her interactions with those two. The film definitely does not pass the Bechdel test. The only moment when her mother appears is on the phone, asking her about Hae-Sung. No Korean person around to challenge how she’s moving about. Just yes people all around. [AH4]
Nora’s literary ambitions might be ‘too big for Seoul’, as they say in the film. But why aren’t we shown what about New York City sparks her writing, or what contracts it has landed her, besides some touristic spots like the Statue of Liberty probably making her feel inspired? Also, why couldn’t she take in Korean authors or maybe even folklore myths as an influence in her works? Just an idea, out of many ways in which a character (whose whole world allegedly revolves around her identity as a writer), can accept both of her identities or cultures. The Woman Warrior, for example, revolves around Maxine Hong Kingston's struggle with her dual identity, caught between the traditional Chinese cultural expectations and the challenges of being an American. She weaves together her personal stories with the tales of legendary Chinese heroines, creating a complex and rich exploration of cultural conflict, gender roles, and the search for self-identity.
Korea’s elements are so irrelevant in this film, that she and Hae-Sung could have been two white long-lost lovers or friends from different states of the U.S., where Hae-Sung reminds Nora of the Cajun food in Louisiana, or about the use of the “y’all” instead of “you guys”.
It seems like Song just does not want to take a stance on racial melancholia and how it relates to the Korean American diaspora. This reminds me of Cheng, who writes that a non-ideological stance on racial problems is in itself an ideological stance. As Toni Morrison said, "It requires hard work not to see." It’s like saying one is apolitical, that they don’t care about politics. It takes not only hard work, but real privilege not want to change the status quo. In this case, ignoring racial melancholia validates Nora’s racial dissociation. I love Asian American writer Cathy Park Hong’s quote, "If Whitman's I contained multitudes, I contained 5.6 percent of this country". Despite Song throwing around the word Korea every five minutes in the screenplay, Nora contains only 0.1% of that country: the language (badly spoken now) and eating with chopsticks.
I had my hopes up for this film. Sadly, this was a fast-food Asian diaspora film for white liberals to pat themselves on the back, thinking how great America is for their racial diversity.
Part 2 will be about the dynamics of Nora’s relationship with Hae-Sung and of the one with Arthur. It’s coming soon in another post. Subscribe to get notified when it’s published.
[1] A direct look into the camera is also a device used by filmmakers trying to follow the female gaze theory of Joey Solloway, a way of subverting the male gaze and its voyeuristic nature. An example of this would be the TV show Fleabag. However, this film did nothing for the female gaze, and in fact, centers its heroine’s life around two male characters.
[2] Also, why is contemporary media unable to imagine women of color with immigration background with anyone but a white man as romantic option, as if to show their assimilation into white Western society or simply narrowing the amount of people of color even get to be in the story. The answer here might be that it is a film made for the white capitalist gaze.
Sources:
Cheng, Anne Anlin. (2000). The Melancholy of Race. Oxford University Press.
Eng, David and Han, Shinhee. (2019). Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Duke University Press.
Hong, Cathy Park. (2020). Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. One World.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. (1976). The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Vintage.