Thank you for the overwhelming response to the last post about the arts and our trip to Pasadena! As usual, subcriptions here remain free, so please recommend to others and if you haven’t yourself…
As we continue to add to the number of mass shootings and gun deaths in America, I’m hoping a small reprieve might be a group of us taking control of the word “mass” where we begin deliberately consuming entertainment that does not include guns, at all, en masse. This is the third installment, and the others can be found in the top-menu selection: “Gun-Free Entertainment.”
As many of you know, Korean films have moved firmly into the American mainstream, with Parasite recently getting the nod for best picture. My “reviews” in this space will not be standard—no cast lists and little plot summary. I just want you to know two things:
There are no guns in this film. I repeat: no guns, and like is often the case in our real world, they are not needed.
Why should you experience this piece of entertainment? What questions or feelings might you engage with?
Let’s get to it!
I am not exactly certain on what drew me to this film. I watched the trailer and it hit me like a poem, and poetry is my temple of worship. Also, the trailer’s cinematography was immediately striking—this holds up throughout the film, with each individual shot feeling deeply intentional and providing what I would call poetic image after poetic image. In short, this film, visually, is poetic and breathtaking.
I cannot tell you enough how much I loved this film, even as it defies the conventions of what I’ve been trained to appreciate. For example, I don’t generally enjoy films that don’t incorporate changes of pace—this film does not. Past Lives has a steady heartbeat, all the way through, and the payoff of that patience and persistence is stunning. This isn’t a spoiler because you need the context, but the most powerful moment in this film, at its conclusion, is two people staring at each other in silence. I am betting right now that you will cry at that moment because you will come to understand a steadily beating heart in an entirely new way. I may have been crying, but I took no photos to prove it.
Greta Lee’s performance is one for the ages. Rarely, if ever, have I seen someone so effortlessly portray a character at different stages of their life, while also showing that no matter your present state (and this is an important theme of The Declining Academic in general!), the past is always an ingredient of that present. It would be cliche to say that this condition is “inescapable,” and Past Lives proves too smart for such an easy approach—here, it’s more that the past is necessary, and we all have the task, in unique ways, to figure out how and why that necessity presents itself.
And finally, the brilliant clincher: Past Lives made me rethink an existing assumption of mine and move past it to the realization that, frankly, should have been obvious to me about our lives for a while now. Think about the endless number of plots built around immortality and the quest to live forever, the search for the holy grail, or doing whatever it takes to avoid death (“I will transplant myself into a new body!” or “I will upload my brain into the cloud and live forever!”). Past Lives smashes this theme’s historical dominance and in profound fashion. But how?
Well, that’s what I want to know from you all! When I watch Past Lives, I see a world and reality where the default feeling is not that people want to live forever, but that people want to live their various “what ifs” and possibilities. Past Lives posits that if we could do this, then we can all pass on with satisfaction, and it dramatizes this argument in a deeply convincing fashion. Put another way, Past Lives reclaims “the multiverse” from superheroes and democratizes it, puts it in the hands and imaginations of normal people living normal lives. In super-hero films, multiverses are always dependent on whether the heroes—meaning the powerful—are present to affect/protect the lives of the un-super. (“What if this is a world with no Spider Man!”)
Past Lives is not a science fiction film that presents a literal multiverse—it’s too human to have to do so. The characters talk through those worlds in dialogue, just like we do, and that’s all that is required; the language is the multiverse. You will follow these characters (there are 3 main characters, though 2.5 might be more accurate); you will love these characters, and in a conclusion so subtle and paradoxically powerful, you will reflect on how honest people can be if they try and that we’re at our best when we make space for each other’s experience and feelings, even when it hurts, a lot.
Finally, this film forced me to invent a new category: Past Lives is the best film in the brand-new “anti-jealousy genre” that I’ve ever seen.
If you have time to watch Past Lives, please do and tell me where you stand!
Note: I streamed Past Lives on Amazon.