March 28, 2024
In catching up on Oscar-nominated movies, I finally got around to watching last year’s Past Lives, which was nominated for best original screenplay and best picture.
The film delves into the Korean cultural belief of in-yun. Nora, the protagonist, explains that in-yun means “providence or fate. But it’s specifically about relationships between people…It’s an in-yun if two strangers even walk by each other on the street and their clothes accidentally brush. It means there must be something between them in their past lives.”
According to this belief in reincarnation, every meeting you have with a person, no matter how small, is layered in destiny. With certain souls, you accrue in-yun. To marry someone means there has been 8000 layers of “meetings” over 8000 lifetimes.
In the film, Nora must decide between her playground crush who reappears in her life every 12 years – which feels like destiny — and the man she met at a writer’s retreat and married, while she and her childhood sweetheart were estranged.
Though the concept of in-yun deals with reincarnation, the film also suggests a past life is one left behind long-ago, some distant time in one’s life that feels foreign. I very much related to this latter meaning.
The film inspired me to reflect on how my life is divided into very disparate “epochs,” and the pull I often feel to negotiate these various “lives.” This entails more than making sense of how point A led to point B led to point C. It also involves reconciling the versions of myself from these various times, to find the through-line that is “me.”
It’s impossible not to compare each of my lives. When did I feel more joy? When did I feel more “me”? And sometimes there’s grief over what has been lost from each life, oftentimes relationships, connections, love.
In a recent poem of mine, “Body of Letters” – one I am still trying to find a home for – I write about a love from what feels like a past life, one that took place in a faraway place. The inspiration came from finding a shoebox of love letters from 20 years ago. After revisiting the highs of that relationship, I fast forward to today: this life, in this place.
What remains? Our forest folded. The shoebox. The dented pinball I swallowed— dull pangs, scoring points only when it comes to rest. Comes to rest.
That “dented pinball” is what I imagine Nora, the protagonist of Past Lives, to feel when she chooses to stay with her husband, Arthur, and not her childhood crush, Hae Sung, at the end of the film. The dull pang of what-if’s slow down, but never fully come to rest.
The film contains more silence than dialogue. I’m reminded of John Keats’ instruction on how to read poetry: it’s like jumping in a lake. The purpose is not to swim to the other side to get out. It’s to luxuriate in the lake. A poem is not to be worked out, but to be enjoyed and experienced through the senses.
Past Lives is very much like this. The viewer swims through the what-ifs, the questions, the doubts, very few of which are explicitly spoken, most delivered through image.
The silence is broken near the end of the film when Hae Sung finally comes to find Nora in NYC when they are in their 30s. The dialogue is gut-punching: Nora tells Hae-Sung that the little girl he missed when she moved away was not here in NYC, that she left her with him in Korea. And Hae Sung says she was always someone who would leave. But for Arthur, she is someone who will stay.
Arthur. My heart went to Arthur. He sat through Nora and Hae Sung’s 2am Korean heart-to-heart at the bar, which he could not understand. While Nora said her final goodbye to Hae Sung, he waited on the steps of their apartment for her, and when she returned sobbing, he rushed to embrace her. She had chosen Arthur even though it was painful and she was full of doubt, and Arthur, wrestling with his own insecurities that he was enough for her, guided her back into their apartment.
When I was younger, I wanted a Hae Sung. We all believe in the Hae Sungs when we’re young. But 12+12+12 years later, like Nora, I would choose an Arthur. Not without, and even because of, the doubts and insecurities I’ve accrued during all the past lives I’ve lived and left behind.
If you haven’t had a chance to check out Past Lives yet, I highly recommend it.
Please leave a comment if you can recommend another film for us to luxuriate in through the senses.
Caroline N. Simpson 