past lives reflects the fragility of the american dream
Written with my good friend and fellow Asian American strategist Sean Choi ahead of the 96th Academy Awards
The American Dream is often illustrated by distinct hallmarks of Americana—white picket fences cradling spacious, manicured lawns; a smiling Stepford-esque housewife in a gingham apron baking pies in her kitchen, kissing her businessman husband on the cheek as he returns home, briefcase in hand; pink-cheeked children riding cherry-red bicycles around the cul-de-sac, their hands sticky with candy. These images evoke feelings of comfort and nostalgia; they inspire stirrings of a latent patriotism such that they may as well be accompanied by the distant screech of an eagle and a waving American flag. But the foundational appeal is something much less romantic and much more primal: security.
The very concept of the American Dream originates from the United States of America’s Declaration of Independence, which decreed that “all men are created equal” with the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But to use a fundamentally exclusionary document as a lens for interpreting life in modern day America is inherently limiting, a realization the country is slowly waking up to.
The term “American Dream” was popularized by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America, in which he writes that, “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement ... regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” This cemented the idea of the American Dream as one of perpetual advancement, of endless opportunity and boundless ambition.
But A24’s Past Lives paints a picture of what happens when the illusion of the American Dream as an ideal begins to lose its luster. Directed by Celine Song in her feature film debut and starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro, the film tells the story of Na Young (Lee), who immigrates from Korea to New York via Toronto (becoming “Nora” in the process), and the complex feelings that arise when her life with her husband Arthur (Magaro) is disrupted by the reappearance of her first love from Korea, Hae Sung (Yoo).
The story unfolds from an initial scene in a bar, where the three main characters are sitting and talking, and an unseen third party tries to discern the nature of their relationships to one another. The scene was taken from Song’s real-life experience of her past love visiting from Korea, and going to a bar with her and her husband in New York, with neither of them speaking the other’s language. For the duration of the film, Arthur calls her “Nora” while Hae Sung calls her “Na Young,” and Lee’s character must similarly reconcile these two identities from two cultures.
“I was actually translating between two parts of my own self,” Song said in a recent video interview from her Manhattan home. “What’s amazing is that each part was a mystery to the other. In that moment I was encapsulating my past, present and future at once, and it felt like my whole life was collapsing. There was a new revelation about what it is like to be living through such vast amounts of time and space and of leaving parts of ourselves behind as we move.” —“‘Past Lives’ writer-director Celine Song has found her future (Los Angeles Times)
For a young Nora living in Korea, the pinnacle of aspiration was moving to America to become a Pulitzer-winning novelist. She does eventually move to New York to pursue her passions, but as she gets older, the dream evolves and her ideal life no longer looks as grand. Past Lives portrays the delicate tension of leading a fulfilling and satisfying life but still wanting something more.
The immigrant experience can be described as a kind of death and rebirth. It’s an underexplored form of trauma—to mourn your past is to appear ungrateful for the opportunities; to disregard it entirely is to appear ungrateful for your upbringing. All of this, while juggling other people’s expectations and judgments and trying to discern them from your own.
“It’s true that if you leave you lose things, but you also gain things, too.” —Ji Hye Yoon as Nora’s mother (Past Lives)
But the American Dream has always been a flawed idea. It presents a singular idea of success, one that hinges on assimilation—for example, the idea of America as a “melting pot,” smoothing away the differences until we’re left with a caricature of what an American “should” look like.
Hae Sung represents Nora’s last tie to her hometown, her culture, and her former self, and by letting go of him, she is fully accepting the path she has carved out for herself in life. But naturally, any kind of severance begets pain, and what makes Nora’s situation all the more tragic is that the loss is so difficult to articulate—she quite literally doesn’t have the vocabulary anymore, as her mother tongue has atrophied. In Hae Sung, Nora sees the person she could have been, a version of herself that now feels foreign, and giving him up feels like a surrender to her present circumstances.
The red thread of Past Lives is a uniquely Korean concept—in-yeon—or the connection between two souls spanning over time. But the film is imbued with universality, due to its painfully ordinary, extraordinarily human characters. Everyone can relate to the melancholy of allowing yourself to ask what if, but it is rare that we are directly confronted by these lives not lived, the people that we no longer are, and it is jarring when it does happen. It’s about that longing for the familiar and knowing it can never be the same. It is not about Nora’s current love vs. her former love; Past Lives instead examines what they represent—people that have known her and loved her as two very different Noras. When Hae Sung and Arthur are talking at the bar and Hae Sung says that he and Arthur have in-yeon too, it’s a deliberate choice to dispel the notion that the point of the film is romance. Romance is simply the vehicle for talking about loss, the loss of oneself and the immense cost and pain of growth.
The concept of in-yeon is presented as a theme, that of past lives and predestination, but it’s more of a character: arguably, the villain. Past Lives has a unique lack of villainous characters—no one is ill-intentioned or evil, despite Arthur joking about it: “What a good story this is,” he remarks to Nora while they’re in bed together at night. “Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later only to realize they were meant for each other. In the story I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny.”
And perhaps this is what makes it feel so heartbreaking. There is no such thing as “meant for each other,” no grand scheme of cosmic design, no right answer. The only thing the characters are confronting are their own choices.
“The chasm between who we are, and who we thought we would be, is always something we’re negotiating.” —“Sara Bareilles Sang ‘She Used to Be Mine.’ Now Fans Are Making It Theirs.” (The New York Times)
Past Lives is a meditation on what it means not just to exist passively but to live as a human and shape your own destiny, cleverly disguised as a love story.
“I didn’t know that liking your husband would hurt this much,” Hae Sung confides in Nora.
The film works because it is both niche and relatable—it bonds us together as humans, but also reveals the fragility of the lives we cultivate so carefully. It’s the butterfly effect, where every choice made ripples out into eight thousand possibilities. In a sea of multiverse movies, Past Lives shows that it isn’t magic or scientific theory that makes the multiverse so resonant, but real life. It portrays a reality that makes us consider our existence within the multiverse, rather than a multiverse film that permits us a temporary escape from reality.
It’s a sadness that we all live with, that becomes a part of us, and in order to grow and evolve, we have no choice but to hold two truths at the same time: that these past selves inform our present selves, and that we also must learn to let them go.
Some people have said that this is a story about immigration, the pain of a phantom limb that you only notice when its absence becomes clear. It’s the bittersweetness of having done everything right and living the life that you want, and still feeling as if something is missing. You’re grieving the person you used to be; it’s a death just as significant as any other. But this pain manifests in so many ways, not just in immigrant stories. It lives in the stories of their children too. Of those facing milestones like marriage, divorce, coming out. Of those diagnosed later in life and learning to live with an entirely new perspective. Really, of anyone who has ever shed their old identity and has built a new one from scratch.
No matter the triumphs and happiness, there is always the foundation of pain, a reminder of the enormous sacrifices you make when you choose to start over in search of a better life. Or maybe “better” is the wrong word—in search of a more honest life, one true to the person you are now, no longer beholden to ambitions set by a self that no longer exists.
It’s a critique of the American Dream; the striving, the aspirational upward mobility, and the hollow promise of conditional acceptance contingent upon the appearance of homogeneity. There is always loss involved, one that is always felt when you remember where you came from and how you got to where you are. But it’s that tension that makes it so beautiful and complex. Past Lives is a reminder of how easy it is to lose yourself as the goalposts keep moving, and how holding on to your identity is a conscious act.
“I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” —“DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #71: The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us” (The Rumpus)
Past Lives is at its core about love, but it’s not strictly romantic love. It’s about the love for your culture, love for a city, love for yourself. It’s about learning to love the life you’re living, the love of your very existence itself simply because it is yours, despite all of the potential lives, the past lives; about grappling with all of the moments in life that make it so rich and worthwhile, and learning to let some of them go in favor of sustaining forward momentum.
“The story is about closure,” says Yoo, who plays Hae Sung, in an A24 featurette. But what Past Lives teaches us is that while people often seek closure for the people they were, real closure reflects who we are now, for better or for worse. It is the American Dream, in all of its guts and glory.
“And isn’t that what Nora spends all of Past Lives trying to help us understand? How to make peace with life’s more unknowable forces—while also choosing, again and again, to love the life you’ve created despite them?” —“Greta Lee Was Hiding in Plain Sight—Until ‘Past Lives’ Changed Everything” (Vanity Fair)