A Poetics of Grief: Relation Through the Lens of Relationship in Celine Song’s Past Lives

In the screenplay for Past Lives, Song’s scene descriptions are acutely sensitive to the way in which identity lives in the distance between self and Other, between knowing and mystery. Letting it live there in the between, in the language, without seeking its resolution or closure, Song’s text remains open to possibilities of connection and affiliation that are inseparable from, yet are not strictly determined by, the past.

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Celine Song’s Past Lives (South Korea, 2023) trains our focus, in a subdued fashion only possible in film, on the vulnerability of immigrant experience. At the same time, it is a film that only a playwright could write. I am of course talking about the enchanting cadences of Song’s dialogue, but more than that, I am talking about how she leverages the power of scene descriptions in the manner of a playwright well-versed in the craft of stage directions. In fact, I struggle to discuss the power of Song’s scene descriptions without engaging with what theatre scholar Bess Rowen has to say about stage directions. Rowen uses the term “affective stage directions” to name a kind of stage directions that “a playwright uses to describe the nuance and/or subtext of a given portion of the play so that the actor might catch the tone and feelings evoked.” Affective stage directions do not “translate to an agreed-upon code or interpretation” but rather “give performers information that allow them to make choices about the feel of a particular character, movement, or overall play in a more nuanced way.”1 Indeed, Song’s scene descriptions for the screenplay of Past Lives have more than a few affinities with what Rowen identifies as affective stage directions. Furthermore, the ambiguities in Song’s scene descriptions demand something from the screenplay’s reader (whether that reader be a performer or an inquisitive viewer of the film like me), something I would like to call an affective-interpretive labor.2 In contrast to conventional scene descriptions, which directly and unequivocally identify characters’ emotions and actions in order to delimit possibilities of interpretation, the ambiguities of Song’s scene descriptions open up the text to invite an abundance of interpretive possibilities, at the same time granting a respect to the unknowability of the interiority and ethical becoming of characters. Thus, in this essay, I will attend closely to some key moments in Song’s scene descriptions in the screenplay for Past Lives, moments I read as adumbrating a relationality where identity is conditioned by interdependence – where identity takes shape in dialogue with the Other, the particular other person.3 This dialogue of identity takes place in the distance between self and Other, in a space constituted by language, as a conversation that does not admit a final word. Thus, in zooming in on relationships between characters, Song magnifies possibilities of relation.

I use the word relation to refer to possibilities of affiliation within identity groups, as well as to possibilities of coalition across lines of difference, with implications for politics that are not reducible to the more intimate kinds of connection characteristic of relationship. However, Song’s Past Lives draws attention to overlaps between relation and relationship, overlaps in which I read important implications for how notions of personal identity are shaped by culture and time. Accordingly, in my discussion of the film, I find it fitting to blur commonplace distinctions between cultural identity and personal identity, for Past Lives seems to me to put into question the notion of a personal identity that is outside of time or that goes untouched by culture. If the film admits anything of the universal, it is that there is a grief that underlies identity, and that responses to this grief have important consequences for, and are perhaps even what go to constitute, identity’s power as a dialogue.

Grief’s Past

Early on in Past Lives, Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”4 plays in the background while two parents pack their things to emigrate from South Korea. This song commands a number of important associations for anyone who already knows it. I read it as an exploration of the temporality of relationship – how relationship reaches beyond its beginning and end, somehow exceeding its finite temporal bounds. It’s a breakup song, a beautiful (if slightly dismissive) attempt to console a lover upon parting. Love is fickle, it “changes / Like the shoreline and the sea”; at its worst, it can become a kind of violence, a captivity, a being-held by “chains / And things we can’t untie.” The relationship in question would seem to have run its course, but not because the intimacy has dried up or because another intimacy has taken its place. With the words “I’m not looking for another / As I wander in my time,” there would seem to be an acknowledgment that the relationship is as good as could be hoped for, but that it is only certain subtleties of feeling that make it impossible to continue. At the same time, the song cherishes the present moment in which the two lovers are still together, even though they are saying goodbye to one another, as if it were the goodbye that had the potential to overflow the limits of the relationship’s term. Even before the lovers have parted, the song is already oriented toward the relationship’s resonances with the past, remembering that “Many loved before us / I know that we are not new.” Their love might feel singular, incomparable to any other, but it is yet another drop in love’s vast sea of ancestral memory. The song also gestures toward a future in which the two lovers, however parted, remain in tempo with one another, no less than they are now: “Walk me to the corner / Our steps will always rhyme.” There is a recognition that even after the relationship is over, it will somehow endure, so long as “my love goes with you” and “your love stays with me.” The song is a compelling testament to the power of goodbye, a reminder that saying goodbye matters, that how one says goodbye matters. Paradoxically, it is the moment of goodbye that opens up the possibility of relationship’s eternity – its ongoing dance beyond the moments of contact between the lovers’ bodies.

Significantly, while this song plays, the departing family’s oldest daughter, Na Young, performs a sort of goodbye gesture of her own. To prepare for her new life in an English-speaking country, she decides to take on an English name that is, at her father’s suggestion, derived from Leonard Cohen’s. “How’s Leonore?” the father proposes. “Nora for short.”5 Nora moves to Canada when she is 12, and then, as an adult, to the States for graduate school. She falls in love with a Jewish American white man, Arthur, whom she meets during an artist residency. She eventually marries and settles with him in New York City, where she establishes herself as a playwright. For much of this time, and through these changes of place, Nora has kept in touch with her childhood love, Hae Sung, even experimenting with a long-distance relationship with him. However, frustrated with the distance and with the competing commitments of their respective careers that will not allow them to visit each other in person, Nora breaks it off with Hae Sung and, not much later, meets Arthur.

In Past Lives, it is Nora’s relationship with her past – her sense of attachment both to Hae Sung and to Korea – that is made vulnerable by her experience as an immigrant. Judith Butler writes that “loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.”6 Butler is here thinking in terms of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who characterizes the vulnerability of relationship as an exposure to trauma. For Levinas, this exposure is primary: my vulnerability to the Other is what makes relationship possible in the first place.7 Beyond this, however, Past Lives shows how this vulnerability, this exposure to being hurt, is disproportionately allotted to the life of an immigrant. During their online romance, Hae Sung and Nora recall that she cried frequently as a child, and that he would stay by her side when she would cry. But Nora says that she does not cry anymore. “I used to when I first immigrated,” she tells Hae Sung, “but then I realized that nobody cared” (PL 32). Nora had to steel herself to survive the isolating experience of being an immigrant, covering over and protecting herself from the trauma of her separation from her former home, not to mention her separation from Hae Sung.

How tempting it is in the wake of loss to cover over this exposure, to wish to restore and protect the integrity of the autonomous self, to privilege possibilities of individual redemption over possibilities of interconnection. Even when Nora breaks off her long-distance romance with Hae Sung, Hae Sung cries, but Nora “looks away” and “does not cry” (PL 42). Nora’s leaving-off from crying, which I view as a turn away from grief, is eminently forgivable in that it is a concession to the imperatives of everyday life, and to the disproportionate pressure that America places on immigrants to succumb to those imperatives. But later, Nora’s vulnerability returns to the foreground when Hae Sung comes to New York City to visit her after many years of not communicating. “He was just this kid in my head for such a long time, and then he was just an image on my laptop, and now, suddenly, he is a physical person,” Nora tells Arthur. “It’s very intense. . . . I think I missed him a lot. I missed Seoul” (PL 66).

The sense of connection and intimacy between Nora and Hae Sung easily picks up where it left off, so it doesn’t take long after Hae Sung arrives for their dialogue to get personal. Nora talks to Hae Sung about her fights with Arthur over the years. She compares their marriage to two trees planted in the same pot – it takes time, and some quarreling, to find where their roots go (PL 61). This beautiful image of two people becoming intimate with one another, finding room for each other as they become entangled, emphasizes relationship as a process. But between Nora and Hae Sung, there is a more immediate sense of “easy intimacy, . . . and it feels like it’s been this way between them forever” (PL 16). These scene descriptions occur early in the film, when they are children in Korea, so that the word “forever” carries a strange resonance, as if it reaches toward a more distant past, before they were born. Here we get the first inkling of what the film’s title alludes to, but we have to wait until later, when Nora is flirting with Arthur, for it to be fleshed out. Nora tells Arthur about In-Yun, a Korean word that suggests the immediacy of connection between two people is explainable in terms of their previous encounters in past lives. That Nora and Hae Sung have this kind of connection, the kind that stretches back forever, is evident. Arthur notices it the moment he meets Hae Sung:

He is startled by the way they seem to fit together – yes, they have the same skin color, but more importantly, they were born and partly raised in the same place. Their souls are tied together in that way. . . .

This is an important person from another life of the woman he loves. Simple as that. (PL 76)

Arthur recognizes that Nora and Hae Sung “fit together”; they already have a strong sense of where each other’s roots go. They know each other from a past life, Nora’s childhood in Korea, but also, it seems, something beyond that: perhaps it is the way in which Nora’s sense of identity stretches beyond the bounds of her individual life, toward subtle resonances that reverberate intergenerationally and interpersonally. This is not to say that Nora’s sense of identity is uncomplicated, or that she always feels securely grounded in her Korean identity. Due to her longstanding separation from Korea, her sense of rootedness is evasive, and the arrival of Hae Sung only makes this evasiveness more pronounced. “I just feel really not-Korean with him,” she explains to Arthur. “But also, in some way, more Korean? It’s so weird” (PL 65).

As a viewer, from the moment I meet Hae Sung, a mere child loving Nora in his innocent, childlike way, I am under the impression that their relationship is not going to work out. Their connection is thick, palpable, but at the same time, a distance between them gapes ominously. What is this distance between them? Why does it seem to somehow strengthen their connection, arousing their attraction to one another? How does this distance constitute an intimacy between Nora and Hae Sung that does not seem possible between her and her husband? These are questions that point to paradoxes of relationship that have crucial implications for how we think about identity. In an interview, Song speaks to how these paradoxes inform Nora’s relationships with Hae Sung and Arthur, not to mention her sense of identity:

These two men . . . each hold a key to parts of her life, and they do not have each other’s keys – they only have one key that unlocks one part of her. The truth is that she gets to be completely unlocked because Hae Sung came to visit with his language and his inability to speak another one. He’s showing up to say, “There is a little basement in your soul I don’t think you’ve thought about or accessed, but I’m still in that basement, I’m still in love with that little girl, I still miss you.” In their encounter, he’s unlocking a part of her that I don’t think she fully recognized as an important part of her until he came along. (PL 148)

I love Song’s image of the “little basement,” a space of the self to which someone else holds the key. This space is between Nora and Hae Sung, made possible in their encounter, but it is also where a most interior dimension of Nora’s interiority, her desire, finds occasion. This image of the little basement, the between-space where self and Other meet, discloses an interdependency, what Butler calls the “ties [that] constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us.”8 And importantly, it all happens in the language, in the dialogue between Nora and Hae Sung. This is not to say that either character is reducible to what they say to each other. After all, language can never be adequate to the Other, whose otherness will always escape language’s attempts to hold it close or make it present. To paraphrase Levinas, the Other will always be other, ungraspable.9 Maybe this is why language so likes to show its inadequacy in moments when a relationship that matters to me is at stake. But this speaks to the importance of committing myself to language even in the midst of its inadequacy, for response-ability means taking on all the risks of responding, taking up language in spite of its inadequacy. After all, it is less the case that I prove my relationship matters by translating it into words that are adequate to it, and more that I give my relationship its matter, make my relationship matter, in language – not just with words, but with all the ways I signify, including, as we shall see in Song’s text, the silences. Perhaps these seemingly incompatible spheres, relationship and language, are more than merely adequate to each other: perhaps they mean everything to each other.

But what happens when I lose the Other? In the absence of the Other, there persists a desire to poetize that absence, or rather, a desire to reach out to the lost Other in the only way I can in that Other’s absence, with language. This is not to say there is any possibility of making the lost Other present; even when it was near to me, my words could not make the Other present, for the Other is always inexhaustibly other from me; my words cannot assimilate the otherness of the Other into a fixed presence to myself. However, it is possible for me to keep alive my desire for the Other through language. Grief is keeping alive my desire for the Other in its absence in the only way I can – through language. But if I think of grief in this way, then it must have begun long ago, before my loss of the Other, for even when it is there, the Other evades, is fugitive to the reach of my words. I cannot speak on my relationship with the Other without rendering it something said, without violating the Other’s irreducibility. The finality of this something said is a closure that in turn invokes an ethical demand to be reopened, a demand for the continuation of dialogue that keeps desire alive, even if it can never make the Other present. Thus grief’s labor of language begins with the very first encounter, at the advent of my desire for the Other.

The language of desire is between us, in neither of our custody yet nurtured by us both. This between-space is where we come closest in our approach without ever reaching one another, for you are secluded from me, unknowable, at a remove that grows with the desire for nearness, at a distance that can never be closed. This present-moment intimacy with you, this crossing of a distance that never reaches a destination (for the destination stretches on to infinity, remaking itself anew at every supposed arrival), this temporality of relationship is where it becomes possible for you and me to live forever. Eternity is possible, even if it can never transcend the present. And even in the Other’s absence, even in the wake of a rupture between self and Other that cannot be mended, if, in a little corner of my soul – a corner that, being out of the way, might otherwise be easily forgotten or left unattended – if, in this little basement, a poem lingers, then the possibility of dialogue with the Other remains alive.

The Other is always already lost to me; or, as Levinas might put it, given the Other’s distance from me, I am always already exposed to the trauma of my loss of the Other. This is a vulnerability inherent in relationship, so that, even in my nascent desire for the Other, I am already beginning to grieve.

Grief’s Present

Relationship is conditioned by an irresolvable distance: the Other is always at a distance from me that redoubles itself at my every attempt at approach; and yet this distance is what arouses my initiative to approach the Other. Past Lives, by approaching the theme of identity through the lens of relationship, shows how identity is similarly subject to these conditions of distance, in which the bottomlessness of mystery gives impetus to desire. In this way, the film brings to mind Édouard Glissant, whose writings, though situated in the context of the Black diaspora, have important implications for possibilities of relation among a wider scope of diasporic peoples. Glissant argues that one does not quite know one’s identity insofar as the totality of identity, constituted as it is by an irreducible confluence of differences, could not possibly be satisfactorily circumscribed within a single act of knowing. But the desire aroused by this not-knowing, according to Glissant, is where identity finds its power in a poetics. “Not knowing this totality is not a weakness,” Glissant writes. “Not wanting to know it certainly is. Consequently, we imagine it through a poetics: this imaginary realm provides the full-sense of all these always decisive differentiations.”10 It is helpful, I think, to put Past Lives into conversation with Glissant, whose characterization of identity as “a system of relation”11 – not pure invention, of course, but a collective imaginary in which those who belong partake and to which they contribute (and in so contributing, make identity as much a matter of becoming as it is a matter of belonging) – gives a meaningful context to Song’s exploration of identity through relationship. To conceive of identity as relation is to concede that identity entails exchange, that it is in some sense an encounter, a dialogue across a distance. In Past Lives, this sense of distance-within-identity is prominent. The grief Nora seems to feel over her sense of distance from her Korean identity is difficult to distinguish, is not cleanly separable, from her desire to maintain a connection to it. When Nora tells Arthur that she feels both “not-Korean” and “more Korean” when she is with Hae Sung, she gives voice to this grief and desire that dovetail to comprise identity. This grief, this desire, this reach across distance in language without certainty of origin or outcome: this is a poetics.

The film’s exploration of identity through relationship is therefore rightly burdened with concerns about language. Arthur mentions to Nora that when she talks in her sleep, she always speaks in Korean. “You dream in a language that I can’t understand,” Arthur says. “There’s a whole place inside you where I can’t go” (PL 71). Arthur discerns a space constituted by language, a space where Nora’s memory happens, where her dreams happen, where her desire happens, and it scares him that it is a space for which he lacks the language needed for access. But even if he had the language, would it give him access to her inner world? Language might indeed constitute the space between self and Other in a manner that works its way back to shape the interiority of desire, and in this way Arthur’s small efforts to learn Korean phrases probably do help to deepen his intimacy with Nora – but even if he were fluent in Korean, would it gain him entry to her interiority?

Song’s scene descriptions help to reinforce the inaccessibility of her characters’ interiorities without downplaying the weight that language bears on their intimacies with one another. After Nora introduces Hae Sung to Arthur for the first time, the three of them go out to eat at a restaurant. After a while of awkwardly translating between the two, Nora begins speaking to Hae Sung in Korean, leaving Arthur out of the conversation. While Arthur dejectedly scrolls through social media on his phone, things get even more vulnerable between Hae Sung and Nora. “I didn’t know that liking your husband would hurt this much,” Hae Sung confesses. Song’s scene descriptions then mark a “stunned beat. Everything stops, and like a magical spell, something opens up between them” (PL 82). Again, the ambiguity of the scene descriptions is important. The “something” that opens up between Nora and Hae Sung is what I want to explore. What gives rise to the opening is what Hae Sung says; it is language that constitutes the opening. But this opening, this text, is between Hae Sung and Nora, so only they have access to it, and only in a limited sense that neither could quite make this text, which takes shape between them, their own. Arthur certainly has no access to it because the dialogue occurs in Korean, a language he does not speak. And neither do I have access to it, whether as a viewer of the film or as a reader of its screenplay, since the scene directions only refer to it vaguely as a “something.” The little basement has been reopened, but much of what goes on there is inaccessible to anyone else but Hae Sung and Nora. My position, then, is not so different from that of the couple we hear in the film’s opening scene, people-watching and speculating on this same moment between Nora and Hae Sung from across the restaurant: “I have no idea” (PL 12). But I am not quite out of the loop either; the impenetrable distance only further engages me to feel and grieve along with Hae Sung and Nora. It is the distance that motivates the engagement, the not-knowing that motivates the desire to get closer. By leaving a degree of mystery, the ambiguity in Song’s scene descriptions makes the characters all the more there to me. It sets forth a play of revealing-concealing that refrains from reductively rendering up the affective experience of the characters, in turn provoking from me an affective-interpretive labor by which I, as a viewer or reader, might approach them without violating the secret of their interiority.

Song’s incorporation of silence in the dialogue between Nora and Hae Sung contributes to this provocative work of revealing-concealing. As the dialogue continues, Hae Sung considers choices he has made in the past and how those choices bear on the present. He regrets prioritizing his career over his relationship with Nora; he worries it was a mistake. “Hae Sung doesn’t know if he’ll ever see her again,” Song’s scene descriptions narrate, “so he pours out everything that’s been on his mind and floods the space between them” (PL 83-4). Thoughts that have been kept private are now spoken out loud, reinvoking the text that for some time lay dormant between them. Hae Sung brings that text back to life in dialogue with Nora, weighing up possibilities of what might have been:

HAE SUNG: What if I’d come to New York 12 years ago? What if you could have come to Seoul? What if you had never left? If you hadn’t left like that, and we just grew up together, would I still have looked for you? Would we have dated? Broken up? Gotten married? Would we have had kids together? . . . But the truth I learned here is, you had to leave because you’re you. And the reason I liked you is because you’re you. And who you are is someone who leaves.

Silence. (PL 84)

The silence here is as important as the speech, for this is the quiet of feeling’s burgeoning and becoming in reference to suspended possibilities. The silence signifies: it contributes just as much to the meaning of the dialogue between Nora and Hae Sung as their words. It opens up a space for grief over what Nora and Hae Sung could have had, and at the same time, could not have had together. The impossibility of their being together is what moves Hae Sung to consider its possibility under other circumstances, in other lives, alternative pasts and futures. Then Nora, “speaking from her heart, as openly as she can,” admits that she left a part of herself behind when she left Korea. “The Na Young you remember doesn’t exist here,” she says. “Twenty years ago, I left her behind with you” (PL 84-5). There are motivations of self-interest at play here that help to explain why Nora would have neglected the between-space, the text shared between her and Hae Sung, in the interval. Nora is strongly invested in her career as an artist, the determining factor in her life’s trajectory. When she earlier reassures Arthur that he need not worry, that Hae Sung does not pose a threat to their relationship, she does so in terms of her commitments to her work as a playwright: “I’m not gonna miss my rehearsals for some dude” (PL 68). Nora’s sense of autonomy continues to figure importantly in this moment where she lets Hae Sung know that she is more than someone who leaves, even if that is who she is to him. But even this moment of reckoning, with all its brutal honesty, counts as a renewal of dialogue between Nora and Hae Sung. Together they participate in a reciprocal act of care through which they come to a better sense of who they are to each other, a sense that does not take away from but rather enhances the agency of both characters. It is a gift of mutual abundance in which Nora and Hae Sung both contribute to the long-neglected text that constitutes the space between them, to the whorl of mutuality whose continuity spirals all the way back to shape their innermost desires, their innermost selves. All along, beneath Nora’s notice, a poem lingered in the distance between them. Together they reopen it, and now it lives and takes shape between them as they dialogue with one another. And for this poem, their silences are just as important as their words, not just for the way in which those silences inflect the dialogue but for their potential to open up spaces for viewers and readers to grieve with the characters, to feel the chasm of distance that conditions relationship, to attend to the vulnerability to loss that we all share.

Time gives as it takes away. But when time takes the Other from me, what it leaves me with in turn is only my recognition of how I failed the Other. This recognition of my failure – what a bitter consolation time offers for what it demands! – is tantamount to a recognition of the nature of time itself, how precious little time I have to devote myself to the Other, to grant the respect that the Other deserves. And while I am bound to fail in my devotion to the Other given the many competing demands of everyday life, it is at the same time my failure, I am responsible for it, and this is what gives impetus to my poetics of grief – that is, this is what motivates my desire. In the final reckoning, there was never enough time, but how much of myself I devote to the Other right now, in this present moment, stretches out to infinity. I was always free to devote as much of myself as I desire to the Other, and the suffering of loss, its obdurate truth, is the recognition that it was never, could never have possibly been enough. It is this, my ownmost, irrecusable failure – a perdition from which I could never be saved – that motivates desire, that motivates relationship.

Grief is an attunement to what is precious, an orientation toward what has been lost that lends weight to possibilities of connection now and in the future, for there is no going back. When it comes to identity – which not only partakes of these tensions of relationship but also plays them out on the scale of diaspora and its relational ruptures – perhaps grief can wend its way toward a receptivity and a responsiveness, revitalizing the reciprocity of dialogue through which a sense of connection to identity is instantiated. Past Lives portrays identity as just this sort of responsiveness: a relational sensibility attuned to language, a recognition of an obligation to participate in a dialogue, and, moreover, a following-through on that responsibility. In this sense, identity means continuing the conversation, responding reciprocally within an economy of grief, engaging with a past that refuses closure, speaking toward a future that no one alone can determine in advance.

Grief’s Future

The parting between Nora and Hae Sung that we come to expect in the film’s conclusion – a parting that has happened before but whose looming recurrence is inscribed even in their most intense moments of intimacy together in New York – reveals an interdependency that cuts to the very heart of identity. Nora and Hae Sung seem to share a conviction that the shadow of their past separation casts its pall over their future, but rather than letting this shadow give a gloomy aspect to their time together, they instead play in its shade, letting it sharpen their focus on everything that binds them. Loss has this way of throwing into relief the fact that “my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours,” writes Butler. “Grief displays . . . the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control”12 This sense of interdependency grows increasingly acute as we get closer to Hae Sung’s impending departure. His stay is short, and his time to return to Korea arrives quickly. Very late at night, Nora stands with Hae Sung at a corner near her East Village apartment while he waits for his ride to the airport. “Heavy silence falls between them” as they wait. “This really should be two minutes of silence,” Song’s scene descriptions specify. “It should be excruciating, and long, and actually two minutes” (PL 89). Again, the silence speaks. It speaks to the pain of knowing this is goodbye, to the ache of an intimacy that is so visceral and at the same time so stubbornly impossible between Nora and Hae Sung. It speaks to the other lives that they could have shared and yet, excruciatingly, somehow do share, by virtue of the silence and the mystery that it speaks.

The silence also works to slow down time’s passage, loosening its threading, allowing grief’s subtle temporal fissures to become more discernible, more pronounced. Soon enough, the driver pulls up, but before getting into the car, with the same gesture that he initiated his goodbye to Nora when they were 12, Hae Sung, still speaking in Korean, turns around and calls out “Hey!”:

And as though that “Hey” is a magical spell, it transforms the space the two of them exist in. It transports them through time, to the long-lost past.

For a moment, there is a glitch in the matrix. We get a glimpse through a portal. We see a mirage. . . .

. . . Or rather, the long-lost past is transposed onto now, East Village, 5 in the morning. (PL 90)

Abruptly we are confronted with the image of Hae Sung and Nora saying goodbye to each other as children in Korea, an image we have seen before, except this time, somehow, the image is darkened by night:

This is exactly the way it was when they first said goodbye to each other.

But while they had said goodbye back in Korea in the afternoon – after school – all those years ago, at this moment, they magically stand in the soft glow of very late night.

It’s as though these kids have been waiting here in this exact spot for 24 years, and it’s only now that they’ve been truly able to say goodbye. (PL 90)

Through all the years they were apart, the poem that constitutes the space between Nora and Hae Sung was stuck in limbo, left static. Now, the living dialogue between them (including the silence between them, which also speaks) breathes new life into that text, bringing the past to bear on the present in a way that Nora has been protecting herself against since she left Korea.

And as quickly as they are transported to the past, they are again back in the East Village, present day. However, it is not only the boundaries between present and past that loosen and blur. As Hae Sung’s parting words show, this temporal slippage echoes onward toward an indefinite future:

HAE SUNG: What if this is a past life too, and we are already something else to each other in our next life?

Beat.

HAE SUNG (CONT’D): Who do you think we are then?

NORA: I don’t know.

HAE SUNG: Me neither.

Hae Sung smiles.

HAE SUNG (CONT’D): See you then. (PL 91)

With these words, Hae Sung gets in the car and departs. However, it would be an injustice to say that he has the last word here. He leaves off his dialogue with Nora gesturing toward a future that will take shape in the dialogue between them at some later time. Hae Sung’s parting words hold no guarantees, though they do invite response. He does not close the poem; he leaves it open, leaves it to linger. It lingers there with Nora. What was constituted in dialogue between them remains with her even in his absence, provoking ongoing dialogue. It is hard to say what Nora’s response is, or what it will be. She “stands there for a full moment after Hae Sung’s car has turned the corner,” but “it’s difficult to read her expression” (PL 91). Carefully, Song’s scene descriptions leave a distance between me – the reader/viewer – and Nora. Nora’s expression, and, by extension, her interiority remain inscrutable to me. In Nora, and also in the text between Nora and Hae Sung, there is something opaque to me as a viewer or a reader, but at the same time palpable in its movement and vibrancy across the screen, across the page. I say across the page because the scene descriptions are an important part of this. They invite me to grieve with Nora while still respecting the unknowability of her interiority, without reducing my grief to hers, without allowing me to assimilate her grief to mine. The uncertainty of her future only deepens the mystery.

After Hae Sung leaves, Nora finally cries. In a long, continuous shot that starts when Hae Sung’s driver pulls away from the corner, she begins to cry as she walks home. “She is crying the way she cried as a little girl,” Song describes, except “this time, little Hae Sung is not there to watch her cry. She cries alone.” Nora brings herself to grieve again, to cry without Hae Sung there to stand by her side. When she arrives at her apartment building, she finds Arthur “sitting there, smoking a cigarette a little anxiously, lost in his own little world” (PL 91). Nora and Arthur again face one another across the distance between them, through Nora’s grief and through Arthur’s fear of isolation; they embrace one another, and they return to the apartment they share. The reopening of the space – the poem that lingers – between Hae Sung and Nora seems to have done no immediate damage to the relationship between Nora and Arthur. Although we never find out for sure, I can’t help but hope that it might even help them continue to find where each other’s roots go.

But neither can I help hoping for a future between Nora and Hae Sung. Hae Sung’s visit is a form of care that returns Nora’s attention to the goodbye they never properly said, and to the grief she consequently forestalled. Their goodbye, then, is not a closure; as dialogue, it is a refusal of closure, a “See you then.” It holds open toward indeterminate possibilities of connection that can only unfold in the uncertainty of a future. In saying goodbye, Nora does not close the door to her past but rather keeps a dialogue open with it, so that she can continue to attend on the forgotten corners to which she still holds attachments. The little basement of Nora’s soul – which is also somehow between Nora and Hae Sung, constituted by language, by the dialogue between them, always still there even when forgotten by Nora, reopened in the encounter – catalyzes a breakthrough in Nora’s grief that was not possible alone; it all happened in the distance between Nora and Hae Sung. This grief, in turn, opens up new possibilities of connection and intimacy from which Nora had closed herself off when she decided no longer to cry, when she decided no longer to grieve because nobody cares.

Song speaks to the expansiveness of these little basements, how they overflow the specificity of any one particular life, in her scene descriptions after Nora and Arthur reenter their apartment:

We hold on the image of the exterior of the apartment building for a moment.

Silence, except for the birds chirping and the city that is beginning to wake up. New York is getting ready for a new day. Millions of lives are playing out in tiny boxes just like this one in this city. (PL 92)

Song incites us to imagine a relationality that reaches beyond this tiny box, beyond the frame through which she has elicited our attention to Nora’s grief, Nora’s desire. Song now zooms our attention out to entertain the sheer magnitude of love and loss in this city, which could never be totalized because even one person’s grief, as the becoming of desire, exceeds totalization. Then, to end the film, we see Hae Sung on his way to the airport, looking out at the city through his car window, “in his own tiny box, … watching New York as it wakes up.” He “faintly smiles”; he “feels both massive and small” (PL 92). Hae Sung might not have found the Na Young he was looking for when he came to visit New York, but in dialogue with Nora, he did find a way to make their relationship matter anew. This freshness of desire, I imagine, is not so easy to distinguish from the grief he feels on parting. And for all its immensity, it is but a drop in a vast sea of griefs, each a world, an eternity of its own.

Grief is an attunement to my exposure to time, a sensibility to the demand that time places on my relationship with the Other; desire is my vulnerability to the Other’s appeal, my thrall to the Other’s claim on my time. Responsibility is my involvement in this economy of obligation, letting the impossibility of its complete fulfillment motivate my response. In this economy, identity plays out: grief motivates us to intimate who we are to one another, and in so intimating, become ourselves. In this mutual involvement in each other’s pasts and futures, unfaltering even when we are apart, grief touches eternity. In the screenplay for Past Lives, Song’s scene descriptions are acutely sensitive to the way in which identity lives in the distance between self and Other, between knowing and mystery. Letting it live there in the between, in the language, without seeking its resolution or closure, Song’s text remains open to possibilities of connection and affiliation that are inseparable from, yet are not strictly determined by, the past. She grants her characters a sense of agency without siloing them, without minimizing the networks of interdependency in which agency finds its field of play. At the same time, she gives hope for a sense of commonality that is not a reduction – a sense of mutuality and reciprocity that does not flatten difference into a sameness – a sense of approach whose horizon of distance is infinite.

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All images are screenshots from the film.