Regret is a theme in this year’s Best Picture nominees. Oppenheimer might as well have been titled “Atomic Regret.” Barbie, the highest grossing movie of the year, suggests the inevitability of feminine regret in modern world. Killers of the Flower Moon could be considered a forensic examination of people who lack the capacity for remorse, and The Holdovers is a Breakfast Club-style mixer of stories with varying levels of being haunted by the past.
The best movie I saw from 2023, however, is Past Lives, a Korean and English-language film that understands with great tenderness and intelligence how humans think about their choices in life. None of the other movies mentioned above match Past Lives for its realism and sympathy toward the dilemmas of being modern people, simultaneously freed and crushed by the amount of power they wield over where we live, what we do, and whom we love.
Past Lives is a dual character study in two childhood friends in South Korea who were separated right when something might have been happening between them. Her parents decide to emigrate to the United States to give their children the best possible shot at a successful career. His family stays behind. It is many years later, thanks to Facebook and Skype, that they find one another again. In a key moment in the film, she (now in the prime of life), decides to cut off their reborn friendship, because she’s afraid she’ll buy a one-way ticket to South Korea and never become the kind of person she wants to.
As Robert Frost observed, life goes on. But the years between them end up climaxing in a surprise trip he takes to see her (and her husband) in New York. Their reconnection aches with longing, yet there is always the sense that the past is gone. Her life, her marriage, her home: they do not belong to him, and they never can. This tension builds and builds until…well, I won’t say. I will only observe that the film’s final scene is a payoff that will be felt keenly by anyone who’s ever been haunted by the ghost of the past. Few audiences will be able to watch this without identifying in some way.
Modern life, untethered as it is from givenness and tradition, poses a contradiction. The more we flex our economic and social freedom to move, resign, divorce, and start over again, the more adrift we seem to become in the ocean of decision. Many people struggle to overcome a paralyzing sense that they’ve made the wrong choice, or that something better is passing them by. Like a prisoner who is given a window just big enough to see enough of the outside world to know he’s excluded, socially mobile types cannot go very far before the mere possibility of an alternative suggests regret.
Past Lives reminded so much of this 2020 essay by Joshua Rothman on our “unlived lives.” Rothman retells the story of his mother, a Malaysian immigrant who found happiness in the United States—for a while. Rothman writes that she
being unhappy, and restless by nature, thought often of her unled lives. Sometimes she seemed lost in them, or misled by them. She dreamed, in particular, of quitting her job and running a farm stand. And so, the summer after I graduated from college, she moved out of the D.C. suburbs and into a remote little house in the Virginia countryside, two hours away, near the Blue Ridge.
It was a second emigration. Her commute was punishing; unsettled and lonely, she grew isolated and drank too much. A few years later, she had a profoundly disabling stroke. Little of the person she was remains. Today, she lives in a nursing home, where, strangely, she seems content. Not long after the stroke, I made one last visit to her house, to clear it out before it sold. I took a photo of her vegetable garden, gone to seed—the closest she ever came to living the life she’d pictured.
How could the exuberant joy that Rothman’s mother felt in coming to the U.S. culminate in a lonely nursing home? Would she have been so unsettled and lonely if she had never left Malaysia? If she had never left the D.C. suburbs? As Rothman notes, every choice we make is also a choice we refuse. We don’t just marry one person, we decline to marry others. We don’t just pick one career, we pass over other options. Our lives are lived and unlived at exactly the same rate. Every choice to get out of bed is a choice not to stay there. And few, if any, cannot think of a time where their life would have been profoundly different if they had simply not gotten out of bed.
Perhaps the only thing that looms larger for the emerging generation of Americans than the desire for success is the fear of failure. Risk aversion is arguably the defining feature of Gen-Z, a generation that is willing to work hard (just look at their extracurriculars at age 10), willing to follow the rules…but not willing to regret. Abigail Shrier’s recent book Bad Therapy argues that Gen-Z has been coddled by parental and therapeutic strategies that micromanage and shelter, and thus rob agency. This is probably true. But it’s also true that modern life is extraordinarily unforgiving.
What is social media if not a constant reminder of our regrets and shortcomings? The young man in Past Lives searches diligently online until he finds his long lost love. As we learn more about him and his story, we can’t help but ask if he’d been better off—happier, more focused, less adrift—if he’d never found Facebook, or Skype, the technologies that once again opened his window view into a world he had lost. This is a fair question in an age where digital overlords acknowledge the toll their products take on mental health. Perhaps the Internet’s power to resurrect the past, to keep our unlived lives in front of us rather than letting them sail off and our eyes to fall in front of us—perhaps this power does not free us, but does the opposite.
Past Lives is such a beautiful film because it knows that our own agency over our lives is limited. I have seen some criticize the movie because they think it makes the audience yearn for the main character to abandon her husband. I disagree. The movie knows that people and places are given to us well before we have any power to refuse or curate them. I would argue instead the movie makes us yearn, not for breaking marriage vows, but for keeping them, even through tears. It makes us yearn for a life where past and future do not pull us apart, but leave us whole. Perhaps even for One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and at the same time, makes all things new.
Past Lives was mu favorite film of last year and while watching with my current gf could not help but think of an ex-gf who I thought was the one. But after reading this I have a new perspective on the film. Thank you for that.
And that last sentence, man that got me. bravo and amen.
Thank God for a loving Heavenly Father!