Getting Killed in my Past Lives
For this week, I wrote a review-ish of the new Geese record.
Getting Killed opens with "Trinidad," a deceptively slow, slightly anxious wah'd guitar and bass groove that unfolds into full on panic, with Winter shouting "there's a bomb in my car" at the top of his lungs. Horns dance about synths and frenetically panned, blown out drums, we get a short, groovy break, then Winter says "get in asshole, let's drive" and it all comes roaring back again. You really feel like there is a god damn bomb in this insane motherfucker's car.
You can read the rest here.
Nothing Coming Up, but thank you to everyone who came out to see Overheard perform at O+, it was a really sick show!
Also, a reminder that I released a live Ghost Down performance for PWYW on bandcamp about a month ago!
Misc. Stuff I’m Into:
Movies:
Perfect Blue [1997, dir. Satoshi Kon]. All I could think about while watching was how this basically happened to Selena in real life, which adds another devastating layer to this brutal watch.
Together [2025, dir. Michael Shanks]. Talk about enmeshment!
Past Lives [2023, dir. Celine Song]. Rewatched. I yap about this extremely heavy below.
Roofman [2025, dir. Derek Cianfrance]. Logan Lucky meets Good Time. Hit my goal of 52 new-to-me movies this year with this one!
Music:
Jay Som’s Belong. This is, like, the way I wish Taylor Swift sounded? Fav track: Appointments.
Sudan Archive’s THE BPM. The most bisexual album since Blonde. Fav track: MY TYPE.
Grizzly Bear’s Shields. Listened for the first time after seeing them last week! Fav track: A Simple Answer.
Wednesday’s Bleeds. Despite how much I hate the album’s cover, I gave this one a chance because Erin vouched for it. Glad I did! Fav track: Elderberry Wine.
My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. I already adore this record, but I recently got the CD after hearing (my favorite track) Something in the film Lost In Translation. Glad I got it too because it ain’t on Apple Music.
Sora - Re.Sort. Brendon says this is the ur-album of every electronic/indietronic music record since 2003, and I agree. Fav track: Revans.
Misc.
Ball x Pit. This game is concentrated good-brain-chemicals, you become the bullet hell, go play it.
I watched the entirety of season 2 of Fleabag two weekends ago, and if anyone had told me how beautiful Phoebe Waller-Bridge is, I might have done it sooner.
WARNING: Spoilers for the 2023 film Past Lives.
In the time between my first and second viewings of Celine Song’s 2023 film Past Lives:
I have gotten the chance to personally tell Daniel Rossen how much his score for the film meant to me (it was kinda awkward)
I have opened up my originally monogamous relationship (and come to understand that this movie’s conflict would not be resolved with non-monogamy)
Microsoft’s Skype has been discontinued, the hated Teams has been forced upon us, and they have since aided and abetted Israel in its ongoing genocide of Palestinians
Immigrants and immigration, without which this story could not exist, have had America’s existing war on them vastly escalated by the Trump administration
I have worked to remove some of my emotional armor.
When I decided to spend my Sunday morning rewatching Past Lives at Metrograph, I had already had my newsletter ideas set up and ready to go. I was gonna review the new Geese album, maybe share some photos from the weekend’s photo walks, and call it there. I just wanted to revisit my favorite film of 2023. Little did I know I’d be sent on a quest. After the showing, eyes stinging from my tears and post-theater sunlight, I paced lower Manhattan, scribbling into my phone, assaulted by the images and performances that struck me to my very core, even harder than they had on my first viewing. I think I came away from all of that with one sentence bouncing around the loudest:
“Past Lives is evil Before Sunrise.”
You might be thinking what I was thinking after I had that idea: “Before Sunset is already evil Before Sunrise.” Yes, that’s true. A film can have more than one evil counterpart. Batman has The Joker and Two-Face. And while Before Sunset is the realist answer to Before Sunrise’s unattainable fantasy, Past Lives is the culturally resonant answer to the Before trilogy’s inexplicable bridging of an impossible divide.
John Magaro’s Arthur (author of the in-fiction NYT Bestseller Boner) spends most of the moments in the evening in between Nora’s meetings with Hae Sung questioning his own value to her, while she unpacks how deeply Korean Hae Sung is, and in turn what she herself lacks by being Korean-American and not “Korean-Korean.” She says the word “Korean” so many times, you can feel the moment when it begins to stop sounding like a word at all. Arthur asks if she’s attracted to Hae Sung and she does not give him a straight answer. How could she? He is clearly very insecure and upset, either with Nora or with himself, but still pours her a glass of water, an act which the kind of spite that erases care might have taken away.
Since watching Past Lives for the first time, and reading a lot about the many intersections with romantic relationships and capitalism, I have come to take a lot more umbrage with the joke-take that Nora should have abandoned her life in New York City for the hot Korean man who decided to pull up. It places a lot of value in superficial beauty and connection, and makes the same racist assumptions we hear in the opening scene of the film, that two pieces fit together just because they come from the same place. Hae Sung is probably more conventionally attractive than Arthur, but what value are we placing on conventional attractiveness versus care, community, and a willingness to grow together?
I stated earlier that since I opened up my relationship, I realized that non-monogamy wouldn’t fix the problem at the core of this movie, and the movie states as much several times. Nora says “I’m not gonna miss my rehearsals for some guy” and “you’re forgetting the part where I love you” to a spiraling Arthur, who was meta-textually claiming that Hae Sung’s visit would make a really good story, and that he’s the evil white husband standing in the way of destiny. But Nora doesn’t believe in in-yun, in providence. This is where she ended up, it’s the life she has with Arthur, and she’s making it work.
Nora and Hae Sung are simply ideas to each other, impacts left by the collisions of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Nora is in constant flux, emigrating first to Canada, then to New York, then from Brooklyn to Manhattan, drilling down into further playwright niches, where we as the audience hear and see her experience the line “some journeys you pay for with your entire life” in one of her rehearsals. Hae Sung has a long, steady life in Seoul, an unremarkable engineering job, an on-again off-again girlfriend who he claims he is too ‘ordinary’ to provide a good life to. Nora is Hae Sung’s one-that-got-away, a boundless free spirit of infinite potential that he never got to see. Hae Sung is Nora’s blazed trail, a world she left too soon due to decisions that were not always hers to make. I think of a quote by, weirdly enough, Stephen Root portraying Finn’s father Martin in Adventure Time: “you burn enough bridges, the only direction to move is forward.”
All this to say, a consensual hotel room hook-up would not crack this case. Twelve years passed since the kids said goodbye on the stairwell and created pinholes in each other that became canyons by the time they’d reconnected on the late Skype. Nora in college, and Hae Sung fresh out of mandated Korean military service, the two would attempt to bridge gaps between their worlds; Nora introduces Hae Sung to the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is a criminal offense; Hae Sung attempts to bring Nora up to the top of a mountain overlooking Seoul via his phone and fails when the cellular connection falls apart. We hear Chris Bear lightly brush drums and Daniel Rossen dance across a piano in the track “Across the Ocean,” soundtracking the squares that make up the two computer screens, growing larger and fidelity of the connection growing worse until Nora decides to end the ‘relationship’ to keep blazing her trail, leaving Hae Sung in the dark. I was so curious about how they filmed these scenes, how the bare light of a laptop illuminated Hae Sung’s outline without revealing a single emotion as he asked, “were we dating or something?”
No amount of trips to Seoul or New York could have un-doomed Hae Sung and Nora. Nora wanted Hae Sung to be the answer to her ni de aqui ni de alla crisis, alleviating all the trauma of losing your entire home country and identity, via one relatively normal Korean man. Hae Sung wanted Nora to be the best friend and childhood crush he lost, his first brush with love that made him understand it, the kind of person who made his friend weep into his shoulder at the soju bar. Both functional impossibilities, both unsolvable “problems” created by ever-changing worlds and selves. We know this because Nora tells Arthur the truth, “this is just where I ended up,” and Hae Sung a fantasy evolved from childhood, “(now I want to win) a Tony.”
I was talking to my friend John about the significance of the final bar scene, Arthur telling Hae Sung “I’m really glad you came here. It was the right thing to do,” as the chatty couple from the beginning of the movie is visible in the background, having long since lost interest. It doesn’t matter if he’s lying about being glad. Arthur highlights the importance of an unsatisfying outcome, that he knows despite no one getting what they expected, everyone will come away stronger. Earlier, Hae Sung had just reflected on the evening to Nora, saying “I didn’t think liking your husband would hurt this much,” one of the most devastating lines in the film. Nora reaffirms that “that twelve-year-old girl is gone, but she was still real.” Arthur picks up the tab.
I’ve yapped away about lines, themes, analyses, but I think a recurring theme in the films that has devastated me most of late is the idea of a past, present, and future that eluded you, and the unshakable feeling that you might have made the wrong choice, or the wrong choice has been made for you. As I write this, in the playlist I am listening to, “Across the Ocean” from the Past Lives soundtrack has transitioned into Alex G’s “Planetarium (Inside)” from I Saw the TV Glow, a film I have not been able to rewatch because of how thoroughly it blew me apart with a similar idea. But despite the bent of optimism at the end, the film’s claim that ‘there is still time,’ Past Lives tells you, or even reassures you, that there isn’t.
The above moment, before Hae Sung asks where they sit on the timeline of their lives, past and future, before saying ‘see you then,’ was something that my emotional armor successfully blocked on my first viewing. Unfortunately, with a few years of therapy and personal work under my belt, I carved a hole just wide enough in the plating for this scene, this flash to childhood, to shoot me right through the heart. Behind sunglasses I walked Manhattan, gasping for little breaths, quick to wipe away any tears that would slide below the lenses. I’m so frequently victim to hearing words, smelling a smell, or seeing a street corner that rockets me back to an exact moment of heartbreak, a kiss, a halfhearted hug, what I didn’t realize was a true goodbye, and Celine Song nailed that exact feeling with such aplomb that I felt like it was happening to me. In further talks with John, we ask each other, why did we stray from our path? Did we stray from our path by not straying from our path? What if it was someone else other than Arthur at the residency? What if I didn’t go to Huckleberry in New Paltz to meet some friends and see Em for the first time that night?
In Before Midnight, the final film in the trilogy, Jesse pleads to a frustrated Celine after a protracted fight: “if you want true love, then this is it. This is real life. It’s not perfect, but it’s real.” The finale to the fantasy, a culmination of nine years of what-could-have-beens followed by nine years of what is. Nora and Hae Sung will never get to have that fight. By the end of Past Lives, Nora has grieved a culture and country she realized was lost to her (“I only speak Korean with you and my mom”), and Hae Sung has grieved a childhood love he realized was lost to him (“we’re not babies anymore”). While Jesse and Celine have never shut the fuck up in their lives, so many of the moments between Nora and Hae Sung are spent in complete silence. Looking at each other, looking away. “Why did you look for me?” “Are you attracted to him?” “What prize do you want to win nowadays?” “Who do you think we are then?”
No one really has an answer.
-Will