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I enjoyed "Cat Person" when it came out and thought it said something real and true about the dynamics of modern dating (certainly a vastly better #MeToo story than that account of an awkward first date with Aziz Ansari). I received Roupenian's first short story collection (which includes "Cat Person") as a gift a few Christmases ago and for the most part enjoyed it.
But yes, reading the Slate story sullied the experience for me a bit. I won't go quite so far as to say it was an act of character assassination targeting Charles, but Roupenian could have done a lot more to distance her fictional character from his real-life inspiration.
According to Freddie deBoer the movie is laughably heavy-handed. The minute I heard they were adapting it as a "psychological thriller" I was wary, because the story is nothing like that.
It might be; I have seen the trailer and based on that I would not be surprised. But in that piece, he describes Past Lives as being about "a woman’s struggle over whether to stay with her husband or leave him for another man," which it absolutely is not. Whatever the male lead's hopes might be in that regard, the female lead shows no interest in kindling a romance with him. That really casts doubt on his judgment about film, especially in a piece about lack of subtlety in film, given that "Past Lives is about a woman’s struggle over whether to stay with her husband or leave him for another man" is the most unsubtle take ever; it is what the audience might expect the film to be about, but in fact it goes in a completely different direction. I agree with him that it is somewhat overrated; it is good, not great.
I guess I'll have to disagree with you there because my read of Past Lives was essentially the same as Freddie's. It was obvious to me and my girlfriend that Nora is absolutely crazy about Hae Sung, has never stopped loving him, and would jump at the chance to pursue an actual relationship with him if it wasn't for her pesky husband and career. What was your read of it?
(I joked that perhaps the reason Freddie didn't like the movie as much as I did is because he's subconsciously worried that one day his Korean girlfriend's own Hae Sung will show up on their doorstep and throw his life into greater disarray.)
Watching this sort of media with an SO has always felt awkward to me throughout the years. So far I’ve successfully avoided it with mine due to her particular preferences in media consumption, but I have to wonder if either of you pattern-matched the on-screen narrative to your own lives, even in hypotheticals? Do you feel more like Arthur, or Hae Sung?
I'm white and a native English speaker and my girlfriend is Asian, so on paper I should be identifying with Arthur. But I didn't really find myself "identifying" with any of the characters on-screen. My immediate thought after watching the movie was that Nora's dilemma could never happen to me, as there's no Hae Sung (an old flame, the "one who got away" with whom I have an undeniable and unshakeable romantic bond) waiting to turn up on my doorstep. For the same reason, I could never find myself in Hae Sung's shoes: there may be women in my past who occasionally pop into my head and I wonder how they're doing and what might have been, but I'm very confident that the feeling isn't mutual. The very reason Hae Sung can't stop thinking about Nora is that he knows she's just as attached to him as he is to her, which eats him up inside.
There's one line of dialogue that, depending how you interpret it, I quite related to. Nora and Arthur are lying in bed talking about their situation. Nora assures Arthur that she loves him, and Arthur says something like "I know you do. I just have a hard time believing it sometimes." There's two ways you can read this line: does Arthur mean that he has a hard time believing that Nora specifically loves him (perhaps because there's still such a huge part of her that loves Hae Sung)? Or does Arthur mean that he has such poor self-esteem that he has a hard time believing that anyone loves him? If the latter, big mood.
Great introspection, much appreciated, but also importantly, what might/did your girlfriend feel? That would be my curiosity were I in your shoes.
She was tearing up in the cinema and felt sad for a few days afterwards (as did I). She was so touched at how supportive Arthur was being in light of the fact that, from his perspective, it looked very much like his wife was reconnecting with an old boyfriend and was feeling torn about which man she wanted to be with. I didn't get the impression that she was "identifying" with Nora, and I'm quite confident that there's no Hae Sung waiting in the wings for her. She just told me that she thought the film's depiction of the immigrant experience was very true to life, specifically in how Nora expresses herself vastly differently in Korean than she does in English (not just the manner of speaking, tone of voice, vocal pitch etc.; but also the content of what she says).
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Well, they reconnect on Facebook 12 years after parting as children, when Hae Sung reaches out to her. After some time, Nora says that she wants to stop communicating "for a while." But she never tries to reconnect with Hae Sung. Twelve years later, Hae Sung tells her that he is coming to New York and would like to see her. Nora never once initiates contact, and as far as we can tell, she never would have.
And see this interview with the director in which she notes that the film was inspired by an incident from her own life:
My read of it was as follows. Nora still retains a deep affection for Hae Sung, as indicated by the fact that she's still thinking about him even prior to learning that he was trying to track her down on Facebook (evidenced by the phone call she has with her mother, during which she discovers that Hae Sung was looking for her). Over the next few months, they text each other constantly, have Skype conversations which last for hours, go on virtual "dates", watch each other's movie recommendations - in other words, do everything you'd expect a couple in a long-distance relationship to do. Both are scared of coming on too strong and getting hurt, so neither of them comes out and says exactly what they feel or want, maintaining a plausible deniability over the increasingly intimate relationship. Hae Sung refuses to commit himself by visiting New York even though he clearly wants to see Nora, and Nora says she's looking up flights to Seoul - do you really even consider flying thirteen hours just to meet an old childhood friend, with whom you've had no contact for twelve years and for whom you have no romantic attraction*? When Nora says she wants to stop communicating "for awhile", Hae Sung asks "were we dating or something?" When he says this, Nora feels like either she's grossly misread a purely platonic relationship, which is humiliating; or she's infuriated by Hae Sung's affected nonchalance and refusal to acknowledge the intimacy of the relationship. The combination of humiliation and/or anger cements her decision to break off contact with him indefinitely. Eventually both of them decide that they need to be "realistic" and not let a long-distance romance get in the way of their careers.
When they reunite in New York, their intimacy and chemistry is immediately obvious, including to Arthur (who barely even pretends not to feel threatened by Hae Sung) and even to passers-by (as demonstrated by the opening scene in which two unseen people watch Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur in the bar and speculate that Nora and Hae Sung are a couple, as opposed to Nora and Arthur). Nora makes no secret of the fact that she finds Hae Sung more physically attractive than Arthur (granted, only when prompted by Arthur). Certain lines of dialogue only make sense in the context of their being old flames (as when Hae Sung observes that Nora began dating Arthur shortly after they stopped talking, and Nora testily retorts that Hae Sung found himself a Chinese girlfriend around the same time - why would she care if she never felt any attraction to him?). When Nora and Hae Sung stand on the street waiting for his taxi, their body language makes it obvious that there's plenty that each of them wants to say to the other, but can't. After he leaves, Nora immediately bursts into tears.
To me, all of the above is entirely consistent with Nora being in love with Hae Sung but staying with Arthur out of loyalty.
*When Hae Sung later flies thirteen hours to see Nora, Arthur correctly infers that Hae Sung is crazy about Nora - the logic cuts both ways, to even consider doing the same, Nora must have had romantic feelings for Hae Sung, at least at this time.
Much of that true, but also not quite on point. DeBoer's claim was that the movie was about a woman trying to choose between two men. Yes, Nora has an emotional bond with Hae Sung -- they were childhood friends after all -- and she might even find him attractive. But there is very little evidence that she ever considered being with him, because they are of different worlds (a big theme of the movie is immigrant identity, and it is very significant that she left Korea at age 12, whereas he never left) and because, and this is the major theme -- she is no longer the person for whom a relationship with him is a particularly attractive option. Hence the discussion of that being a possibility only in a future life.
Interesting that your interpretation of the film was so different from mine, and to me the film never seemed intentionally opaque or impenetrable, like it was knowingly left open to interpretation.
I feel like GDanning's interpretation is very male-brain, for lack of a better term, of the issue. In which he acknowledges Nora is attracted to her prior flame but fails to understand the dance a bit. Stuff like 'If she was so incredibly enamored, why did she never reach out on Facebook' which is like standard female-brain behavior, but mystifying to a male or substantially male thought process.
I also agree that she was never truly considering leaving him.
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Ah, cool! This is exactly what I remember about the discussion here when the story was published, except my feeling about the story was there's something deeply wrong with the whole thing, and the insistence that it, and the reaction to it Says Something About Society felt very gas-lighty. Needless to say I feel quite vindicated with this story coming out, and incredibly frustrated at the demands of taking Current Things seriously, and additional context coming years down the line when nobody cares about it anymore.
I think you could make a great thriller from Alexis' side of the story.
You mean Margot?
No, Alexis. The actual person who dated a guy for a few years, and was stalked by an aspiring writer who took the details of her relationship and twisted them into a dark mirror-universe version of reality. The story became viral, and so acclaimed that it ended up making her doubt her own memories at times.
Oh yeah, now that would make for a compelling thriller.
I didn't think "Cat Person", the story as written, contains the necessary ingredients for a psychological thriller.
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