Issue #81: Back in Business 🧨
Issue #81: Back in Business 🧨
Cat Person + Past Lives
Surprise! It’s been nearly seven months to the day since we last published, and we’re so glad to be back in business. We could bore you with the details, but let’s just say that life was lifeing for a bit there. Thankfully, we’re both excited to dive right in and write about some movies. And just in time for awards season! Isn’t that fun?
For our triumphant return, we’re covering two films we can’t stop thinking about. From Zosha, a missive about the missed opportunity of Cat Person. Then, Cate explores the love and longing of Past Lives.
With that out of the way, we’re so grateful you all subscribe to our tiny little newsletter, and we can’t wait to hear from you.
Welcome back, and happy movie yelling :)
Zosha on Cat Person
I will give Cat Person this: The movie understands that you need to backfill your texts. I am not wholly convinced the movie really understands texting, per se — or at least, the way you do it to the people you like day-in and day-out. But then again, after watching the movie based on the viral New Yorker short story of the same name, I’m not convinced Cat Person knows much at all.
The New Yorker story took the internet by storm in December 2017. Here was something weird, knotty, and not entirely clean cut. Margot meets Robert at her movie theater job; they develop a texting-based relationship, something she’s alternatingly skeptical and enchanted by. For whatever you think of the story’s merits, it touched on enough things that the virality made sense — it was at once dealing with gendered dating dynamics, online relationships, being a cat person, and bad sex. Even if everybody was only interested in discussing one thing, there was enough meat on the bone to keep feasting for days (which, if you were online at the time, you’ll remember they did).
Cat Person, the movie, has no such charms. The movie has decided there is only one issue at play at the heart of the story, and it must be everywhere. Gender is everywhere — the B-movie commercial audio playing over the opening, the call Margot (Emilia Jones) makes to her best friend when she’s walking home at night, the subreddit said bestie moderates (the “Vagenda”), the ant colony Margot’s boss has been cultivating for 17 years and how the queen’s body is “meant to provide support” with a “sacrificial” annihilation.
It often feels like Cat Person thinks these moments are very smart, when instead it just seems like there’s a Twitter tab open in the background. What it ultimately succeeds in doing is making so much of the dialogue feel trite and pat, whether it’s directly confronting the themes or not. These choices perhaps seem most poorly done when Margot is struggling to make sense of where Robert (Nicholas Braun) fits in her life. They text constantly, and yet, when she invites him to her work and they get locked in a closet, she starts to genuinely panic. It’s an intriguing idea cut to its barest self, with ominous music and moody lighting meant to heighten the fear she feels when instead it just kind of cheapens the spectrum of suspicion she’s feeling.
Which is a shame because Braun and Jones are great in their respective roles. Jones feels competent and assured without making her perfect. Braun is the perfect kind of generic dude you can project a lot onto (as Margot does): he’s tall and imposing and kind of brusque in possibly (or at least sometimes) a sweet way. It’s easy to believe how he would inspire — and she would imagine — thoughts of him in his therapist’s office, bemoaning how intimidating she is, or how he could slot into any job she could picture for him once she realizes they’ve been talking for months and she has no idea what he actually does for a living. It’s almost enough to let you believe that after that truly awful first kiss (which, honestly, good for the movie for that one) she would still want to believe.
Then after the first hour — oh yeah folks, buckle up; this is a New Yorker short story stretched to a two-hour runtime — the movie really just goes for it, fumbling every centimeter of nuanced set up in the process. The last act is egregious, taking every single part of the movie too far, turning from “possible” horror movie to “definite” horrible movie as it teeters from cringe into full-blown genre flick. If Cat Person as a story had any merit, Cat Person’s final third makes sure to send that shit up in smoke and burn off any good will it has. In the end, it leaves itself to rest on its laurels, thinking it’s making “big” points when in reality it’s not saying anything at all. It’s hard to say that a movie this easy to yell about isn’t worth seeing out of morbid curiosity, but I can at least say it’s better to have just left Cat Person on read.
Cate on Past Lives
“You dream in a language I just can’t understand.”
Arthur’s words to his wife Nora get at a hard truth that runs through Celine Song’s intimate debut. A stunning portrait of longing, love, and the limits of fate, Past Lives makes space to validate the yearning of “what-ifs” while keeping its characters grounded in their realities.
A first love is a precious thing. And despite the inherent irrationality, it can be hard to let go of the golden sheen that covers a fond memory. But that is precisely what Song guides her characters to achieve in her film.
The people we used to be are vestiges of who we are now. But they’re no more than the ghosts of our identity — past lives if you will — hanging around as we struggle to move forward and remake ourselves anew. It’s an idea all three of the film’s main characters grapple with throughout the story.
Arthur (John Magaro) struggles to accept that Nora’s decision to be with him was an active choice, rather than a circumstance she fell into. Would the person she used to be, be happy with the life she’s built now? If she had the choice, would she keep choosing him?
Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) finds himself pulled towards a girl who broke his heart; drawn ever more to the love they used to share. The memory of their intimacy is so strong that it compels him to seek her out. How can he make space in his life for a woman who is only half there?
But for Nora (Greta Lee), both things are true at once. What is left of the girl who loved Hae Sung? If she had to do it all again, would she make the same choices? Did she merely settle for the life she has now?
“When you leave something behind, you gain something too.”
As Hae Sung and Nora explore the possibilities of their past, Song repeatedly frames them as equidistant forces. They are oppositional entities, drawn together by their shared in-yun. But the space between them is always maintained. They are close, but not quite — a tension born of unspoken affection. Their lives run parallel to each other. Their paths never cross.
That’s why it’s no surprise Past Lives isn’t a story about a woman who runs off with her lost love, as Arthur fears. Instead, it is about a woman making the painful choice to definitively close the book on a chapter of her life that until now had remained unfinished. As emotional as Nora is by the end of the film, she’s confident her love lies with Arthur. And that’s precisely what she tells Hae Sung when the three of them go to a bar after a night out.
And here too, Song makes light work of her thesis. Sat between both Hae Sung and Arthur, Nora bridges a gap that is both linguistic and romantic. As one reads the language of the screen, Hae Yun, to her left, is her past. Arthur, on her right, is her future. She may be losing the love of an old flame, but she’s reveling in the love of a new one.
“I always come second place to you and I never cry.”
Nora and Hae Sung’s connection overflows with longing and sincerity. Their connection was and is real. But they have outgrown it.
In the end, the what-ifs are an echo — a tribute to the life they could have built together had they decided to do so. But they’re no longer the people who could have created the private bubble needed to sustain it. They’ve moved past it.
As Nora literally watches her past love fade away, she says goodbye to the person she used to be. Her curiosity about her own convictions is sated. Ending the speculation about what could have been frees her, so that she can finally fully embrace the life she’s chosen. She’s found her ending.
Because though fate may poke and prod at us, it is ultimately our own choices that define the people we become.
Assorted Internet Detritus
ZOSHA: No seriously you should be following the Google Antitrust trial — here’s a newsletter for that. You can hear Seattle on Transatlanticism, literally. The review that talked me out of seeing Exorcist: Believer.
CATE: The end of Netflix DVDs, marriage won’t save you, portrait of a tortured artist and our interview with same, Only Murders In The Building and radical housing politics, the girls are getting gay y’all, and a shameless plug for the pop culture podcast I produce: Even The Rich.
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Zosha + Cate <3
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Past Lives has been on my list too long and this is just another reminder to step on it!