Culture Cabinet

We’ve had a plethora of films lately that deal with the concept of a multiverse. From the Oscar Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once to the films within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they’ve examined its meaning in different ways. There are two recent releases – The Flash and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – that center around the concept of the multiverse, though one does so better than the other.

So what has us so interested in this idea of a multitude of universes beyond the one we inhabit? I think that the answer might actually lie in Celine Song’s beautiful directorial debut, Past Lives.

The film traces Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) through three periods of their life, finding them at 12, 24, and 36 years old. In the third segment in which Hae Sung visits New York City and sees Nora for the first time since they were children, Song’s delicate and poignant script plays out how they each question the “what if”s of their life.

Childhood sweethearts who were separated when Nora’s family immigrated from Korea to Canada, the couple’s lives took divergent paths. Nora is a playwright in New York City, while Hae Sung is an engineer in Seoul. But they can’t help the pull they feel towards each other and the questions it causes. For Nora, Hae Sung also is the physical embodiment of Nora’s curiosity towards what her life might have been like if her family had stayed in Korea instead of immigrating.

In the film, Nora discusses the Korean concept of “In Yun” with other characters. I’m no expert in it, but it’s essentially the concept that interactions with people in different lives can build up until there’s a life in which they are together. Or something like that. It’s a great way for Nora to center her questions about her connection to Hae Sung and if perhaps, there’s a past or future life in which their romance works out.

And isn’t that the beauty of the multiverse? The idea that if it is real, then perhaps out there somewhere within it, there’s a universe where we made the other choice every time we’ve been faced with a path. In which we pursued the career that we were too afraid to, went to the university that we decided against, made things work with the one who got away.

The multiverse isn’t a new concept – in fact, it’s been around for a long time. And even some scientists are convinced that the multiverse is real. The main one is called inflationary cosmology, which suggests that the universe expanded rapidly in the moments after the Big Bang. Regardless of the specifics, it’s something that people are drawn to.

There’s something alluring about the idea of the multiverse or past lives or a hundred million other chances for us to have gotten it right. So while the concept is already getting stale as it bleeds across different film franchises, it’s one that likely will always hold a certain appeal for humanity. Because as Past Lives beautifully demonstrates, sometimes we get glimpses of a life that could have been and sometimes they are achingly bittersweet.