[COLUMN] With Past Lives and Materialists, Celine Song is One of the Great Internet Filmmakers | by Darren Mooney

As a writer and director, Celine Song is something of a paradox.

Dramatically, Song’s roots are in theatre. Her first major work was the play Endings, which was performed Off-Broadway between February and March 2020, its run cut short by the pandemic. Song’s love of theatre shines through in her work. In Materialists, Song playfully credits herself as the writer of the godawful stage play in which John (Chris Evans) is performing, which Harry (Pedro Pascal) diplomatically describes as “interesting.”

More to the point, Song has written her two feature films in a way that feels very “stagey.” Both Past Lives and Materialists unfold as a series of extended conversations between sets of two or three characters. This isn’t to suggest that the movies don’t look great. Working with cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, Song has an eye for a beautiful setting – a merry-go-round on the edge of Manhattan or a lovingly lit wedding in upstate New York – but the films are written like plays.

In Past Lives, Nora Moon (Greta Lee) alternates between conversations with her childhood friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and her boyfriend Arthur Zaturansky (John Magaro). In Materialists, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) bounces between one-on-one scenes with her competing love interests John and Harry, her co-worker Daisy (Dasha Nekrasova), her boss Violet (Marin Ireland) or her favorite client Sophie (Zoë Winters). It wouldn't be too hard to reimagine these movies as stage plays.

On the other hand, Song is part of a digitally native generation. When Endings closed, Song’s next major project was a production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull within the virtual world of The Sims 4, streaming on Twitch. That is a surreal collection of words to type, and Song embraced the unique nature of the online streaming machinima, inviting participants to become collaborators who helped her customize character designs and other details. Song understands the online world.

For all that Past Lives and Materialists are very traditional in their cinematic construction, they both feel like movies that are fundamentally about the internet. In particular, the way that the internet has distorted interpersonal relationships and how human beings understand one another. This is not to say that Song is the definitive internet filmmaker of her generation, but she is perhaps the filmmaker who most subtly and shrewdly understands the digital realm.

When discussing “films about the internet”, a variety of images inevitably come to mind. There is the retro cyberpunk aesthetic of something like The Matrix or Johnny Mnemonic, or even the kitsch of Lawnmower Man or The Net. There is perhaps the literalism of something like Wreck-It-Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet or The Emoji Movie. There are keyboards and wires, digital transitions and dial-up sounds, memes and green text. That is all perfectly fair.

However, the whole point of the internet (and perhaps the source of its decay) is that the internet is not a single fixed location or aesthetic. The internet is everywhere. It is all around. It is in the air. It is on computers. It is in people’s pockets, on their watches, in their glasses. It is in the way that people talk. It is in the way that they write. More profoundly, it is in the way that people think. It is in people’s heads. It is an endless ghost city. It is all-consuming and it is inescapable.

There are movies that really capture the overwhelming nature of this modern hypermediated reality. For directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All At Once was in large part about what it feels like “to live right now with the internet.” The vast multiverses of movies like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-lVerse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse capture some of the sensory overload of being online, overwhelmed by stimuli, information and possibility.

Past Lives and Materialists are very different films than Everything Everywhere All At Once or the two Spider-Verse movies. Celine Song is not seeking to replicate the intense sensory overload or maximalism of using social media constantly or being bombarded constantly with information. Structurally and rhythmically, Song’s two movies are very traditional. They are paced gently and deliberately. The sense of being overwhelmed does not derive from the volume of information.

Song herself has conceded that the actual mechanics of modern technology don’t really interest her as a filmmaker. Asked about the most difficult scenes to film in Past Lives, she pointed to “the scenes where you're just shooting the Skype screen.” It can be very hard to make the internet look visually compelling – just watch the new version of War of the Worlds starring Ice Cube – and Song’s movie’s aren’t interested in the visual language of cyberspace.

Rather, Song’s movies capture the more mundane realities of living in a world that has been reshaped and reconfigured by the digital revolution. The entire plot of Past Lives is enabled by social media. The film opens with a short sequence depicting Nora – then known as Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) – on a playdate with a young Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) in Seoul. The two have a strong connection. However, shortly after that, Nora’s family migrates to Canada.

In a rather heavy-handed but effective visual metaphor for the separate paths that they are on, the two children find themselves at a fork in the road. Nora’s life will take her half the world away. Hae Sung will remain in South Korea. In most cases, that sort of separation would be sharp and decisive. It would be painful, but both Nora and Hae Sung would get on with their lives. Even if they wanted to, it would have been next-to-impossible for the two to reconnect.

However, the internet has collapsed time and space. It is a gigantic networked repository where everything is archived and easily accessible. Childhood photos sit on Facebook, looking just as fresh as they did decades ago. Since the act of “unfollowing” is a social taboo, lives lived online accrue more connections across a vaster swathe of chronology and geography. Hae Sung is able to reconnect with Nora via Facebook. The pair even end up video calling one another.

Years later, after Nora has married Arthur, Hae Sung travels to New York in the hope of reconnecting. It is like reopening an old wound. Nora is tempted not just by nostalgia for the life her family left behind, but for the life that she might have lived. It’s not particularly controversial to observe that modern culture is obsessed with nostalgia. To a certain extent, those impulses are enabled and encouraged by the internet. The past might be another country, but the internet is a passport.

If Past Lives is about how the internet has made the past inescapable, then Materialists is very overtly a movie about romance in a post-online dating world. It is perhaps interesting that modern romantic comedies haven’t really explored the fundamental ways that online dating has changed how human beings interact with one another. At most, the dating apps become a source of a quick joke in movies like Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy before the film continues as normal.

There are undoubtedly a couple of reasons for this. Most obviously, there are not a lot of romantic comedies being made. Those romantic comedies that are being made are likely being sent direct to streaming and are designed to appeal to audiences whose memories of dating predate the apps featuring older actors like Will Ferrell, Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson and Reese Witherspoon. The goal is not to capture the reality of modern love, but to hit the beats of a familiar genre.

There is also perhaps an argument that online dating is to romantic comedy what the cellphone was to the horror; it is a device that completely undermines the central appeal of the genre. It changes the rules of the game so fundamentally that any narrative earnestly engaging with this revolutionary leap forward risks becoming unrecognizable. With that in mind, it’s worth conceding that Materialists generated a substantial backlash for not being a typical romantic comedy.

Materialists is not literally about the internet. The plot focuses on Lucy, an exclusive New York matchmaker whose job involves helping incredibly wealthy and beautiful people find love. However, the film very obviously takes place in the shadow of online dating. The first client that Lucy talks to over the phone objects to being set up on a date with Sophie, complaining, “I would never swipe right on a woman like that.”

Lucy spends the movie dealing with the unrealistic demands that her clients impose on her, which will be familiar to anybody who has used a dating app. Human beings are reduced to raw data, and filtered out: height, weight, age, income, property value, body mass index. Lucy repeatedly tries to get her clients to broaden their restrictions, but they consistently refuse to do so, treating Lucy like an online delivery service.

Lucy believes that matchmaking is algorithmic. “It’s just math,” she tells John. Asked what makes a couple perfect for one another, she suggests, “Similar economic background, politically aligned, well-matched in their attractiveness.” When justifying her matches to Sophie, she repeatedly insists a candidate “checked a lot of our boxes.” It is an economy of human beings, the reduction of individuals to commodities traded on the open market. Lucy is effectively a sentient algorithm.

Unsurprisingly, there is not a lot of room for love within this hyper-commercial service. As Lucy confesses in conversation with Violet, “We promise them love, and then we just give them bad dates with morons and criminals.” In a moment of frustration, Lucy warns one client (Halley Feiffer) that she cannot customize “because this is not a simulation.” She explains, “This is not a car or a house. We're talking about people. People are people are people are people. They come as they are.”

Song constructs a love story that feels tailored to the internet age, in which human interactions are governed by these sorts of mathematical algorithms and solipsistic expectations, where human beings are ordered like Uber Eats. However, part of the cleverness of Materialists is that Song doesn’t real blame the internet for this. She understands that online dating has simply enhanced certain trends and encouraged people to think about romance in particular ways.

After all, the title Materialists is a classical allusion, a reference to a branch of philosophy that arose in opposition to romantic thought. Song seems to suggest that the internet has merely provided a framework for that philosophy – one anchored in hard and pure rationality – to become ascendent and even dominant in modern interpersonal relationships. Human beings were always capable of reducing one another to statistics, the internet just provides an efficient engine to do that.

Still, Part Lives and Materialists are decidedly modern films in terms of their subjects and themes. They may not be about the internet in a direct or literal way, but they are in conversation with how online frameworks have altered human relationships and people’s understanding of the world. For all that Song’s films are structurally classical, the kinds of movies that generate reactions like “they don’t make them like this anymore”, they are very much of this particular moment.