My date and I looked at each other during the closing credits of Materialists, in a packed-to-the-gills big house at San Francisco’s AMC Kabuki Theater, and simultaneously chortled: “Past Lives, but for white people.”
I reviewed writer/director Celine Song’s debut Oscar-nominated 2023 feature, Past Lives, at length (see references), and like that film, Materialists took a night to fully ripen in my conscience, as my mind cooled from its inflammation of old, persistent wounds, and then appreciated the subliminal and sublime artistry of emotions evoked and then held in contemplation and compassion.
Song is a doctor of the romance genre: She pokes us to find out where it hurts. And it does. You may need therapy sessions, or conversations with friends, after you take in her film. Materialists is stimulus for the only economy that will really matter, in the end: the economy that is the sum of our love, and which seems in regular worldwide depression, or drought, as Beyoncé would have it. All our divisions and conflicts may only be an agony of love. Materialists, like Past Lives, adds artful, disruptive code to our human matrix and attempts to awaken something … well, Neo.
Materialists and Past Lives work in similar ways. Both center the complex emotional journeys of women: In Past Lives, Nora (Greta Lee); in Materialists, Lucy (Dakota Johnson). Both women burst with imagination, primarily used to affect others, and only after long last, in self-reflection and agency. Nora was a writer; Lucy tries to connect the narrative dots of people’s lives as a matchmaker. Both films can be read as “cautionary tales.” Both save their emotional wallop for the closing scenes, and they evoke losses of historical trauma, and potential rekindling of primal loves (in Past Lives, the love of younger selves, and in Materialists, the imagined first love of our cave-people ancestors). Like Past Lives, Materialists leaves the audience questioning (or tragically, succumbing to) choices guided by culture, ambition, and superficiality, and underscores our difficult modern journey, which leaves us longing for collective righting, and rewriting, somehow.
The A24 film unabashedly pours salt on the wounds of the modern American dating scene, skewering viewers with blunt portrayals of the superficial but quite palpable ways we reject each other: money, height, looks, age, race—all the contingent ways we grasp at self-worth and other-assessment. One woman holds a resume of requirements for her would-be beau, another woman is looking for someone to “check all the boxes,” and a 49-year-old man demands a 27-year-old woman, as if the world should be a factory for the specific satisfaction of their small-s selves, as opposed to a goad to develop a big S—an inclusive and compassionate Self. There is no doubt we throw shade on each other for all these reasons, and thus “buy into the blockchain of subtle oppression,” as I once wrote in an essay on Asian American gender relations (see references).
We are all works-in-progress, though, and as Anais Nin said, “all life is a preparation for love.”
As a psychiatrist, I know that many people walk around feeling quite rejected and abandoned by others. I, too, have felt this. Feelings of rejection, abandonment, and betrayal are some of our “universal human transmissions.” We can only repair these transmissions in relationship to ourselves and each other. Society is the sum of our love, and is also a work in progress.
One can only hope that it doesn’t take a closing credit on this whole show to make us long for doing better by our best selves, and better by each other.
Song shows us the aggression in our gaze, the aggressions of living in a supercapitalist and all-too-often superficial society. Her film also includes a startling incident of sexualized aggression, out of place in the typical rom-com genre. Song does not let us forget that our world has victims. But she also reminds us we do all have agency. We can choose different ambitions, different frontiers, different algorithms. We can see past looks and wealth. We can overcome devaluation and dehumanization.
We can reimagine the movie of our lives, and speak in the ancient moon language of the great Persian poet Hafiz of the 1300s, whose homeland is now being bombarded:
Moon Language
by HafizAdmit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “love me”
of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
© 2025 Ravi Chandra, M.D., D.F.A.P.A.