everything everywhere all at once
I’ve watched this movie for the first time around the time it was released because I had heard all the buzz around it. It was alleged to be groundbreaking in every way possible, yet I couldn’t see all that. I didn’t get why it was necessary to go to all these lengths to tell this story of self-acceptance. I found the story to be okay, the tensions to be entertaining, but I couldn’t reconstruct the plot in my mind. It felt like a movie that was doing everything imaginable because it could. And now I see how that was the point. The absurdity is a plot device that makes the story more… fruitful.
The narrative is as absurd as it can be, following a woman who elopes her family with her lover to the USA to start a new, modest life. She was everything and reduced herself to nothing. Everything was possible, yet her life was plagued by failure after failure. Even her daughter disliked her! And rightfully so, because Evelyn, the mother, clung to her deep-seated homophobia and shame that everything she stood for was a disappointment to her father, Gong Gong. Her husband, Waymond, loved her, however, her self-loathing made her incapable of reciprocating. He thought the prospect of divorce might nudge her into dialogue about their relationship.
In another universe, she invented a way for the mind to travel universes and tested that on her daughter, Joy, who showed an extraordinary ability to withstand multiple and wide-ranging jumps between relationally far universes in the multiverse. Her daughter was likely depressed already or realized that she was depressed in many of the other universes because she never lived up to what her mother wanted her to be. She starts a chase after a version of her mother who could see life from her nihilist lens.
As a side note, Joy’s outfits remind me of Björk a lot. They’re just over the top and absurd, but once you see them, you wonder why nobody else sees the world her way. I think the juxtaposition of Joy’s outfits with the concept of the bagel, the ridiculous black hole of everything and nothing, really drives the point home. That everything is stupid and unimportant.
There’s a point after which Evelyn stops clinging to her unsatisfactory life and embraces nothingness, when she and her daughter share their nihilism. Yet in recognizing that fact and through the sheer coincidence that others weren’t going to give up on her as easily as she gave up on them, she decides not to let go of her daughter the same way her father did. It dawns on her that mother and daughter are the same kind of disappointment to different people. She lowers her guard and that’s when everything becomes possible again because she trusts others to handle themselves and others well enough. She doesn’t need to be emotionally regulating everyone anymore.
As Joy is relieved that she finally found an Evelyn that understands, convinced that she can make her jump with her into suicide and nonexistence. By then Evelyn was tapped into the possibilities that her life could’ve taken and recognizes it’s not all lost. She wouldn’t let go of her daughter like her father did and she convinces her to see purpose in the purposeless, to do whatever because it felt good.
Where this ties into the zeitgeist is in how it addresses the generational divide of the older generation wanting to return to a good time (given that this reason is what Alpha Waymond—from the universe that invented jumping universes—uses to convince Evelyn to fight her daughter across the multiverse) while the younger generation wants to make something new and good, but is hitting a wall that is driving it into nihilism. Both see each other as the enemy because they don’t understand each other. Waymond shows her how that’s precisely the reason they need compassion. Not because they understand each, but because they don’t. Evelyn doesn’t need to understand her daughter’s homosexuality to love her. Furthermore, there is a feminist component here: Evelyn’s liberation comes from leaving her “airbag” behavior that makes her overcompensate for the shortcomings of men in her life. She learns that their emotions are not her responsibility.
This isn’t simply a story about an immigrant mother learning to accept, not tolerate, her daughter’s queerness and to look beyond her failures. It’s about not succumbing to the bagel of the past. It’s about choosing to see the other person and learning to live with difference instead of shoehorning it into an understandable matrix. And I find that to be beautiful. I’m glad I decided to rewatch this movie after having read The Myth of Sisyphus because I believe it has helped me understand it better.