Everything Everywhere All at Once: Five Stars from a Nihilist

SPOILER ALERT - PLOT POINTS DISCUSSED 

It's that special season that only comes one time each year: Tax Season! And what better way to celebrate the bureaucracy this April 15th than by hitting the theaters for a movie?

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most fun I've had to date watching a bickering couple get audited. In fact, despite the majority of the story taking place in a laundromat and an IRS building, it's more fun than some flicks set in more alluring locations. The Daniels do not disappoint when it comes to wackiness, and that's saying something when you're talking about using a story concept that's become overdone as quickly as the multiverse concept has. The way they poke fun at this sci-fi trope while simultaneously telling a powerful story about having to live in many worlds at once is beautiful! They combine the side-splittingly ridiculous with the deeply relatable in a fashion that leaves you thinking back and picking up on new currents of insight long after the film ends. My one criticism is that I wish they had managed to give the googly eyes more screen time.

Laundromat proprietor Evelyn Wang is already world-hopping before she gets a glimpse of any of the bizarre other realities that await her. She's at the juncture where her family's worlds collide: Her father who knows only China, her daughter who knows only the US, and her husband who naturally approaches life's challenges with an optimistic attitude that seems nonsensical from her vantage point. When she is given the chance to connected with other versions of herself that have followed wildly different life paths, she learns to draw strengths from perspectives that were as unrelatable as alien universes before. 

The real experience of the movie is in all the outlandish details: If you like the weird and the silly, you have to see if for yourself. But aside from enjoying the kaleidoscope of oddities, I also found the simple underlying story of one person learning to understand another deeply touching--it tied in all the right details to play out my perfect fantasy of what seems like an impossible reconciliation of opposing views.

In Evelyn's view, the world is simple. You know what you have to do and you do it to survive. But for her daughter, Joy, everything looks different. There are endless possibilities of how life could be, especially since she turns out to be one of the multitude of Joys that together form the monstrous being Jobu Tupaki, once a normal human whose mind fractured among all the versions of herself across the multiverse so that she experiences all of them at once. Evelyn is told that she must destroy Jobu Tupaki to save everyone, but how could she destroy her daughter? Instead, she resolves to know her experience, to become all Evelyns everywhere all at once and bring Joy back.

I'm sure I can't be the only one who found the depiction of Joy / Jobu to be particularly insightful. She feels like the incarnation of everything my pastors and the Focus on the Family hosts on the radio told me to be afraid of. Evelyn has already had conflict with Joy over the fact that she likes girls. While Evelyn is fairly accepting of Joy's girlfriend, Becky, once her father arrives from China, she attempts to hide the relationship from him. Jobu Tupaki is described to Evelyn as a completely relativistic being. Experiencing so many realities at once has left her thinking that nothing matters so that she acts without regard to right and wrong, and the dimension jumpers who explain the situation to Evelyn fear that she is building a black-hole-like object that could destroy everyone (although it turns out to be a bagel that literally has everything on it and is intended to destroy Jobu herself).

If I had a bagel for every time I heard an authority figure say the country was going to hell in a handbasket because acceptance of gay people was being promoted, I'd have to open a deli. Likewise for every instance of hand-wringing over fears of moral relativism corrupting the youth. Or just for fear of everything that was different. The devil was extending his sway because Lady Gaga put on a new ridiculous outfit or because male K-Pop stars performed with painted nails. 

I like that the film has Jobu Tupaki wearing the sorts of over-the-top fashions you would see in a music video because things as simple as that were all wrapped up in what the older generation I knew told us was evil and dangerous. That aesthetic and the concept of being overwhelmed with variations on reality also calls to mind the fear of the internet that tied in to the same attitude. The fact that information and distractions of all sorts were so available nowadays was yet another fearful departure from the ideal world of simple values, where technological changes should have stopped either in 1st century Israel or 1950s America, something like that, to allow us all proper time to focus on spiritual things.

She's gay, she's internet savvy, and she's a nihilist. She's everything the older generation feared coming to destroy the world. And that's why I love so much that her mom does what I never saw the people who preached about the perilous state of today's youth doing: She tries to get insider her world and meet her there. 

The hellinahandbasketers were terrified of anyone who wasn't straight. They didn't try to understand these people and what their lives were really like. They didn't even believe them when they said that they had to struggle for acceptance just to live a safe and normal life--it was all a political agenda to turn the government against family values and nothing more. Neither did the handbasketers make an effort to understand the thought process of anyone whose values differed from their own. They repeated and repeated that people in "the world" didn't believe in objective truth and that this was ridiculous because they still acted as if some things were true or false and right or wrong, showing that they didn't really believe what they claimed anyway. In other words, everyone whose values derived from an unfamiliar source was stupid. It didn't matter that a lot of the world actually does believe in truth and just thinks it points to different conclusions than the handbasketers do or that people who admit their morals derive from subjective sources still have good, sensible reasons for acting as they do and can still live in a peaceful, happy society. Everyone who did not adhere to the specifics of the handbasketers' community was evil, dangerous, ultimately a tool of Satan to bring chaos and misery. 

If someone's kid showed signs of any of the things the handbasketers feared, it basically meant they were all the other things too, in the worst way. And trying to understand where they were coming from was out of the question. If you tried to see things from the perspective of someone who was gay or liberal or who didn't share your religious beliefs, you might get sucked into the black hole of despair too. Educating yourself on the subjects that mattered to these people was dangerous; it might corrupt you. You too might end up knowing what the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity was, which would make you a ridiculous, foppish, over-educated excuse for a human being, barely fit to live. You too might end up thinking that nothing really mattered and slogging through the rest of your dismal existence in a perpetual depression.

Imagine what it would have been like, I say to myself, if the older generation I knew had been willing to act like Evelyn in this story. Imagine if they had ever seriously asked themselves what it would be like to have society treat them as monsters because of who they were attracted to. Imagine if they had ever arrived at the point Evelyn finally does of saying sure nothing really matters and having even that not matter because it doesn't change the fact that she loves her daughter and wants to live this one normal, boring, imperfect life with her, regardless of what else might be going on in all the vastness of everywhere and everywhen. 

One reason I refer to myself as a nihilist is because that is what all my old authority figures were so afraid of. They were so petrified by the idea of nothing mattering in this eternal, cosmic sense they placed so much importance on. Anyone who would say that nothing lasts forever and so nothing matters in that eternal way was portrayed as a monster. If they thought nothing mattered, they were probably fine with murder and with letting their lawn get overgrown, and they were certainly miserable and bitter all the time. I can't talk enough about how misguided these fears were. (See Chapter 4 of my book for a bunch of me talking about that.) I just want my old authorities to see that I'm a happy and ethical monster.

For me, it's a fairy tale moment when Evelyn is able to say "nothing matters" in a positive sense. I haven't witnessed a transformation like that in real life. I suppose it must be more possible than magic, but it feels on the same level. Imagine if the people who were so afraid of not having black-and-white standards that they had to call everyone different from them evil just hadn't been so afraid. Imagine if they were able to arrive at that point where they knew that even if nothing really mattered they still wanted this life to be good and they saw the people around them as people, not as monsters, and trusted that they wanted the same thing. It's a sweet, kumbaya thought, and I'm so glad the Daniels put it in a movie. 

Like I've said before, the incarnation narrative of Christianity is an idea I still find powerful and useful; I tend to see it everywhere. In the community that taught me this narrative though, it was a certain brand of Christian beliefs that stopped people from being able to practice the sort of incarnational love that Everything Everywhere All at Once plays out on screen. What a tragic contradiction! But the appeal of the story stands, and it's always fun to see it popping up in works that aren't trying to say anything about Jesus at all. I would still be recommending this movie as an entertaining experience without that element, but getting to see someone take on the perspective of a nihilist and say, hey, this isn't so bad! was the clincher. That's what keeps me thinking back over the story and saying to myself that even without sci-fi powers or fairy tale magic, perhaps I can help build bridges between isolated worlds too.