‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ Is Both Beautiful & Frustrating At Once
Image; The wrap
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s dimension-hopping epic Everything Everywhere All at Once centers on an aimless woman named Evelyn Quan Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who runs a laundromat. Evelyn is unhappy with how her life has ended up — a life that seems to be crumbling at the seams until she stumbles into a vast conspiracy about a multiversal war. As Evelyn hops between dimensions, she learns more about the sides fighting this war and how they pertain to her life and her choices, both in this dimension and in all of them at once.
There is much to enjoy about this movie. Michelle Yeoh plays the various iterations of Evelyn effortlessly. It was breathtaking to see Yeoh morph from a small business owner to a martial arts film superstar to a chef and back again. Overall, the cast of this movie does a great job selling you its multiverse premise. I loved most of the elements of this film: the direction, the editing, and the score. There was hardly a misused piece.
Yet despite all of this beauty, there was one thing about this film that has really bothered me: its take on fascism. While Everything Everywhere All At Once does excellent care to tell an emotionally impactful story about a family struggling to find its way in the multiverse, its political message is less than inspiring.
So let's put on our multiverse Bluetooth headsets, and make our way through this exciting journey, to unpack both the beautiful and the frustrating within this brilliant movie.
The Beautiful
The beautiful and maddening thing about this film’s multiverse premise is that there are so many themes to pick apart from it: that’s kind of the point. You could talk about the immigrant journey in America, queer acceptance within Asian American families, the economic struggles involved in navigating America’s vast bureaucracy, the “what if-ism” involved in imagining another life, and so much more.
The emotional core of this movie, however, is about family. Evelyn’s family is in the middle of falling apart by the time we start the film. She has been struggling to maintain her business for so long that, outside of shouting at people to do what she says, she’s lost the ability to connect, clinging to passion projects hoping that they will make her feel alive. Her husband, Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), is seeking a divorce (kind of) at the start of the movie. Her daughter Joy Wang (Stephanie Hsu) is in a committed lesbian relationship that Evelyn refuses to accept under the guise that her father (James Hong), Joy’s grandfather nicknamed Gong Gong, will not allow it.
We learn that these tensions are metaphorically embodied in the multiversal war that makes up the chief tension of the film. On the one side, you have the Alphaverse versions of Waymond and her father, who are in a vicious battle against the malevolent being Jobu Tupaki. This “villain” is an entity whose consciousness is fractured among the multiverse itself — an act that has given her Godlike powers to rearrange matter at will — and these two will do almost anything to stop her.
On the other side, you have, well, Jobu Tupaki, who we learn is the Alphaverse version of Evelyn’s daughter Joy Wang. This Joy was pushed too hard by the Alphaverse version of Evelyn, the latter who invented multiverse travel. Alphaverse Evelyn wanted her daughter to succeed, even at the risk of her own sanity. Joy’s consciousness fractured into countless pieces as a result. Joy or Jobu Tupaki now cannot handle being pulled in so many directions at once (a metaphor that can apply to everything from the distraction of social media to the disaster that is climate change).
Consumed by nihilism, Alphaverse Joy now wants to end her existence, and she is looking for someone to make the journey into the abyss with her. She has created a blackhole cheekily referred to as an “everything bagel” that she believes will end the torture of her existence.
From the perspective of an interpersonal drama, we come to understand that this “war” is partially a metaphor for Evelyn’s neglect. She has been too hard on her daughter, pushing Joy not only to hide a version of who she is, but to feel bitterly alone. Evelyn needs to learn how to be more forgiving and kind.
The movie's climax involves her being nice to a string of characters by truly “seeing” them, either through passionate dialogue or even, at one point, administering some hot BDSM spanking (you had to be there) until she finally reaches her daughter. The reconciliation Evelyn has with Joy is exceptionally beautiful. There was not a dry eye in the theater by the time we got to her delivering a poignant monologue about choosing to be there with Alphaverse Joy, the chaos of the multiverse be damned.
This film works from the standpoint of being a story about a broken family reconciling with trauma. It falls in line with the other movies released recently with the theme of adults apologizing to their kids (see Encanto, Turning Red, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, etc.).
From the standpoint of politics, however, well…
The Frustrating
As we stated earlier, this film is not just about a family’s reconciliation. It’s also about dealing with political nihilism and fascism, which are two concepts that have a long history. Fascist leaders often take advantage of people’s disillusionment in broken systems, something we have seen everywhere, from the Nazi Party taking advantage of the economic desperation of the Weimar Republic to Donald Trump tapping into the dysfunction of the current US economy.
Jobu Tupaki is a fascist who leads a militant cult of nihilists who have responded to the multiverse's pointlessness by worshiping her devoutly. The hole of the “everything bagel” has become their official symbol. They wear white, flowing robes in the Alphaverse to harken to religious movements like the Catholic Church or Mormonism. In the first act of the film, the Alphaverse version of the IRS Inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), a worshipper of Tupaki, even says to a group of terrified onlookers that their lives are made more significant by Tupaki’s presence. These people are fanatics centered on a cult of personality, which is exactly how fascism operates.
We don’t know too much about the multiverse war being waged by the Alphaverse, but we do know it has been brutal for that dimension. There's a scene where Alphaverse Waymond is chowing down on a sandwich in an office conference room, and he briefly mentions how the war in his dimension destroyed all the cattle there.
We also see worshipers of Tupaki being unperturbed with killing various people within this timeline. The Alphaverse Deirdre had no problem snapping the neck of one iteration of Evelyn. Tupaki even kills several “innocent” security officers in a magnificent scene where she rearranges the matter around them until they die (seriously, the editing in this scene is fantastic). These are dangerous people who have enacted countless cruelties onto the indifferent multiverse — all because they cannot handle the gravity of their insignificance.
And so, while this film is beautiful from the perspective of a family coping with their drama, its approach to ending Tupaki’s regime (and dealing with the nihilism it's rooted in) has me feeling conflicted. We never have to grabble with all the pain she has caused, feeding into the same indifferent nihilism that the movie seems to be criticizing. If we are supposed to care about our place in the universe, shouldn’t we care about the lives lost here?
Then there's the film's climax, where Evelyn has to face down a group of Alphaverse goons on the sides of Alphaverse Waymond Wang and Alphaverse Gong Gong. Evelyn has to get past them to stop Jobu Tupaki (AKA her daughter) from killing herself via “the everything bagel,” and as we have already mentioned, she does this by “being kind” to all the people in her way.
The fact the solution to dismantling a fascist regime boils down to Evelyn’s husband begging her to “be kind” sends all the wrong signals. I feel like I am seeing the movie version of one of those “kindness is everything” yard signs. It is condescending and paternalistic to suggest that the nihilism plaguing Millenials and Gen Zers — who Joy is a partial stand-in for— should be handled with kindness. The focus should instead be on solving the problems that make the younger generations depressed and hopeless (e.g., wealth inequality, climate change, etc.).
This one scene turns a transcendent emotional journey about family drama into one I am very conflicted about. No, Waymond, our problems are not our lack of kindness for the bad people in the world. Sadly sometimes fascists and other terrible people need to be dealt with through force. We didn’t defeat the Nazis by telling them they matter and giving them a good consensual spanking. We had to use guns and fists, and the refusal to acknowledge this fact makes this narrative messy.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is not the only piece of media to fall into this trap. The show Steven Universe is also about a magical person who stops a galaxy-spanning, fascist empire by showing kindness to those on top. You see this theme resurface a lot in the fantasy genre. This is a common problem in liberal media, where kindness is shown as the antidote for larger, systemic problems, but it doesn't make this climax any less frustrating.
Gen Z doesn’t need paternalistic kindness. They need people to give a shit and start fighting — and not just with hugs.
Both At Once
When I look back at this film, I see two emotional truths. On the one hand, I see a movie about a mother reconciling with her queer daughter and distant husband, and I want to weep tears of joy. We are getting this beautiful story of kindness and redemption, and it makes me happy to know that it exists.
On the other, I see the story of a fascist empire being neatly dismantled through acts of kindness and compassion, and it immediately pulls me out of the first story. I want to scream at the naive arrogance of pushing for this type of message in 2022 when most countries are teetering on fascism.
Mostly, I feel both of them at once, and maybe that's okay. Perhaps it's enough to take the good from a story, criticize the frustrating elements, and then hop on to the next adventure.