Everything Everywhere All at Once
A Review of a Metamodern Movie
(Warning: To review the movie the way I want to, I’ll spoil the entire movie.)
Due to the lateness of my watching Everything Everywhere All at Once, I have read a great many reviews from my Facebook friends. Many have been downright hostile, complaining especially that it’s nihilistic. A few others have praised it as brilliant. I have to admit that I’m in the latter camp. The film is brilliant and all of the Oscars it received were well deserved. I will further admit that I had originally thought there was no way Jamie Lee Curtis deserved the Oscar over Angela Bassett (I mean, she IS Angela Bassett). However, after watching Everything Everywhere All at Once, I have to further admit that I was wrong. Jamie Lee Curtis showed incredible range in this film, all while remaining the same fundamental character.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is the story of Evelyn Wang, a Chinese immigrant (in one timeline) who, with her husband, runs a laundromat and is getting audited by the IRS. Jamie Lee Curtis plays the IRS agent. Evelyn is somewhat estranged from her husband, Waymond; she is very estranged from her daughter, Joy; and she is trying to throw a party for her father, Gong Gong, who she resents. She doesn’t want to tell her father that her daughter is a lesbian. Her father warned her not to marry Waymond and go to America, and given that they are borderline poor and definitely overworked, and facing a hostile IRS audit, she is no doubt thinking her father was right (which, let’s face it, would only make any of us even more resentful).
At the IRS office, she is approached by an alternate version of her husband (which manifests through her version of her husband) who is a martial arts expert, and who is seeking to recruit her to stop an evil, nihilistic villain named Jobu Tupaki, who has created something that could destroy the multiverse. This version of Waymond is from an alternate universe called Alpha. He explains that every single decision you make creates an alternate universe where the opposite decision was made. This creates an ever-branching multiverse, which she is able to tap into with a headset he gives her. With every alternative Evelyn, she is able to gain more and more skills, from martial arts to increased lung capacity from being a singer.
The accusations of nihilism come from the fact that Jobu Tupaki is deeply nihilistic. She is a version of Joy who a version of Evelyn was trying to train to move among the various multiverses, but who pressed her too much and caused her to enter every multiverse too quickly and thus became broken. She came to realize that nothing matters, that we are an accidental arrangement of atoms that could have been otherwise. As proof, she brings her mother into a universe where they are rocks because there’s no life in it. In the end, Jobu Tupaki only wants to destroy herself—only, she wants to be accompanied by her mother.
The problem is, though Evelyn has also experienced all the other universes, she doesn’t become nihilistic. Specifically, though she ends up admitting Jobu Tupaki is fundamentally correct, she comes out on the other side with the realization that you can create meaning in the world—and that you do so by being kind and through love. She learns this from her husband, who says he chooses to see the world through that lens, and that that is his superpower. It is a choice to be kind; it is a choice to love. And these help provide meaning to the world.
Both Evelyn and her father express their love for their children through criticism—they sincerely want their children to be better and to make better decisions, but they are so blunt, they don’t realize they are alienating rather than helpful. They are loving, but not kind. Waymond, on the other hand, is both loving and kind. Unfortunately, Joy pays more attention to her mother’s criticisms than to her father’s lovingkindness. Evelyn has to learn that she has to adopt kindness as well if she’s to have a good relationship with her daughter, and if her daughter isn’t going to develop (further) resentment toward her. Their relationship becomes a possibly (likely) better one, at least in this universe.
Another thing Evelyn learns is not to regret her past and the decisions she made. In one universe in particular, she is wildly successful because she never married Waymond (in fact, she’s successful in almost all the universes where she doesn’t marry Waymond). However, she meets him at the premier of one of her Kung Fu movies, and it’s clear that he’s successful as well. However, he says he would have rather been a poor owner of a laundromat with her. Though successful, he’s filled with regrets about having not been able to be with her, no matter the outcome. She, of course, knows the outcome, and she’s regretting that outcome. These regrets bring resentment, which leads ultimately to nihilism. What she needs to learn is that she has to have no regrets about the decisions she has made. Learning to live a life with no regrets, meaning you have no more resentment toward others or toward circumstances, and learning to be both loving and kind, is what brings you to the other side of nihilism.
The problem is, you have to pass through nihilism in order to get to these realizations. This is the pathway I took, and these are the realizations I made. There is no inherent meaning in the world—in fact, from that perspective, everything is indeed meaningless. However, you can create meaning in the world. You have that power. And that power is hardly trivial. You can create meaning in any number of ways. In the film, it’s through family and forging friendships. For an artist (like the Daniels), it’s through art. For me, it’s both. I live a deeply meaningful life because I choose to create meaning in my life.
The Medieval mindset is that the world is inherently meaningful because God created everything. While the Modern mindset (starting with the Renaissance and ending sometime in the 20th century), science and technology are successful at discovering and creating the world because the world is inherently meaningful. This meaningfulness is somehow separate from God, yet is retained from the God-centric view of everything being meaningful because of Him.
The Postmodern mindset is fundamentally atheistic and rejects the idea that everything is meaningful. Because of this rejection, postmodernism fundamentally embraces nihilism. In many ways, it becomes “pragmatic,” meaning “whatever works” is what’s important. Since we cannot know what works, because nothing is meaningful in the world, we just have to try out everything. Institutions don’t matter and can be changed willy-nilly. Don’t like something? Just destroy it. It won’t matter. In the end, people just follow their emotions and seek to destroy anything they don’t like, without thought to what it means to do so (and why should they, since nothing is meaningful?). The early Postmodernists may have only intended to critique Modernism, but the end result has been a complete breakdown into nihilism.
What, then, do we do when faced with a nihilistic breakdown of society?
The answer is to assert meaning anyway. That’s the Metamodern mindset. And that’s the mindset we see in Everything Everywhere All at Once. The existence of the multiverse doesn’t mean there’s no meaning in the world. No inherent meaning, yes, but that hardly means no meaning at all. While hardly a nihilist, Evelyn has to learn to give her life meaning; but to do that, she has to first pass through the nihilistic world view of her daughter in the form of Jobu Tupaki. Evelyn has to learn to be kind toward Jobu Tupaki (rather than to kill all versions of Joy/Jobu Tupaki, as one version of Evelyn’s father wants to do), which is all that will save Jobu Tupaki from destroying herself (and potentially dragging Evelyn in as well). Many Metamodernists have turned this experience of meaning-creation and feelings of lovingkindness as a kind of spiritualism. What, in the end, it really is is an embracing of all the fundamental world views—tribalism/family, ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Postmodern—while transcending them all simultaneously.
As I have said above, I have seen many reviews of this film from my Facebook friends, and it is those reviews which have helped to form this review. Those who have been hostile to the film are clearly reviewing it from a Modernist mindset. All they can see is the nihilism. Many don’t like the pacing. Many don’t like the fragmented nature of the narrative. All they see is a Postmodern world view they fundamentally don’t understand.
Postmodernists who watch this film will no doubt view it as a fundamentally Postmodern film as well. In this sense, they will agree with the Modernists among us, while asserting the nihilism to be correct. They won’t understand the end, and will argue that the ending doesn’t make sense. (But they will at least notice the ending, which the Modernists seem to not have noticed at all.) They will also like the pacing and the fragmented nature of the narrative, as these are features of Postmodern storytelling.
The Metamodernists who have seen the film have all universally liked the film and have pronounced it to be a Metamodern film. I agree. You have to pass from Modern mindset (Evelyn at the beginning) through Postmodern nihilism (most of the middle of the movie) and on to a Metamodern world view. We also don’t mind the pacing and the fragmented storytelling (it’s how I tell many of my stories), but we assert the ending to be the logical outcome of the story. Meaning matters. We just have to create it. We have to be loving and kind in a fundamentally meaningless universe, in a society in which lovingkindness is in short supply. Yet, if we want there to be lovingkindness in the world, we have to exhibit it ourselves.
When I watched the film, there was a lot of laughter from the audience. This is another feature of Metamodernism. The return of the sense of humor. Much of the humor in this film was absurd, ridiculous. Mostly, it was satirical. The satirical mindset is, I think, another aspect of Metamodernism. Postmodernists are also satirical, but it’s satirical in the assertion of the meaningless of things. Metamodern satire attacks Postmodern nihilism (though much of the satire was in the “nihilistic” portion of the film). There’s a difference between non-serious and serious satire, even if there are aspects of the former that appear in the latter. And one of the aspects of Metamodernism is the return of seriousness. After all, if there’s no meaning, why take the world seriously? But if you can create meaning, then it makes sense to be serious. But this is a kind of seriousness that most resembles play. Play is a non-serious thing done seriously—and this film exemplifies that world view.
Obviously, given this review, it should surprise no one that I recommend watching this film. However, given some of the comments above, it’s a recommendation only for people of certain mindsets. I want Postmodern thinkers to watch it so they can move closer to becoming Metamodernists. But pre-Postmodern thinkers will all hate it. If you think that’s you, don’t bother watching this film. You have a way to go before you can understand just how brilliant this film is.
For another review that takes a metamodern position and covers somewhat different ground, I recommend this review.