I write this text late at night. I just left the cinema and I have no clue how to process what I just seen. So I open the phone and start typing my unfiltered perspective on Everything Everywhere All at Once, hoping that, by the end of it, I will be able to untangle some of the feelings I have related to the movie. It might contain spoilers, even though I will try my best not to.
I knew from the trailer it’s the sort of maddness that I might not resonate with. I am more of a Banshees of Inisherin type of girl. Or the Babylon madness type of person, because… you know, Margot Robbie is the sweetest girl on the planet and Damien Chazelle just knows how to strike a chord.
But each year I am trying to see as many of the Oscar favorites before the awards. It’s just something I find entertaining. Or maybe it’s just my FOMO acting out. And I loved all the videos I’ve seen on Instagram about Jamie Lee Curtis and Michelle Yeoh. Everything… was pretty appealing for me because of that.
And, as the title promises, this movie shows you EVERYTHING, all at once. The EVERYWHERE part could easily stand for all the other multiverse films out there that seem to remind me of.
***
I loved the transgenerational side of the story, because it reminds me every family is far from perfect. And more than this, that once the times passes, it becomes more and more difficult to connect with the ones you love, no matter how much you’d want to.
The portrayal of depression as a bomb-like bagel which has the potential to ruin each and every universe out there seemed a bit absurd at first. Why bagel? But now, as I write this text, just minutes after leaving the cinema, I think I have my answer. Why not? Describing it as a dark hole that sucks all the happiness in is pretty sad anyway. At least a bagel is tasty, and if I were to turn my depression into a bagel, I’d very much like it to be a blueberry one.
Jobu: I got bored one day, then I put everything in a bagel… everything. All my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every personal ad on Craigslist, sesame, poppy seed, salt, and it collapsed in on itself. ‘Cause you see, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes this… the truth.
Evelyn: What is the truth?
Jobu: Nothing… matters.
Joke aside, depression is a sort of Everything that makes you feel all at once and nothing at all.
You feel it being everywhere – you cannot envision a single version of you that could possibly feel some sort of happiness, right? Because that is what depression does to you. It sucks all the joy, just like a dementor and it makes you believe there would be impossible to be your true self, to be free, to be loved, to be accepted, in any possible life that you could be living, in this whole wide possibility of worlds.
“If Nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away – sucked into a bagel” – Jobu Tupaki
But there is a problem, in my opinion. This movie does too much of telling and too little of showing.
***
We have many types of misery. We have the unhappy husband, who is pushed around by the wife. We have the wife who longs for her father’s approval and who just does the surviving, getting older without having the chance to discover who she really is, what she enjoys. Her true calling. There’s a character in the movie that tells her something like this: “We have chosen you because you never finish anything. You are so bad at everything, that you have the potential to be exceptional”. I don’t remember the quote word for word, but that was the main idea. The real version Evelyn is as flawed and imperfect as anyone can be.
We have the daughter’s daughter (Joy), who is caught in this new reality which is America, feeling neither fully Chinese or fully American. And as it happens to the children of immigrants, she feels like her world is clashing with her mother’s. The more she wants her mother to see her for who she really is, the more she feels pushed away, criticised. The more unfit for her mother’s world she feels. The gap between the two widens. The bagel becomes bigger. It transcends universes.
All this time, I wasn’t looking for you so I could kill you. I was just looking for someone who could see what I see, feel what I feel. – Jobu to Evelyn
***
Have you ever day-dreamed of all the other yous that could exist out there, of all the other lives you could have been living, if you just took a single decision just slightly different?
Well, that is how I want to read the movie. And I think the director knew there was nothing original about the theme, so he filled all the multi-lives with a lot of nonsense, like people with sausages instead of fingers. Worlds were you can be a famous movie star, or a singer. Worlds where rocks can speak to each other and have plastic eyes. Worlds in which you are just a human piñata. But in none, as it always happens, you can be fully or truly happy. Something’s always missing – be it the child or the love of your life.
And maybe this is another reminder that we should learn to be grateful for what we have. To stop being caught in the daily tasks of life and just learn to truly live. To love. To be hurt. To be vulnerable.
You know this theme well, and you recognize it from the first 20 minutes of the movie. You know how it will end. The in-between is the only piece that’s unfamiliar territory. And this in-between is a bunch of nonsense. A lot o clichés, too. And even more martial art moves.
But maybe there is a lot of nonsense in each one’s daydreaming, too. Maybe it does not matter too much anyway. Maybe Everything Everywhere All at Once just wants to tell you that all sort of complications would have arrived in any of the other lives you could have been living, had you followed a different path. Made a different choice.
This movie reminded me a lot of Mr. Nobody. I remember the first time I saw it, I couldn’t make sense of anything. A couple of years later, my roomate from university convinced me to see it again. And this time, as I was able to decode its meaning, I was in awe at how much I resonated with it. Because as an young adult, you start being confronted with choices that you know that have the potential to alter your whole future. There was a trend to make movies about different choices/different lives at that time. I remember two other titles that could be related to the topic, such as The Butterfly Effect and Happenstance, and which I used to watch on repeat when my dark bagel was eating me alive.
And if I thought that we would be past this theme, nope, we’re still at it and it still owns the power turn a story into an instant succes. Matt Haig’s Midnight Library is no exception to the rule, even though Nora’s lives are far from being as chaotic or absurd as Evelyn’s from Everything... Don’t get me wrong, I love Matt Haig. He’s one of my favorite authors, next to Fredrik Backman, John Green and Murakami, but I just couldn’t understand the frenzy around Midnight’s Library, even though more that 1,2m of people on Goodreads seem to think otherwise.
***
And why do we still need this theme of different choices/different lives? I’m not completely sure, especially since in my instance, I still learned nothing from Mr. Nobody, Midnight Library and the rest, even though I’ve resonated with the story so deeply.
So maybe the sole purpose of this movie is to remind you that, no matter what life you could’ve been living, none would have been entirely okay.
Or maybe it’s a sign that if you are unhappy with some aspects of your life, there is still time to change it.
Or maybe it just wants to tell us that we all question our life choices. We all have a dark, poisonous bagel at the core of our identities.
That we all wished our parents loved us more. Accepted us more. That we offered more love to people we care about, instead of being caught in surviving the daily tasks and bills.
I don’t know.
For two hours and 20 minutes, I kept saying: “What the heck did I just see?!” Well, maybe its sole purpose is to make you take a closer look at your life. Or not.
I may, as well, be reading too much into it.
Perhaps Everything Everywhere All at Once is just as insane as the dark bagel hidden deep into Jobu Topaki’s soul. But in some very absurd way, it all makes sense.
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