Everything Everywhere All At Once: How the Daniels use the multiverse to talk about hope
An action-packed mother/daughter story teaches us to hope in the face of chaos
To watch Everything Everywhere All at Once is to spend two hours in equal parts delight, confusion, sadness, and ecstatic joy. You may in fact feel every emotion, everywhere, all at once.
When I watched the film in 2022 at the Alamo Drafthouse Village here in Austin, it was on an opening weekend surrounded by movie people. Everyone was cautiously optimistic about going out in their masks with vaccines. The adrenaline of being out of your house with strangers was itself its own sort of chaotic addition to the experience of the movie (they actually talked about this experience on this movie’s episode of You are Good and I’d be remiss not to credit them here).
And even though my senses were overwhelmed, my laughs and my tears spent in equal measure, when I stepped out of the theatre I turned to my husband and asked one question:
“Am I crazy, or is that the best movie you’ve ever seen?”
The film from the Daniels won seven Oscars this year, so apparently I am not the only one who fell underneath the spell. Yet, when I mentioned this movie to my dad and my mother-in-law, they both had the same reaction: they had no idea what was going on.
In talking with them, I realized that this movie is written in the language of people who have contemplated the meaninglessness of existence and somehow come across the other side. I want to walk through how the central relationship of the movie walks us through the a pretty effective of mirror of going through that experience.
Everything: The Violence and Chaos of Jobu Topaki
The multiverse is its own language for audiences today. We are but one of many possibilities, infinite strings of choices broken into bits. We use multiverses to dive deeper into characters and their choices, to contemplate alternative futures, to talk about the nature of humanity, and to sell more movie tickets. In a great article on the phenomenon of the multiverse in pop culture, Stephanie Burt essentially sums up Jobu Topaki’s motus operandi:
“All these multiverses might add up to nothing good. If all potential endings come to pass, what are the consequences of anything?”
The multiverse in this movie is used as a way to shortcut the philosophical conversation about destiny, fate, and predetermined life paths in the megaverse of EEAAO. The possibilities in the universes are endless. The branches each connect and unfold in a winding path but there is never discussion of a higher entity or any sort of ordered plan to the sprawling possibilities.
Jobu Topaki, the big bad of the movie, is the personification of our fears about that disorder. She is violence for violence’s sake, she is chaos, she is viciousness dressed in a fun package.
The first time you see EEAAO, Jobu Topaki, AKA Joy (Stephanie Hsu), she appears in costumes that are enough to almost derail your focus as a viewer. Her flare is in her excess, patterns mismatched, fabrics stacked on each other haphazardly, nails that pop pop pop against the cubicle. It could all seem silly and maybe even cute if she didn’t immediately pop a version of Evelyn like a balloon and leave her corpse in a baby costume.
This sudden, gruesome death shows us that Jobu Topaki’s way is quick, brutal, and meant to make a mockery of our ideas of convention. You want her to respect her dead mother? She’s just one of an infinite number of dead mothers, and Jobu will leave her here in this costume covered in blood because none of this matters.
In our humanness, there is perhaps nothing more terrifying than the idea that all of our attempts to create something out of this life are in fact doomed to be meaningless. Chaos, or the idea that consequences are random and have no moral weight, means that we are completely helpless against a universe much more powerful than we are.
Violence as we know it is a reflection of our own fragility in comparison to a world that can wipe us out in a million chaotic different ways. Jobu Topaki’s violent rampage then is a symptom of Joy’s belief that all choices are cancelled out by the unfeeling, unplanned nature of the universes themselves. She first appears to our version of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) and immediately begins her demonstration of the inherent violence and chaos of the world around us.
She kills the guards in her way with the flair of a circus act. There’s glitter, there’s a fruit basket hat and costume, there’s night sticks that become long, floppy dicks. Joy keeps a smile on her face as one by one she extinguishes life, these flourishes we normally associate with fun taking on a sinister tone as Joy weaves them into her violent delight. Joy is going for the shock factor. She wants her mother to see that no one will stop her because there is no bigger meaning.
Even as Joy crouches down to reveal her Everything Bagel, the most meaningful creation she’s wrought so far, she makes her mom scissor their hands together to reveal the window to her space outside of time. With this little act she says, not even your homophobia can hurt me now, mom. I’m in charge here and nothing matters.
Oh and in case you didn’t get it, all of this chaos is taking place in the IRS. Because the only things that are inevitable are death and taxes, and now, Jobu Topaki.
In describing Joy it would be easy to see all of the blood first and the motivation later, but I call her what she is: a depression monster. Jobu Topaki is in many ways reacting like so many of us do when we have that first brush with the idea that our lives are finite and maybe pointless. She just has the power of infinite universes at her fingertips.
It is this that Joy sees in her daughter, and why she refuses to kill her even when Gong Gong (James Hong) tells her to remove one more vessel from Jobu Topaki. She does not see a monster. She sees a girl who has her whole life been pushed by her mother to achieve greatness and now sees that any greatness gets washed away in the scale of the universe. What has all of the striving and pain been for if none of this has any point?
Evelyn, riddled with guilt at the monster she’s created and overinflated with the idea that she is chosen to make something of her life, makes the choice to become like her daughter to save her, confident that she can see the puzzle pieces Joy’s found and make a different picture.
Everywhere: The other side of nothing matters
Instead of finding a different picture, what Evelyn finds in the chaos is the same nihilism that Joy has been acting out. A million decisions erased by a million other decisions, an irredeemably stupid universe where people have hot dogs for fingers. How can there be any meaning in a universe where these possibilities exist? “This is crazy!” Evelyn tells Joy. “Now you’re starting to get it,” Joy replies. “I can think of whatever nonsense I want and somewhere out there it exists, it’s real.”
They jump from universe to universe together, in one Evelyn seeing a sleek version of Waymond that was never formed in her world where they instead chose love and a laundromat, in another becoming two swinging pinatas together, and in another even existing as rocks in a silent world where life never formed.
The sequence itself continues down more of the same chaos, Joy dragging Evelyn through the absurdity of life in all of its configurations so that Evelyn can see how close we are to being a maid or sign spinner, or how to become a 2D cartoon who can stab herself with no consequences. At the end of the universe’s most exhausting game of show and tell, the pair end up in the throne room of the Everything Bagel where Joy offers them a way out from what she has determined is a meaningless existence.
“You can see how everything is just a random rearrangement of particles in a vibrating superposition,” Joy declares.
Evelyn, looking into a universe where her laundromat is getting taken away and Waymond is leaving her, gives into the dejection that her daughter has been living with alone and breaks a window with a bat. “Nothing matters.”
Joy smiles as she watches her mother in this world destroy her chances at happiness because this life is no longer real to her. She’s broken her mother just as she as she is broken.
In deep existential depression there are usually two stages: One is refusing to tell anyone about how badly you’re hurting because you think your sadness is a contagion. “If I tell them what I’ve seen then I will break the world apart for them, too.” Many people who leave the church or have been assaulted by someone their family trusted or have other information that would fundamentally change the way their closest loved ones see the world react this way. There’s a savior complex that keeps them from allowing people into their pain because they think sharing pain is cruel.
The second is angrier and usually further down the path toward healing. They want everyone in their life to have to feel what they feel and know what they know. They’ll tell the truth, the hard facts, make everyone face the ugly things and they’ll say it’s out of spite. But truly, it will be because like Joy, they want someone else to see what they see and find another way. Evelyn was supposed to be able to find another way.
Joy went looking for her mother so that someone could feel what she feels, and we learn that a small part of her hoped that Evelyn could show her something different. “I was hoping you would see something I didn’t. Convince me there was some other way,” she admits as they sit as rocks.
Instead, the two get ready to disappear into the Everything Bagel together. But someone does see what the Evelyn and Joy see, and he does have another way.
Evelyn is pulled from her steps toward the bagel by the call of Waymond in another world. We see Waymond cleaning the floor of the laundromat, then in another universe talking with the glamorous Evelyn who’s a martial arts movie star in the alley. The man who at the beginning of the movie Evelyn was so ready to tell about the life she could have had without him is now the force that’s holding her back from the edge of oblivion.
“You tell me it’s a cruel world and that we’re all just running around in circles,” Waymond in a tux says. “I know that; I’ve been on this Earth just as many days as you.
When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It is how I’ve survived.”
Waymond is an anchor for Evelyn to have the strength to save Joy. She thought her own wisdom and strength would give her the power to fight the existential crises of seeing it all, but it was instead the hope of her husband that pulled her back from the edge. As a montage of Waymond’s optimism flies by, a sobbing chef cries over his raccoon being taken away in his universe (yes this movie is at times bat shit crazy and I absolutely love it), “None of us are any good on our own,” Evelyn replies.
This is the turning point for “nothing matters” as an ideology. Where Joy saw this as an excuse to live without consequences or regard for others, Waymond invites Evelyn to think of this as an invitation to live without taking herself so seriously. What would it be like to laugh at googly eyes instead of tearing them down? What would it be like to learn how to play again without feeling self conscious? What would it be like to let go of your father’s opinion and believe in your own?
“I am no longer willing to do to my daughter what you did to me,” Evelyn declares as she moves her father aside to save Joy instead. She will not take him more seriously than she does her love for her daughter.
When Joy does come out from the clutch of the Everything Bagel (again, this movie is constantly telling us that life is absurd and we should embrace how close we are to hot dog fingers), it is because Evelyn has allowed herself to be helped by people she has helped. In the chaos of the universe she has found that even all-seeing beings crave relationship with each other. She has allowed that relationship to help her see it all and find another way.
”You still went looking for me through all of this noise,” Evelyn pleads with Joy as she tries to pull her back in. “I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.”
All at Once: Putting all of you into this once
Sarah Marshall and Blair Braverman discuss the idea of the neutral deadliness of nature in some of the latest episodes of the podcast You’re Wrong About. In talking about people’s fear of the outdoors, Blair describes an aversion to the idea that nature has no ability to care about you and go out of its way to protect you as a special human. Sarah’s response is to say that this neutrality can be also soothing, “There are no dads in the forest,” she says. Meaning: there is no one to arbitrarily punish you for rules that don’t exist here.
I think of this duality as the same duality behind “nothing matters.” We can choose to see chaos and violence as the outcome of a universe operating without sentience or a plan. We can see our choices being “washed away in a sea of every possibility,” or we can choose to live in a world where we have full permission to seek each other out because the rules about how strong we have to be are arbitrary anyways. Maybe we do not have to make ourselves into lone heroes in a world where your individual speck will be gone soon.
When you are on the edge of the cliff, looking for meaning, you cannot talk to someone who has not asked the same questions. If you can’t see what I see, then you cannot speak to what I know. The most beautiful thing about Everything Everywhere All at Once is the fact that Evelyn knows how desparate this fractured mind has made Joy:
“I know you have these feelings that make you so sad. Feelings that make you want to give up.”
And yet she chooses to fracture her mind anyway. Because to save her daughter she is willing to give up her ignorance so that she can see a way out. In my life I relate to this deeply; I cannot listen to someone who doesn’t read the news or books or talk to people who don’t live in their bubble. For me, I know that they don’t know if it’s going to be okay.
But when I meet someone who has chosen to give up their okayness and embrace brokenness so that they can truly see, that person to me is someone I can trust. What is so remarkable about Waymond as a character is that he is not someone who lives outside of reality. He understands exactly what is going on with Evelyn, he is not confused. Yet he is still filled with hope and joy and possibility for a better future.
What you see in Waymond is a man who pays attention to you when you walk into a room, who delights in you. In the beginning of the movie, Evelyn’s internal dialogue was running her show and anyone who tried to fight it found themselves disappointed. In the final scene, her attention once again is elsewhere, but this time it is swept up in the delight of her family all around her in that moment.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a movie filled with stunts that are straight up not physically possible, jokes that are insanely horny, a hot dog universe that is sooooooo stupid, and a thousand tiny moments of details created by someone who loved this story too much to let an opportunity slip by. It’s also a movie that can teach us how to move through darkness, and that’s a lesson best shared with people we love.
Thanks for reading the second edition of Media Made Me! I’ll be testing a few different days of the week over the next month to see what works best for everyone, so thanks for bearing with me.
Have a great weekend!