Media Wednesdays

My partner and I decided recently to institute a tradition of enjoying some piece of media every wednesday evening.

This is our second week, and I chose the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. I really enjoyed it. Below are some of my thoughts. Its a first pass, and I’m not going to try to capture everything, but I do not want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here.

The film made me laugh and cry. It made me want to profess my love for my partner with reckless abandon. It made me feel and think, and at the end of the day, what else could we ask from a piece of media.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Younger Generation Embodying Chaos

The mother, Evelyn, struggles. I was going to add “with …”, but really, with everything. Her alternate-universe husband says, she failed at everything she had tried. But, specifically with her daughter Joy, she fails to acknowledge and truly accept her.

The villain of the movie is an alternate dimension version of her daughter, shattered across the multiverse, being everywhere at once. This sounds wacky. It was. But it absolutely worked.

I thought it was apt to compare an unwillingness to understand and meet people where they are by blaming or diverting “the enemy’s” intention –

Nobody understood the motivation of Jobu Tupaki, the name they gave this broken version of Joy. And the resolution of the film involves finally meeting her, hugging her, and hearing her. When we don’t understand someone, their actions seem ridiculous, dangerous, or confusing. We fear that which we don’t understand. The movie showed the common gap between generations, in meeting each other, seeing each other, really well.

A Reframing of Nihilism

I started reading The Myth of Sysafus, a book about suicide and Nihilism (don’t worry, I am doing very well right now, I’m just trying to learn philosophy). The book spends thousands of words answering the question of absurdity, why we exist in a universe with no aparent reason (which religion / sprituality attempt to resolve, but the author sees as cop outs). Everything Everywhere All At Once concludes with a beautifully simple reframing of the phrase “Nothing really matters”. The daughter has given in, allowing whatever base or benal desire to drive. Crumbling, chaos, catastrophe, none of it mattered, and stepping in to care for anyone or anything was pointless. At the very end of the movie, the dialog between the mother making up and the daughter opening up:

(loosely)

Tons of stuff has just happened and the end of the world was held at bay

Joy: “Do you still want to throw your party”

Evelyn: “We can do whatever we want. Nothing really matters.”

Without changing the words, Evelyn turned the phrase on its head. If nothing really matters, sure it can lead to lack of meaning. But also, it gives us all the room to find the meaning we want in life. Without the context of the movie, it doesn’t sound very impactful, and may still sound negative, but I promise, that line was a welcome blow of relief. An emptying of the tension that the first act did such a good job establishing.

Positivity for Survival

The husband Waymond maintains a happy and optimistic attitude throughout, opting for peaceful understanding to break tension at the end of the film. In his various dimensional versions, I recieved a message that the way he survived through life was his positivity.

I’ve always thought myself a happy person. Lately, I’ve identified that I am, in fact, much more optimistic than the average person. I related to Waymond. And I also see that those that don’t move through life this way aren’t flawed, they just have learned to survive differently than I. It made me stop and reflect, how often we think the way we think or do things is surely the most optimized or correct. In reality, its just a way.

Understanding > Resisting

In line with that thought, at the end, Evelyn has to fight off people to get to her daughter before losing her to the everything bagel hole. Rather than resisting with force (which she had done previously), she sought to understand. And each of these people in the way seemed to have some deeper unmet need that she helped fill, a listening ear, a strappy sexual encounter lol, a perfume that reminded an older man of his deceased wife.

And really, I think that on a deep level, we all are broken in our own ways. If someone sought to really understand us we wouldn’t find any reason to fight each other.

All At Once

What a wonderful film. I learned from the wikipedia page it is the first movie to win more awards than Return of the King! And it deserves it. It feels unfortunate that the political climate may prevent some people from engaging with it and enjoying it. Its lude and breaks lots of “norms”. The plot sounds ridiculous. But the message was a real human one. I loved it.