EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE: Metareality Materiality

Directors: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

Writers: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis

Runtime: 139 mins.

2022

everything

What does meaning mean?

Around the middle of the 20th century, the gargantuan impact of modernism was being challenged, as the 'grand narratives' were seeming more and more like an emperor without clothes. Structuralist explanations of the world and its machinations began to feel oppressive, flattening human experience into molds that never quite fit. The tyranny of meaning no longer held court. God is dead, and we stragglers struggle with the plurality of perspective, the unknowability of a quasi-infinite quantum universe. Deconstruction eradicated the clichés, traditions, and beliefs that we had held dear. Everything is relative, you see, and meaning is little more than a comfortable shawl that is bittersweet to part with.

The ramifications of this movement oscillated through every aspect of culture. Here were the early rumblings of identity politics, in which our particularity gives us a unique perspective that is not to be invalidated. Here, too, was the primacy of metafiction: art that is aware of itself as art. If meaning is broken, at least we can still mess around with the frame like a child playing dress-up with glassless glasses.

The reign of irony is a road that leads nowhere. Metafiction ultimately strayed towards navel-gazing, holding its self-awareness above our head as if intellectual superiority were the only currency left. Deconstruction challenged the status quo but offered nothing to replace it. Another question arises, perhaps the most important of all. If everything is relative, and everything is particular, and everything is meaningless... well, what then?

I believe that we are now in the era of post-postmodernism. Deconstruction may have burned our narratives to the ground, but something must yet rise from the cinders, and that thing must carry the lessons that postmodernism has taught us. Everything is relative, yes, but doesn't ideology still control us whether we recognize its artificiality or not? Everything is particular, yes, but isn't our particularity what connects us to others in a larger tapestry? Everything is meaningless, yes, but isn't that exactly what allows us to play with reckless abandon?

"New Earnestness" is my name for the art movement that corresponds with post-postmodernism. Whether it's The LEGO Movie, a self-conscious branding exercise grasping at deep truths about the power of play, or Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, an exercise in weaving pathos out of the randomness of intertextuality, our era of art is looking at irony dead in the eye, understanding that it is bereft, and demanding that we take it one step further. New Earnestness rejects triteness, but doubles down on salvaging meaning from the most familiar clichés.

everywhere

Psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan continues the tradition of continental philosophy by rejecting vulgar postmodernism, opting instead to focus on the primacy of the unconscious mind. He plays with language by offering up what he calls 'aphorisms,' little phrases meant less to be easily grasped and more to spark consideration. There is a concept he discusses that I couldn't quite grasp until I saw this movie: traversing the fantasy.

Fantasy is not just in our imagination, it fundamentally structures our entire existence. Fantasy sustains our relationships, smooths over discrepancies and contradictions, enables us to see through the twisted lenses of past and future. Fantasy is the warped glass that makes reality untouchable, or indeed, that lays bare the nonexistence of any pure uncut reality in the first place.

There is no 'cure' for neurosis, psychosis, anxiety, existential dread. There is only process. And Lacan argues that the process of moving into a healthier register of self-relation is not to discard the fantasy, for this will only lead to a repressive cycle that redirects the fantasy to manifest in ever more poisonous ways. Nor is the solution to achieve the fantasy, for this is both impossible and undesirable (the fantasy cannot satisfy, and our unconscious mind will always self-sabotage before we succeed). Instead we must traverse the fantasy. Grapple with it, form a relationship with it, peruse it, and in doing so cease to be beholden to it.

I was never sure what this might look like, but the role of good art is to give our ideas skin.

all at once

The most exhilarating film in years is about a Chinese immigrant family who owns a laundromat and spends the lion's share of the film getting audited at the IRS. To make a movie about everything, you can make a movie about anything, but it has to be about something. Four quadrant films algorithmically designed to be maximally appealing and minimally offensive are functionally dead. We access the stories of others through their sharp particularity, and in this case, that's a tax audit.

The audit is an incursion on the already hectic life of the family, but we quickly become aware of a far larger rupture: interdimensional bodyjumping realitywarping agents who are fighting a war for the continued existence of the multiverse itself. There is tremendous comedy generated from the juxtaposition of these two different registers of stakes, but the film is careful to never treat it as a joke. The eradication of the multiverse can be scary; a hardass auditing your business can be scary too.

There is a bravura moment early on when Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) follows the numbered instructions given to her by her alternate universe husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) for how to secretly rendezvous with him. She switches her left and right shoes, imagines the utility closet, and when she presses the green button on her new earpiece, the movie screen cracks down the middle as if fractured glass. One Evelyn is still listening to IRS Agent Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis) yammer on, the other is yanked into the closet for some wickedly sharp exposition. This incredible effect feels like it's introducing us to the language of the film to come, but that's the thing-- the screen fracture effect only happens once more in the entire runtime. Much like Sorry to Bother You, this is a movie that introduces wildly creative visual and storytelling conceits left and right, only to abandon them before they become even remotely stale. Everything Everywhere has more creativity in its extremely buff pinky than most films could dream of in their entire runtime.

As it turns out, this universe's Evelyn is the perfect candidate to import talents and experiences from all her other selves, Matrix-style, precisely because she has made good on none of her potential. She must navigate the multiverse to oppose Jobu Tapaki, the version of her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) who has shattered into an all-seeing being who no longer sees the meaning in anything at all.

This is the great downfall of multiplicity. If everything is a random rearrangement of particles, if life is arbitrary, if meaning is made up, if each subjective experience is a tiny island of particulars weighed equally against infinite other tiny islands of particulars... why go on? Nihilism is the great enemy that Evelyn, and Joy, and Waymond, and their patriarch Gong Gong (James Hong) must all rally against.

The way this film moves is like nothing I've ever seen. There is the story of Evelyn and the tax audit, layered together with Evelyn the interdimensional kung fu warrior. But even these two primary narratives split off into countless sub- and alt- stories that have only tangential direct bearing on the plot, yet somehow feel crucial to the oncoming revelations. A silly slip of the tongue (Evelyn misremembering Ratatouille as "Raccaccoonie" while trying to explain the bodyjumping to her family) becomes an entire comedic subplot (Chef Evelyn discovering that her outstanding coworker is hiding a talking raccoon under his chef's hat) which ultimately morphs into a tearjerking moment of catharsis across the metareality (Chef Evelyn undoing the damage she has done by helping rescue Raccaccoonie from animal control). There are, like, a dozen of these microanecdotes? At least? And not once do they distract or intrude the way a Family Guy cutaway does. We can attribute that to both the prismatic screenwriting and the remarkably intuitive editing that follows the truth of gestures through the noise of infinite variation.

The world folds in on itself. "Claire de Lune" is first heard vaguely as booming fight music, then later with more clarity in a transcendental moment of love, then finally, diegetically played on the toe piano as a romantic moment between two hot dog-fingered lesbian lovers. The meta-textual layering doesn't just happen with absurdist jokes, but with cinematic references designed to circuit break us into the mindset of the mini-story being told with minimum time and effort. Randy Newman, legendary Pixar musician, voices the aforementioned Raccaccoonie. 2001: A Space Odyssey provides evolutionary justification for the hot dog fingers. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is heavily featured as a fourth wall breaking reference to the career of Michelle Yeoh. Perhaps most beautifully, the melancholy love films of Wong Kar-Wai are visually referenced in the colors and motion of a devastating alleyway interaction between alternate versions of Evelyn and Waymond, from the universe where they chose not to be together.

Again and again we return to the image of Evelyn staring into the camera, witnessing all these stories fold and unfold together: the Everything Bagel of all existence. She looks on with elation, she looks on with despair, the colors wash over her face like the reflections of a laundromat wash cycle. It is beautiful and bleak, it is absurd and meaningless, it is EVERYTHING.

Here my words fail me. I want to tell you how Evelyn traverses her fantasy. I want to tell you about the way she rediscovers meaning through all that noise. But this is where the film must speak for itself, as the revelations of Everything Everywhere All at Once could not possibly be translated into any other medium. Suffice it to say, I have never cried through the entire final hour of a movie before. This film is a stunning accomplishment, the first masterpiece of the New Earnestness movement, and one of the only movies I've seen bold enough to breathe warmth into the hurricane internet chaos of contemporary existential despair.

5 / 5  BLOBS