#15: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Guest post by Maddy Costa on multiverses and menopause in the Daniels' hit film.

I wanted to write about Everything Everywhere All At Once objectively but didn’t know how, so I copied paragraphs from other people’s reviews to stitch together into a text of parallel voices, everyone – Ben Travis and Yingfei Chen and Danny Leigh and Tasha Robinson and Ben Walters and Marya E Gates and David Ehrlich and Clarisse Loughrey and Mark Kermode – all at once, the links between them seamless. But when I opened up the document two days later to do the stitching, I realised something:

Few things in life are certain besides death, taxes, and maybe the never-ending task that is doing laundry. For all its fantasy trappings, this is a film with down-to-earth concerns: mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, coming of age and coming out, dreams and disappointments, otherness and belonging, generation gaps and information overloads. Beneath the multiversal mayhem, Everything Everywhere All At Once is a family story.

Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn, a Chinese-American immigrant who runs a laundromat with husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), is a woman teetering towards existential crisis. She has a business to run, taxes to file, customers to please, a father to live up to, a husband to argue with, and – most importantly – a daughter she increasingly cannot relate to. She’s closed off, trapped under the weight of her failed hopes and dreams, struggling to perpetuate a life she has no passion for. The spectrum of women who Evelyn imagined she might become grew smaller every day, the possibilities burning away like joss paper until the proprietress of a failing laundromat was the only person left in the ashes. Now Evelyn’s life consists of wincing her way through racist micro-aggressions at work and beyond, peeling off the googly eyes that Waymond sticks everywhere to make objects seem happier, and acting as narrow-minded towards her lesbian daughter Joy (an inter-dimensionally great Stephanie Hsu) as her own father was towards her.

In a lift at the tax office, the usually placid Waymond is suddenly transformed into an action-man version of himself from another multiverse, on a Matrix-style mission to find “the one” who can save them from Jobu Tupaki, an all-powerful “verse jumper” who is threatening to tear reality apart. But Evelyn isn’t the One, she’s the Zero. In an infinite sea of possible Evelyns, she is the ultimate sum of unrealized potential and missed opportunities. Out of all the Evelyns that exist, branching off from every choice she’s ever made, this Evelyn has fared the worst. No other version of herself has settled for less, or found so little joy in the people she loves — her daughter most of all. That nightmare scenario is playfully teased with the presence among the Evelyns of a film star, introduced with footage of the actual Michelle Yeoh on red carpets. Everything everywhere is better in the movies, or at least it always feels like it.

This is at heart a character piece; call it poignant maximalism. Evelyn’s family’s life is ordinarily cluttered, demanding and disappointing, fraught with intergenerational miscommunication, resentment, guilt, fear, failure and regret. Fantasy writes large feelings that come with the territory: I want her dead; if he carries on like this it will be the end of us; are you for real right now? Under the radically questionable conditions of multiverse structures, the hero’s challenge shifts: less about overcoming false consciousness to defeat evil, more about grappling with fathomless contingency to stay in one piece and make it through the day. In this sense, navigating the multiverse is a bit like being middle-aged. The reveries and regrets of middle age loom large, in terms of both contemplation of roads not taken and recognition of experience and satisfaction as matters of perspective: one person’s disaster zone might be another’s oasis. The worlds Evelyn accesses are silly, sad, or strange, but none of them challenge her as much as the things she’s missed out on understanding about herself, her family, and her own past and future.

The Daniels have fully captured the fractured feeling of modern existence, of never quite being at the wheel of your own life. Evelyn is splintered by self-denial to the degree that even her subtitles fracture apart at one point, and yet the actress playing her is so locked-in to the character’s belief that her life is “wrong” that you can feel Evelyn start to reclaim her perspective when things go truly haywire. There is specificity in her story. But there is universality in the way that she feels – overwhelmed by the relentlessness of her life, consumed by everything, everywhere, all at once. Life, like the multiverse, and Everything Everywhere All At Once, is a lot.

One effect of the warp-speed storytelling is that the film sometimes slingshots from pathos to punchlines, then back again, quickly enough to induce whiplash. But in this anything-goes environment, the shifts don’t feel like tonal contradictions. They just feel like an acknowledgement that life is simultaneously painful and absurd, and that the tension between the two helps define the sensation of being human. Kwan and Scheinert keep finding small, quiet pockets where Evelyn can consider how she’s let herself and other people down, what she owes them, and what she can still offer them. For a movie that frequently throws Evelyn through realities and through walls and windows, it’s admirably focused on her well-being and her understanding of herself. And more than that, it’s focused on understanding how people inevitably limit their possible futures whenever they make choices, and how meaningless life can look after a series of choices goes wrong.

Appropriately, the multiverse concept works on many levels. There are nods at the fragmentary effects of side-hustle labour practices, living with ADHD and exploring online rabbit-holes. There’s focus too on the shifts between thought-worlds experienced by code-switching, polyglot migrant people. Different languages structure and create different modes of being; and getting lost in translation might also mean inadvertently coining a delightful new idea. At the heart of the film there is an immigrant story: we see a karaoke machine subsidised as a business expense, faded porcelain, the pull and push between old and new generations. The family seamlessly transitions between Mandarin and English in their speech, blurring the lines of the two cultures in the same way Evelyn and Joy shift between different realities after their minds are splintered through the exhaustion of “verse-jumping”. It is an exhaustion familiar to anyone with a background of immigration, that of existing in two worlds at the same time and struggling to keep up with either, all the while being shrouded in doubts and regrets.

Yeoh’s performance shows with peculiar power the effort required to remain anchored in one reality when so many others demand one’s inevitably insufficient attention. There is a sustained emphasis on nihilism — how can anything ever truly matter? Is it possible to chart a course of empathetic present-mindedness between impossible perfectionism and entropic ennui? The film suggests the effort is worthwhile but also recognises the impulse to refuse and withdraw. It’s an achingly honest examination of despair, cynicism, anger, and ennui, all leading up to a message that’s all the more moving because before it asserts that life is worth living, it stares deep into the abyss, considering all the reasons why people might think otherwise. “Every rejection, every disappointment has led you to this moment,” Waymond insists, revealing that an infinite number of alternative possibilities await our anti-heroine, and declaring that although she is currently living “the worst you”, Evelyn is in fact “capable of anything… because you are so bad at everything”. That means she’s the only one who still has unfulfilled potential. What a beautiful way to look at the world – that a life in stasis is really one of bottomless possibility.

See the problem? Everything that glittered to my magpie eye said more or less the same thing.

*

I wanted to write about Everything Everywhere All At Once objectively but – forgive me a mantra – there’s no such thing as objective criticism. Critical writing emerges from taste; taste is a matter of upbringing, how you unfurled through interactions with other people, different media, art in its most expansive definition; the impact of those interactions on how you think; interactions accumulating as you get older: and how all of that living interacts with the specific work you, the critic, are writing about and the moment in which you’re writing. Objectivity is but a mask behind which power – and vulnerability – can hide.

I do a lot of compare-and-contrast work with multiple reviews of the same show, usually to expose the power structure that conditions theatre criticism in particular. But reading multiple reviews, more than I quote from, of Everything Everywhere All At Once was instructive in a different way. In the nuances of how each person described the film, something of the personal life of each author was revealed: who has direct experience of immigration or cultural duality, who is middle-aged, who is unplagued by the idea that there is another life out there, another you, more creative and fulfilling than this one. There is specificity to Evelyn, but the ways in which her experience is universal calls forth some specificity from everyone who writes about her, too.

I wanted to write about Everything Everywhere All At Once objectively because I wanted to hide. Because the film was a mirror and a scalpel, reflecting back and dissecting my own life: as a daughter of immigrants; as a vessel for yearning, my own and my parents’; as a parent of two teenagers. Like a lot of people who reviewed it, I laughed and cried, only my crying didn’t stop: in the second half I cried for 45 minutes straight, not a delicate weeping but helpless snotty floods, turning my cotton face mask from light blue to dark. Crying for myself as a parent of one teenager with whom it seemed I couldn’t have a conversation without one of us turning it into a fight. Crying for myself as a parent of another teenager who had but recently entered the tunnel, that necessary phase of human evolution called individuation which involves rejection of and separation from the parent, and missing with an overwhelming grief the younger child outgrown. Crying for myself as a teenager who never grew up and still wants to be saved, who made one key decision from which all others followed, a decision I would change in a heartbeat, knowing that if I did – 

When my eldest child started secondary school, I told myself it was time to stop writing about the family: stop laying claim to their private domestic experiences for my professional persona. It strips them of agency: they have their own voices to tell their own stories – but, and this is the thing I find more frightening, it also exposes to them parts of me somehow easier to reveal in public than in the pressured intimacy of the heteronormative household. But what is a subjective writing cut loose from the network of relationships that surround the subject? There are a lot of ways I’ve been struggling as a writer for the past four years: the puzzle of this question is one of them. Out there in the multiverse, I’ve learned the grace of Claudia Rankine, whose work feels intensely personal and at the same time external: not objective but none the less at a remove. Or, I write fiction. In this world now, this winter of 2023, I’m haunted by this line from Maggie Nelson: ‘Writing can hurt people; self-exposure or self-flagellation offers no insurance against the pain.’

That sentence works just as well if you replace the word writing with living: a point that Everything Everywhere All At Once makes repeatedly. It’s a simple but deliberate move that Evelyn’s daughter is named Joy: how are you supposed to live when your relationship to joy has broken or become faulty?

*

There was one person the reviews of Everything Everywhere All At Once I read didn’t reveal, and that’s a woman the age of Evelyn: specifically, a woman going through menopause.

Although doctors told me otherwise (they were wrong), I’ve been going through menopause since I turned 40; I’m now 47. Saying it’s a journey is an understatement. I’ve found a lot of solace this year in an essay by Ursula K Le Guin called The Space Crone, published in 1976 when she herself was going through ‘the change’. It’s an argument for, and celebration of, the transformation women can potentially achieve through menopause – if they are ‘brave enough to carry it out wholeheartedly’ – from object to Crone. And it’s called ‘The Space Crone’ because Le Guin ends with a reverie: when alien beings arrive on earth seeking an exemplary person from whom to learn the nature of the human race, that person would not be a scientist or a politician or a shaman or, heaven forfend, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but ‘a person who has experienced, accepted and acted the entire human condition’. A woman who has given birth to herself, via menopause, as a new being: a crone.

What if Everything Everywhere All At Once were an extended metaphor for menopause? The brain fog, the surges of rage, the fear of change, its inevitability? I didn’t want to be alone in this thought so I did one final search: ‘everything everywhere all at once menopause’. And there she was: Mona Eltahawy, author and curator of Feminist Giant, also menopausal, also a daughter of immigrants. If I’d found this text at the beginning of writing instead of at the end, I might not have written a word, and just sent Salome the link to share. But look how differently she says the same things as everyone else:

‘Women of colour – older ones at that – are rarely allowed options and yet here is Evelyn with multiple universes, unbeknownst to anyone, including herself. It’s not just that you can’t be what you don’t see, it’s that she is so flattened from every angle–from her father who has flown all the way to the U.S. to continue the haranguing that was put on hold when she left, to the IRS agent auditing her laundromat and now this evil that is threatening to destroy the universe. If three dimensions once existed, they’ve collapsed into one, leaving us with barely-there Evelyn.

‘She is a woman who knows only what the world allows her to be and who has no time or privilege to know that she could have been something else. And then bang – ’verse jumping!

‘I see that bang as perimenopause – that snapping into being as we become superheroes. The multiverse might not need us to save it, but our internal multiverse needs us to have a similar reckoning, to stand in the power of a self that has made it through the perimenopause and everything it threw at us, and to emerge as our own superheroes.’

SING IT, SISTER!

Eltahawy’s essay is The Space Crone for the 21st century – or The Space Crone reached middle age (menopausal, if you will). In this understanding, Evelyn’s pursuit is not contentment with her lot but a new kind of knowledge, a new mode of existence. Think of that final scene, where she’s still distracted in the IRS appointment: ‘I like to think of brain fog as the liberation of our imagination by perimenopause, nudging us into mental avenues we have not had the power or the audacity to tread before,’ writes Eltahawy. ‘It is called brain fog because it is non-linear thinking that does not pay attention or stay focused in the ways that we are “supposed to,” and patriarchy demonizes and pathologizes what is different.’

Reading Eltahawy, I realise something: it’s not that I wanted to write about Everything Everywhere All At Once objectively, but that I wanted to write about it from a different subjectivity. It’s the trap from which Evelyn releases herself, by opening herself up – with bravery, wholeheartedly – to change.