"Everything Everywhere All At Once"

A Piffany About Finding the Meaning of Life in The Movie Multiverse

Michelle Yeoh, deserving all of the awards. (Photo by A24)

I held off posting this for a couple of weeks now, all because a friend of mine had not yet seen Everything Everywhere All At Once, and I didn’t want to spoil anything for them, or for any of you reading this now.

I almost held off even longer, because as a longtime critic for hire for newspapers and websites, I know all too well just how much expectations can cloud enjoyment of the actual experience — whether you’re watching a movie, going to a restaurant, or visiting a tourist attraction. So the more I add to THE DISCOURSE about this movie, the more likely your future viewing of it might not live up to the expectations we’ve hyped up into your subconscious.

So yeah, get yourself to a screening of Everything Everywhere All At Once, at once!

If you want to keep reading, I promise I’ll keep this spoiler-free, plot-wise. Promise!

Not since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have I experienced such a sensation of mind-opening proportions in a cinema.

And not since The Matrix five years before that, when I keenly identified with Keanu.

So perhaps it’s neither accidental nor coincidental that this movie is somehow both of those things, and everything, everywhere, all at once, too.

You don’t have to be Charlie Kaufman (co-writer of not only Eternal Sunshine with director Michel Gondry, but also the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation before that) or Spike Jonze (who directed Being John Malkovich, and wrote/directed Where the Wild Things Are and Her) to find innovative ways to deliver motion pictures into our eyeballs. You also could be Jordan Peele, who flipped the script on us with his first two features, Get Out and Us, and has a forthcoming WTF on film called Nope. Yep! The trailer for Nope looks delightfully frightful and unpredictable. And you could be Daniels, the writer/director duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who have somehow some way brought Everything Everywhere All At Once to us.

It may never have happened this way, no matter how cynically easy it is for me to imagine that Daniels pitched some of their producers using shorthand of “Eternal Sunshine meets The Matrix,” just because Everything Everywhere All At Once includes tearjerking ideas about love and rescuing relationships, as well as jaw-dropping martial arts choreography. But if you think that’s short-sighted oversimplification, just imagine somebody somewhere else comparing their movie to Donkey Kong, just because Mario engages in high-kicking jumps to save his girlfriend from certain doom. Sure, I may have literally lost the plot in the midst of this paragraph, but I’m leaving it in for the sake of engaging in the premise of the multiverse.

It’s one thing to say we contain multitudes.

Quite another to consider that the fabric of the universe itself contains multitude versions of ourselves due to rips and folds within the fabric; that there’s one or 100 slightly different versions of you on slightly different versions of the Earth, who through those slight variations, have yielded substantially unfamiliar results — not just for you but everyone else on that timeline.

We’ve been inundated with this idea cinematically in recent years, thanks to, or for that, please blame the folks at Marvel Comics and Disney.

From the Oscar-winning 2018 animated film, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, to 2021’s live-action team-up, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Disney/Marvel’s Loki in between. Sure, it’s cute and all when the movies magically bring a meme to life.

But if you’re caught yourself wondering about the meaning of life, what it’s all about, then a multiverse, or even a time-travel flick, only sends you further and farther down this philosophical rabbit-hole.

Of course, you don’t need a movie to tie your noggin up in knots over the meaning of it all.

You could just turn on the TV news, or let loose the social media spigot so an unending stream of dire warnings flows up against inspirational quotes and moments filtered beyond recognition. Either way, you can choose to interpret the information you receive as reason enough to inspire you to take positive action in your life and those around you, or you can compare and despair.

Just look at this Tweet and response, which my electronic friend, the storyteller Mike Daisey, shared recently.

We’re already living in our own multiverse simply through the choices we make, or don’t make, throughout our lifetime.

Even our nation’s traditional motto — E pluribus unum, Latin for “Out of many, one” — suggests that out of many lives, we have one collective shared experience as Americans. Whether you believe that or not is an entirely other story.

But as the Tweet exchange above demonstrates, we can look at any decision, no matter how consequential or trivial, and choose to see it from only one perspective, one side of the coin. We can live in resentment. Or we can live in gratitude. We can allow self-centered fear about the present cloud our outlook of the future. Or we can take what’s presented to us as a gift, as an opportunity to cherish the opportunities we still have in front of us.

Life doesn’t have to be so binary, though, does it?

Instead of believing that God is everything, or that God is nothing and nonexistent. Instead of believing that either everything matters or nothing matters. Instead of subscribing to one polarizing binary over the other, what about seeking the truth somewhere in the vast in-between?

The truth is, those things matter which we make matter.

Part of the beauty and joy of living comes to us through discovery. By choosing our own adventures without jumping ahead in the book to see how it all ends. By surprising ourselves with how much we still have to learn.

That’s also part of what makes Everything Everywhere All At Once so fascinating and exciting. Just when you think you know where the scene is zigging, it zags. Just when you think you know how it all ends, it continues.

If you have watched the film by now, or if you’re ready to inhale some other takes on the film that may contain spoilers, then here are a couple of my colleagues in the critic world on Substack.