The Multiverse of Sadness — How “Everything Everywhere All at Once” Finds a Path Through Despair
Depending on how you define it, the concept of the “multiverse” has been around for at least as long human beings have been telling stories to each other. From the veiled realms of mythology, inaccessible to mortals (save a few stalwart travelers), to distant alien civilizations, to phase god-knows-what of Marvel’s increasingly shambolic cinematic multiverse, the idea of strange realities intersecting with our own has long been the meat and potatoes of speculative fiction.
A popular offshoot of all this fantastical world-building is the notion of “alternate histories” — parallel earths that have more or less similar histories to our own, but in which one or more epochal events went the other way: JFK gets un-assassinated; the Nazis win the Second World War — that sort of thing.
The modern appeal of this particular brand of story-telling seems to have its roots in the Cold War era, a time when even ordinary people realized that the flow of history, though it had long felt staid and unalterable, was anything but. An assassin’s bullet had triggered a global war, a madman had overrun a continent, and now a simple misunderstanding could destroy civilization. The future was balanced on the edge of a knife, and human survival increasingly felt like a game of chance.
That sense of psychological tumult, the uneasy feeling that the entire world could change (or end) overnight, due to the most trivial of reasons, has never really left us. If anything, it seems to be getting worse, more acute. Though most tales of alternate histories usually take the forms of bullets dodged (in case you imagined that the Nazis winning WW2 might have been a positive event) or possible futures to be avoided (dystopian nightmares like The Handmaid’s Tale) the often-unspoken counterpole to these artistic consolations — made plain, perhaps, by our current woes — is that we might be living in a dystopia now, that our own reality might have been something better, save for one fateful moment in time.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, the latest film by “Daniels” (duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) wrestles with that idea, but also transcends it, snappily nodding to Marvel-esque notions of multiversal calamity while telling a small, human story about what it means to live well, and what it means to live at all. This is the multiverse viewed from the ground up, and it’s a place even more poignant than in its grander incarnations, because here the worlds that might have been, and never were, are often the result of our own choices, instead of someone else’s.
The film stars Michelle Yeoh as the harried Evelyn, who runs a struggling laundromat alongside her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, in a welcome return to acting). Things are not going well for Evelyn: her business is being scrutinized by a particularly uncompromising IRS auditor, Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), Waymond wants out of their failing marriage, and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is directionless and — even worse for the traditional Evelyn — gay.
Matters don’t improve much when Waymond, possessed by another version of himself from another universe, suddenly attempts to recruit Evelyn to the multiverse-spanning conflict with “Jobu Tupaki” — AKA Joy — who, in his universe, is a powerful entity posing an existential threat to all of creation.
From here, Everything Everywhere All at Once blasts into the stratosphere, managing the seemingly impossible balancing act of being, well, everything all at once. The film never sags under the absurdity of its premise, and in fact it manages to incorporate that absurdity in a way that feels natural, even affecting (witness, for example, the bottle-romance of two characters with hot dogs for fingers). It’s a touching observation of families, a philosophical meditation on meaning, a rollicking sci-fi action/adventure, and a screwball comedy all rolled into one, and yet somehow the entire thing feels of a piece — even the most ridiculous moments somehow ring true.
Much of the reason for that can be attributed to the relationship between Evelyn and Joy, whose dynamic forms the emotional core of the movie, grounding it in (this) reality. Their story is one not unfamiliar to many children of demanding parents: A well-meaning mother who pushes her daughter too hard to succeed, and in the process neglects her child’s emotional well-being — often without realizing it.
Of course, in Everything Everywhere All at Once, the consequences of this neglect are even more tragic than usual. Evelyn, or at least another version of her, is responsible for transforming the Joy of her universe into Jobu Tupaki. Realizing her potential to “verse-jump” through universes, Evelyn pushes Joy too far, forcing her to bounce between universes until she breaks down, and comes to inhabit them all at once — an experience that leaves her with God-like power.
Unfortunately, that power is quickly equaled by a new-found sense of despair. Jobu Tupaki has (literally) seen it all, and she finds it all wanting — if everything is possible, then nothing really matters. Order and sanity, Jobu imagines, can only be restored through dissolution, and if she has to take the entire multiverse with her in the process, then so be it.
Joy/Jobu’s story is the story of the human condition, writ both large and small. Jobu is in pain, and in much the same way as Joy. In every universe she inhabits, Joy/Jobu struggles to find meaning and acceptance, and in every universe, she is discouraged — overwhelmed and alone. What’s worse, as Jobu Tupaki, she finds no relief from her suffering and confusion, even within apparently limitless possibility. She is still a human being, after all, and the multiverse still stubbornly refuses to conform to her expectations of it.
Jobu Tupaki’s nihilism is just another form of Joy’s despair. Like most nihilists (if such a person truly exists) she longs to survey the world from on high, to look down on it with Olympian insouciance, affecting nothing and affected by nothing.
It’s an understandable desire, but a doomed one. As long as we remain a part of the world, such a renunciation is impossible. Jobu is only fooling herself. What she truly longs for is not an end to caring, but an end to her own suffering, and when she finds that she can’t divorce herself from her humanity in life, she decides that the only way to peace is to renounce that life entirely.
But first, she has to share her pain with her mother. Evelyn has been blind to Joy/Jobu’s suffering, but Jobu, at least, can do something Joy can’t: she can show Evelyn, first-hand, the source of her despair. It’s a way to punish her, but in another nod to the shared plight of Joy/Jobu, it’s also a cry for help, a plea of a child to a parent to fulfill their role as an island of stability amid a roiling sea of confusion.
That worldly confusion isn’t just personal, or at least it isn’t anymore. Everything Everywhere All at Once comments, too, on the current, and very real, profusion of multiple realities, born of our disconnected media enclaves. Places where even the most obvious truths become something no one can agree on, where historic events can be ignored or brushed away as if they never occurred, where things happen but nothing matters, like shadows gilding along a wall.
We are all in danger, the film seems to warn, of becoming Jobu Tupakis, cynical nihilists who can inhabit any universe we like, ignore (or even destroy) the ones we don’t, and treat all of them as equally pointless. “Be kind,” extols the gentle Waymond during one tense scene, “especially when we don’t know what’s going on.” In another era of the movies, lines like this might have come across as hopelessly saccharine. But in this day and age, such simple humanity feels almost like a revolutionary act.
Finding your way through our current digital bedlam, just as sure as finding your way in this universe, is hard — maybe impossible — for small beings such as ourselves. All that we can do is be kind to each other, the film says, because all we really have, like it or not, is each other.
Perhaps, as Jobu Tupaki imagines, this is not reason enough to hang on, because there’s no real point to anything, anyway. Jobu is convinced that there is no grand meaning to human existence, or even a reason why the multiverse exists at all. Everything is just a blip — a buzzing confluence of futility, a constant reminder that our individual lives are ultimately empty, complete jokes.
But as Evelyn comes to realize, and as she comes to make Jobu/Joy realize, the universe’s stubborn insistence on not giving us the tidy narrative arc we so desire is a benison, not a curse. In a multiverse of so many, what universal meaning would satisfy everyone anyway? Better then, to get to the hard work of living and of loving, to find your own meaning in your own life, and to help others find joy in theirs, if you can.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is about many things, but its most powerful theme is reconciliation — of finding peace with each other, of finding time for each other, of re-contextualizing the fleeting moments of our lives as something given, rather than something constantly being taken away, and of accepting the fact that although we are necessarily limited in the choices we can make, we need not be limited by the choices we have made.
The possibilities for change are endless after all, and, so long as we do hang on — to life and to each other — they are ever ahead of us.
