Everything Everywhere All At Once is a glorious film. Its maximalist approach to storytelling resonated with me greatly. It felt like the directors, succinctly named Daniels, took the whirlpool of a racing mind and spilled it, still in motion, on a canvas of film.
More specifically, they took many lifetimes’ worth of experiences and condensed them into a black hole dense movie. The movie, as a result of said density, deals with many topics. From the idea of each choice closing off many others, to the family dynamic of east Asian cultures, to painfully digging into ever bleeding wound in my soul that can be summed best as “Hell is meeting the person you could have been.”
One of the most interesting topics for me was the topic of the meaning of life, or rather, more importantly, how to find a reason to keep going in a purposeless existence that’s doomed to end.
There will be spoilers from this point forward, so if you haven’t seen this movie, please go watch it. It’s a funny, action packed, creative film that’s full of love and soul, with great acting and some truly unique set pieces.
As said previously, the movie’s maximalist style means it was about many things, and I’m sure that you found that its “main moral” was about something different than what I did. But to me, this movie was, without a doubt, laying down the foundation for how to deal with the dread of the meaninglessness of our lives, or, nihilism.
The movie starts with the protagonist, Evelyn, being swamped with paperwork and living her life in a painful, malfunctioning autopilot. Not able to find love or happiness in anything, she spends her days preparing for the simple tasks ahead, and finds anything that deviates from her duties to be a waste of time, pointless silliness. She’s barreling towards her death, unable to accept love from her husband, unable to confront her father for his lack of love towards her and unable to truly come to terms with her daughter’s sexuality as a lesbian. Her life, stagnant as it is, is just a long flatline that precedes the final, infinitely long, unbearably flat line.
Then, her husband from another dimension opens her eyes to the other versions of herself, as if to crack her mind’s shell to allow her to daydream of what different ambitions she might have had. This realization opens her to all her potential, muddied by so many choices, great and small, that led her to her current state as “the worst Evelyn”.
Her daughter, meanwhile, in an alternate timeline, lost her mind and sense of self long ago. Crushed under the burden of Evelyn’s expectations, Joy fractured and had her mind reside in all possible versions of herself at the same time. She fulfilled her every potential, but was unable to enjoy any of it. She became everything but was actually nothing.
Fulfilling every potential made life meaningless for her. What was the point of the suffering of life if everything was already within reach? Her despair and loneliness led her to a quest of finding purpose, a purpose she tried to fulfill by creating the “everything bagel”.
The bagel, a pitch black ring with a glowing light within, was created using everything in existence. Every single concept, entity, creature, it was all there. Representing Joy’s inability to escape experiencing everything, this bagel was her only shelter from the boredom and tedium of a life with nothing left to discover. Dense like a black hole, it would absorb her multiversal presence and allow her to escape through the eternal embrace of death.
If the movie begs the question of: “what meaning is there in life, if it’s going to end anyway? If all our achievements, desires, possessions, are all just moments of happiness in this spark of life that sits between the endless dark before our birth and the endless dark that awaits us after the end, what reason is there to keep going?”
Joy’s answer is: there is no reason, so let’s get it over with.
The bagel represents this ideology with its shape and color. Pitch darkness trapping a distant light. An empty, sorrowful life punctuated by a full stop that represents freedom from suffering. Its the image of finding hope in the end of all things.
Evelyn, having undergone the same mind breaking awakening that Joy previously went through, is initially allured by the prospect of the bagel, almost getting sucked into it, but not before she notices a pattern in her husband Weymond’s past behavior. As she lived her straight arrow life, he was always kind, optimistic, hopeful and happy. Even in timelines they never became an item, he was kind and accepting to her. Weymond’s passive, positive approach opened many doors that her sternness couldn’t. His acceptance of their daughter, of customers of their laundromat, even of the monstrous IRS employee opened doors that Evelyn never could.
In all her lives, he held before her an answer to the impossible question: “Find meaning through kindness towards others.”
With a simple request, “be kind”, Weymond opens Evelyn’s her eyes. As she looks at her infinite other lives, she is able to find her own answer. An indestructible force that she uses subdue her foes, a simple word “love”. Her powers allow her to negate attacks against her, reflecting malice and hatred with kindness and succor. Evelyn’s answer for the impossible question then, is an acknowledgement of the coming end, and yet staunch defiance of its implication. “So what if we’re doomed to die and our experiences are ephemeral, our love for one another allows us to enrich our lives so that they are worth living.” Even if this force cannot push back the end of our lives, it fills them with a purpose and a boundless “reason”.
In love, Evelyn finds the opposing answer to Joy’s. Let’s live our lives and find joy in the love that we share with those we care for.
Evelyn’s answer and newfound power is represented by the iconic googly eyes that are present all over the movie. Placed all over by Weymond originally, they pop up in the beginning as an obstacle in Evelyn’s path, to be removed promptly so she can return to her simple, short term tasks, much in the way that she disregards Weymond’s love and desire. Her true awakening, her “third eye opening” is the understanding that these little obstacles are the reason for which we should keep living, and not something to be uprooted so we can finish our menial tasks.
The googly eyes, Evelyn’s love, are a perfect visual counterpart to the bagel. Where the bagel is white within black, finding solace in the end, the eyes are black within white, finding happiness in existence even under the shadow of death. While the bagel is centered and symmetrical, representing the dour seriousness that lies within Joy’s nihilism, the eyes are off center and silly, making the most of what we have by acknowledging the grim comedy of our lives and making the most of them with a smile. While the light at the end of the bagel tunnel lies in its center, representing the inevitability of death that we must concede to, the googly eyes allow you to traverse the white of life through many different paths, many of which are longer than others.
It’s very possible that I’m reading too much into this simple visual comparison, but this contrast of white within black and black within white is almost like this movie’s yin-yang dichotomy and I absolutely adored it.
Evelyn’s answer is profoundly simple and a beautiful implementation of Weymond’s request for her — to be kind. Demonstrating to others how they can be loved, like she was loved across the multiverse, she’s able to lend a hand to her suffering daughter, and pull her from the brink of destruction at the hands of her bagel. Even if Joy is ultimately correct and it’s all meaningless, and the fleeting moments of love and happiness will be eroded by the rising tide of a life of suffering, they can and will return, like volcanoes erupting in the deep. Though the bagel is vast and the eyes are small, the bagel is one, and the eyes are many.
I left the movie extremely happy and uplifted, and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did.
