Movie Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

In this sermon, an antisemitic, ignorant pastor who calls himself Brother Sean rants about why God hates video games. He used to be a gamer, but he quit a long time ago: "It was vain. It was stupid. It was a bunch of flashing lights."*

*Later, the pastor says has has a DVD player, which is better than a video game console because he can use it to watch YouTube. This is confusing for many reasons.

"Flashing lights" is a throughline Brother Sean returns to in the sermon, a two-word phrase that in his mind illustrates the idiocy of video gaming with the irrefutable force of a mathematical axiom. "That's what [video games] are," he says, "A bunch of flashing lights." And again, in fiery conclusion: "... it's a bunch of stupid, vain stuff. It's flashing lights on screens."

After I finished watching the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once, I started reading its reviews. I'm happy I did, because reviewers found some wonderful turns of phrase to express the essence of that movie. I've seen the word "maximalist" a few times, which is indisputable. (I mean, it's right there in the title.) New York Times writer A. O. Scott came up with the delightful sequence "exuberant swirl of genre anarchy." Consequence's Clint Worthington wrote about its "dadaist absurdism and blink-if-you-miss-it pace." For The Guadian, Mark Kermode submitted "madcap invention and frenzied visual wit." IGN's Rafael Motamayor had the four adjectives "bizarre, gross, heartfelt, and honest" for us, while the Critics' Consensus section on Rotten Tomatoes describes it as "an expertly calibrated assault on the senses."

Don't get me wrong, I like all those words. They do a wonderful job of describing this movie. But for me, the core of Everything Everywhere All at Once is best captured in sermon. Everything Everywhere is a bunch of flashing lights. It's vain. It's stupid. It's flashing lights on screens. But here's something lost in Brother Sean's sanctimonious haste: flashing lights on screens are also some of the most compelling things humans have ever produced. For me, Everything Everywhere was a particular sequence of flashing lights that gripped me like few things I've ever seen.*

*Other notable titles: La vita è bella, Wolf Children, Homecoming King.

Early in the movie, a woman named Joy tries to communicate her sexuality to her senescent grandfather in awkward, mangled Chinese. Not knowing the word for "girlfriend", she falls short. Her mom Evelyn steps in and, unable to get past homophobic Chinese mores, fails to stand up for her own daughter. Joy is infuriated by her mom's betrayal and storms away, even though Joy can't say the words herself.

This is just one example of the how film uses language to highlight its characters' complex emotional lives. Another is the meticulously-crafted chaos of Evelyn's dialogue. She bounces from English to Mandarin to Cantonese -- often mid-sentence -- with effortless, rapid-fire pace. These transitions are highly intentional, but they don't sound engineered. They rang with an authenticity that brought me right back to my parents' living room.

A full movie later, Evelyn has gone through a hero's journey. She has deep insight into every possible facet of experience, which conveniently helps her work out her problems. It's no surprise when, at the film's climax, with every reason to abandon her mediocre life and broken family, with the full weight of existential despair on her shoulders, Evelyn chooses love and connection. And as she redeems herself in front of Joy, finally telling her father (Joy's grandfather) the truth, Joy does not forgive her.

"I'm tired," Joy says. "I don't want to hurt anymore and for some reason when I'm with you, it just hurts the both of us." Joy just wants to go, to be left alone. And Evelyn says, "Okay."

I was no longer watching Joy in that moment. I was her, and I've been her countless times before. I've lost track of how many times I've wanted to tell my parents I don't care how or even if they're bettering themselves. How I don't want to hear any more apologies or rationalizations. How I can't forget the suffering they caused. I want to tell them I'm tired, and being around them hurts the both of us, and I just want to be left alone.

But at the same time, I want to tell them I forgive them, even if I'm not sure I do. I understand how their upbringing shaped their choices, and I'm not bitter about the resulting harm. I'm doing beyond well on my own. I'm past healing, into thriving. I'll never fully understand them, they'll never fully understand me, and that's fine. I know they did the best they could. How could I hold that against them? 

More than wanting to say any of this, I want acceptance. I want to hear my parents say, "Okay." That's why seeing Evelyn do so was so cathartic. It was my life and more, all rendered in magnificent flashing lights.

Sadly, this is also where Everything Everywhere All at Once disappointed me. Because in the aftermath of Joy's rejection, Evelyn gives a second heartfelt speech about love and connection, and Joy relents. She collapses into her mother's arms in a tearful hug, and the painfully honest bittersweetness of the scene is drowned out in a saccharine deluge of total reconciliation.

However badly my parents might want reconciliation, I do not. I don't want grand speeches collapsing into tearful hugs. I want acceptance and understanding, but I also want to move on. Sometimes, happy endings are not compatible. By contriving them to align so tidily, Everything Everywhere becomes less real, regressing back into the generic universe of every other feel-good action movie. This is especially frustrating because Everything Everywhere has a whole multiverse at its disposal. There was such rich potential to tell a multitude of stories, and having them all end on such high notes killed that potential. If the endings had spanned the full spectrum of human experience -- if there had been a soaringly joyful one, an absurdly silly one, a mature bittersweet one, a deeply tragic one, and a mysteriously ambiguous one -- if there had been everything everywhere all at once -- I would have been a lot happier.

Hollywood's inability to divorce itself from less-than-perfect endings hurt the film again in the story of Evelyn's failing marriage. After decades of emotional neglect, her husband Waymond files for separation. I was excited at the potential here. It was a chance to fight back against the false notion -- especially prevalent among Chinese-Americans I know -- that divorce is the worst thing that can happen in a marriage, so disastrous as to be unthinkable. I don't buy that. Far worse is trapping yourselves and your children in a toxic, loveless union defined by daily routines of blame and abuse. I was looking forward to a story about how divorce, though undoubtedly tragic, can also be liberating and virtuous -- a mature way to move forward and start fresh. Instead, after a few intense hours culminating in a single grand moment, the spark between Evelyn and Waymond rekindles and she enjoys total romantic renewal. In real life, I don't see single grand moments undoing decades of strife and neglect. Which is weird, because I see it all the time in flashing lights.

Part of me sees the happy endings of Everything Everywhere All at Once as inevitable. It's a movie about Evelyn gazing into an incomprehensible multiverse, with all the vanity and stupidity that entails,* and nonetheless finding Joy, triumphantly emerging with an even stronger claim to hope and purpose. The movie's character arcs and themes demand these happy endings.

*One sequence of flashing lights features a supervillain laying the smackdown on security guards with two giant dildos, and that's not even the weirdest thing to happen in that scene.

But Everything Everywhere is not just a movie about triumph over existential dread. It's also a movie about being a first-generation Asian-American immigrant. It's about the vast linguistic, cultural, and generational barriers that alienate those immigrants from their children. So I couldn't help but feel like it's about me. 

It isn't, of course. Even though it's so close to my heart I could jury-rig it into a Pacemaker, Everything Everywhere All at Once is not about me. Sometimes, people do want total reconciliation. Sometimes, happy endings are compatible. Sometimes, when we gaze into the incomprehensible universe, we find joy gazing back. Especially when we're gazing at a bunch of flashing lights.

Here's a rare accomplishment these flashing lights can claim: By the time I'd spent 140 minutes with them, I identified with them so strongly that any divergence from my own lived experience felt wrong. They made me forget that the unique bittersweetness of my own life story isn't the only flavor out there. Vanity was in the theater, just not all on the screen.

It would be easy for me to decry Brother Sean's vitriol as vain and stupid. So I will. Almost everything in that set of flashing lights is beyond vain, beyond stupid. He raves about how Jews own Activision and Bill "population control" Gates wants to murder babies. Truly deplorable stuff. But as much as I hate to admit it, there were rare moments in his sermon when I found myself nodding in agreement. One was when he denounced the military "going into countries and killing people," how they indoctrinate soldiers to devalue human life. Violent video games aren't how they're doing that, but I support his antiwar sentiment nonetheless.

 

More relevant to his point, I have spent too much time playing video games. Brother Sean cites Titus 2:7, exhorting his congregation to "in all things [show] thyself a pattern of good works." I also strive to in all things show myself a pattern of good works, and video games have been an obstacle. The flashing lights can be so captivating they entice me to neglect my responsibilities, or sacrifice longer-term fulfillment at their altar.

I don't mention the specks of truth in Brother Sean's incoherent screed because I think we should take it easy on his ideas. They deserve every bit of condemnation we can muster. But when I think about how truth survives even in that rambling wasteland, I realize something interesting. While Brother Sean's sermon captured the soul of Everything Everywhere All at Once for me, the same also happened in reverse. When we gaze into the multiverse -- when we lose ourselves in that infinite, meaningless blur of flashing lights -- nihilism feels more than tempting. But he who fights monsters should take care lest he thereby see everything as monstrous. And if you gaze for long into the abyss, love and meaning also gaze back into you.

The tragedy of Deroy

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So I'm playing this tabletop roleplaying game right now, this collaborative storytelling game called City of Mist and it's absolutely amazing. It's incredible. The characters and the plot are compelling and rich and I wanted to share just a small piece of that with you today just to give you a taste of the story that's being told. Now there's going to be massive spoilers here, so if you don't want that you can check out the podcast, it's in the video description below.

All right. So, I was talking to one of the players, let's call him Jon Doe. I was talking to Jon about the gap between individuals and large-scale power structures. Because the characters in the game right now -- there's six players, each with their own character -- the problems they're dealing with are large-scale problems. There's this horrible gang that dominates their neighborhood and it has a ton of control, and it does drug trafficking and corrupts politicians and it's killed people. And there's also this huge corporation that started out as something pure but got twisted over time into something cold and uncaring and vicious.

One of the most recent things that happened was the team went out to take out some of this corporation's surveillance drones and the corporation found out and dispatched these security forces and the security started gunning down an innocent bystander. And for me, those security forces were a microcosm of the story of this corporation because the corporation started as a business intended to empower artists and support the dreams of individuals. But as it grew and grew and grew the importance of the individual got left behind, and that's why these security forces are so scary, is because they don't care about individuals. They're only there to defend the corporation's interests. They didn't care that the guy they were shooting at wasn't involved, they were just following orders.

So we have these massive, formidable institutions. These institutions are the villains. And I like that, because we see stories -- and especially RPG stories -- about the heroes fighting a single big bad evil guy all the time, and a power structure as a villain is scarier, it's amorphous and domineering, and I like the nuance there. But I was talking to Jon about how it seemed like a really difficult story to tell. Because individuals can't change massive societal power structures on their own. We can't do it alone, this is something I really believe is that the only way to overcome harmful power structures in real life is by organizing and large-scale collective action. And that kind of runs counter to the core fantasy of role-playing games, because in a role-playing game you play as a single character, an individual, a hero who does have the ability to enact grand scale change. The whole story is about how the actions of these individuals change the world.

So that kind of seemed like a contradiction to me. On one hand, I have this idea that you need large-scale collective action to solve large-scale collective problems, but on the other hand you have the fantasy that these six individuals are gonna change the world. And so I presented this to Jon and Jon said no, that's not a fantasy at all. Actually, individuals can do an enormous amount to change the world, and the false belief that they can't is precisely how these toxic power structures maintain their grip on society and propagate. Even large-scale collective action is based on the choices of individuals. And he said individuals actually have a lot of advantages over large systems, because individuals have better communication, it's much easier to coordinate logistically, they're faster and more agile. The more people you have in an organization the more it bogs down under its own weight, and you need more management and there's more miscommunication. And he said maybe our team of six can use that to our advantage. And I said that's very interesting, but there's a big problem. There's a big, gaping hole in that plan. And that's this: one of the power structures the team is fighting is a huge gang. It's called the Ouranios gang. And two of the characters on the six-person team are also in the Ouranios gang. In fact, they are directly connected to the people at the very top of the Ouranios gang. So you don't have that advantage of communication at all, because the leadership of the Ouranios gang has a direct line into the heart of your team. And the storyline of those two team members who are in the gang, their names are Kaz and Agave, is a storyline of abuse and manipulation. They're being controlled in toxic ways by the leaders at the top of the Ouranios gang, and a big question in the story is if they're going to be able to make it out of that horrible situation or if they're going to stay trapped and keep suffering and cause suffering. The redemption of Kaz and Agave are the key to this whole thing. And then I said it seemed like you and the other people on the team are working on that, you're working on bringing Kaz and Agave out of their toxic relationships and giving them a positive support network, and then you won't have spies in your own camp and you'll be able to take advantage of all that stuff you were talking about before. And Jon said yeah, I was doing that. I was doing that before. With Deroy.

And that was heart-wrenching for me. It was so brutal, and to understand why you have to understand the story of Deroy. Deroy is a character based on the Hindu god Shiva, the Destroyer. Deroy is cool because he can annihilate anything. He can just clap his hands and make anything disappear, just vanish. Gone. And it's not just physical objects he can make disappear, he can also destroy metaphysical concepts, like ignorance, or the linearity of time. And he can also choose what breaks, so he's indestructible. When Jon first pitched this character to me he just pitched me this image of Deroy getting slashed across the face with a machete and the machete is shattering into a thousand pieces while Deroy takes no damage, and I was like that's badass, that's awesome. So you might be thinking, Deroy sounds totally overpowered! How is that fair? He's completely indestructible and he can destroy anything, including metaphysical concepts. He is the avatar of destruction incarnate. But here's the problem: he can't make anything. He has no originality, no creativity. When he tries to paint, he can only produce the most bland, generic paintings. When he tries to drum, he can only produce the most boring, basic beats. And he's got this childhood friend called Eddie who's a prodigy! Eddie's this genius musician whose music is so good it moves his environment and Deroy always feels inferior to him. And eventually Deroy runs away from home because he just can't bear living in Eddie's shadow anymore, and he sees how Eddie is doing everything on his own and Deroy wants to do that too, but he can't, he can't make or build or create, he's cursed to be the avatar of destruction. So he runs away from home, he abandons his support network and tries to do it all on his own and meanwhile Eddie is deeply embedded in his community, and Eddie is supporting others and receiving support, so Deroy's whole notion that Eddie was doing it on his own was misguided. And Deroy just goes more and more downhill and he's blaming himself for all of it.

And this is where we get to the climax of the story. Picture this. The team is facing off against a major villain and they think the villain has won. They think the major villain has killed a whole crowd of people. And Deroy sees this, and he blames himself. And he wants to completely erase that villain from existence, not just destroy her, but make it so she never even existed at all. He wants to turn back time and wipe out every trace of her from reality. But he knows it's gonna come at a cost. This is a destruction of such magnitude that the only way he can do it is if he sacrifices himself and leaves the story. That's the price he has to pay. And he pays it. Because he falsely thinks he's the only can fix this.

And here's where to Kaz and Agave. Remember, Kaz and Agave are the key to this whole thing. They're the reason will never be able to win against the Ouranios gang. And Deroy was one of the few people who knew about the toxic situation Kaz and Agave were in. He had done all this work investigating them, learning about how they were being controlled and manipulated and when he sacrificed himself, all of that was lost. In trying to redeem himself he destroyed a crucial piece of the support network those two needed so badly. And that's the tragedy of Deroy.