Where We Are Now: 'Everything Everywhere All At Once'

On a Cinema of Fear

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Ten years ago, if I'd written something about Everything Everywhere All At Once, my suspicion is that I would have been more than a little acerbic. I think I would have argued that it's not simply a middling film, it's also a politically and culturally destructive one. I would have done my best to make it clear that the uncritical acceptance, and even glorification, of films like this one is a symptom of the worst elements of the American mindset and needs to be combated at any cost.

(If you have any interest in seeing something in that more acerbic vein, my thoughts from back then on Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, or The Babadook are pretty good examples.)

But time has passed. I've gotten older, and my views have evolved. It's not, or not quite, that I don't have that kind of reaction to something like Everything Everywhere All At Once anymore – it's just that these days there are other things that seem to me to be more interesting and perhaps even more important.

If you haven't seen it, the film opens with a family in trouble. Mom and dad are at the edge of divorce, the family business is failing, and the grandfather refuses to acknowledge his granddaughter's sexuality.

Then they discover that existence itself is threatened, because of a superhero-esque MacGuffin. This trope is that there is not one universe but many (a "multiverse," in the parlance), in which different versions of all of us exist simultaneously. And in that multiverse, a different version of the daughter of the family – named Joy (Stephanie Hsu) – has traveled through every possible iteration of her own life and, having seen everything, has realized that nothing matters at all. In doing this, she's also become super powerful and bent on destroying everything that exists because of her despair.

Fortunately, the mother of the family, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), builds up her own super powers by also traveling through the various universes. She confronts the evil version of her daughter and eventually rescues her by assuring her that she is loved. This comes after after a moving speech by the father, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), about how we should all be good to each other, regardless of whether there's any reason to or not. So, in the end, everything turns out for the best and everyone is happy.

Along the way, there are numerous filmmaking pyrotechnics, some of which come off and some of which don't. We visit a universe, for example, where everyone has hotdogs for fingers, and a universe in which the characters are rocks that communicate by telepathy. It's an inventive film, if not a particularly subtle one; it dominated the recent Academy Awards and is adored by legions of fans who are famously hostile to critiques of it.

So why would I have rained vitriol down on it ten years ago? Two main reasons.

The first is that it's an actively conservative movie, and those aren't my politics. Sure, it pays lip service to certain things that most people associate with liberalism – the acceptance of the fact that the daughter is gay being the main one – but in more important ways, and again, not subtly, it works to endorse ideas that serve as the bedrock of American conservatism.

One of the primary ways it does this is by celebrating a notion of a socially atomized society. In classic Reaganite fashion, the film's vision is not one of group-oriented solidarity in the face of the machinery of the world, but one in which our social thinking extends no further than the individual and the family. The protagonists are in economic trouble because they have not run their lives properly; one of their antagonists is (of course) an IRS agent; and perhaps their main sin is that they've let their duty to each other slip because they've forgotten the importance of family.

The problems, in other words, suggest the solution: to retreat into that family unit and rebuild those bonds. One does not have to have a long enough memory to be able to recall Margaret Thatcher (parroting Friedrich Hayek) asserting that "there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families" to note that this is a classically conservative worldview: the problems in society do not come from large structural issues (like poverty, the financial incentives of the rich to keep the poor in that state, or, heaven forbid, the way we conceptualize society itself); no, they come from a lack of individual responsibility, and are solved by repairing that flaw. (One notes, as an aside, that this reflects the basic conservatism of the entire superhero film cycle, which again and again depicts insanely powerful individuals rescuing the rather pathetic general population from a never-ending series of world-ending threats.)

This isn't surprising, of course. America is a deeply conservative country, and big Hollywood films frequently tend towards the reactionary. But in the case of Everything Everywhere All At Once, the effect is heightened by another conservative habit: a vigorous, incurious anti-intellectualism that rather gleefully masks itself as pseudo-intellectualism (itself another Hollywood mainstay).

This comes about in two ways. First, the central conceit of the film is that if you learn too much or travel too widely (for what else lies behind the metaphor of "learning everything" that pushes Joy (note the heavy-handed irony of her name) into her predilection for universal destruction?) you will be in danger of realizing that it's all meaningless; thus, it's better to bury yourself in the time-tested verities of making money by running a small business and enjoying hearth and home. Despite its surface theatrics, there is really no sense of wonder in the film, no grappling with the possibility that other places or cultures might offer us things we don't yet understand, and so we should open ourselves up to them; instead, everything out there is weird and silly, or simply demented, and truth – the "real truth" that the film insists on rather militantly – is platitude.

In this sense, the film makes what is actually quite an astounding assertion: that every possible universe understands good and evil in exactly the same reductionist, conservative way that the filmmakers do. And behind this lies the strident claim that the movie itself is already in possession of absolute, unassailable truths. There is no real moral ambiguity here, no real openness. Mean people are bad. Family is, like, the best thing there is. And let's try to be good to each other, huh?

Secondly, the film uses irony in a fascinating way. The one thing that cannot be said about The Daniels (the two guys who directed it) is that they are not accomplished filmmakers in tangible, important ways. It's almost impossible to overstate how difficult it is, on the technical side of things – from using the camera to create a certain feeling, to working with the actors, to helming the post-production process – to make a film that looks and feels this good. Turn on any midrate Netflix movie and you'll see examples of just how hard.

But for the Daniels, all of this accomplishment is at the same time saturated by a strange, very contemporary, irony into which the celebration of (or perhaps ignorance of) bad taste (the kids might call it cringe) is ineradicably woven. There are parodies of more "serious" films thrown in here, there is a juvenile sensibility, and there is the continual evocation of the idea that the filmmakers might be joking about all of this, that it's funny – the "it" here being something like the hotdog fingers – that it's a play on actual movies in which actual people who don't have hotdogs for fingers are experiencing actual emotions…while at the exact same time insisting that it's all very earnest and needs to be taken seriously. Because of the devastating importance of family and goodness and all that.

This is, I think, an extraordinarily defensive posture for an artist to take. It's an experimentalism that believes, at base, that challenging experimentalism is stupid; it's an approach that makes a gesture at something complex – say, a movie that mixes genres and takes the viewer to strange, conceptually exciting places – only so that it can insist that the only purpose of complexity is having some chuckles while we take ourselves on a journey to what we already knew all along. It would be like HAL in 2001 saying, "I'm sorry Dave, I have just learned how to fart," followed by the sound of a train whistle and Dave making a silly face as the odor wafts into his space suit. Like, ha ha, do all your philosophizing, Kubrick you pencil neck, but what we really all know is how funny it is that farts smell bad.

So, essentially, that would have been me ten years ago. When I was concerned that the conservatism of America would doom us all, and that anti-intellectualism was a horrific problem. And, like I said, it's not that I think something totally different now; it's that when I watch a movie like this, the critic in me increasingly focuses on the question of what it says about us, its audience.

And I think this movie says something rather sad.

Because another way to view a film is not through the lens of what it's about in some cultural sense, but why it makes such a big splash. What is it in the film that so attracts the people who watch it?

Easy Rider for example, feels like it captures something about the moment in which it was released (1969) because of the way it encapsulates the fantasies and fears of its audience: the '60s dream of setting loose from the bounds of society, matched with the already dawning knowledge that those dreams would end, at least in part, in flaming destruction.

The Big Lebowski – which was not a huge hit at the moment of its release, but has come to be regarded as one of the classic films of its moment (1998) – almost perfectly reflects the grunge-tinged sense of those years that behind the byzantine workings of ordinary society lay little more than a corrupt elite, and that it might just be a slacker who figured out that the whole setup was a sham and thus saved the day. It is a film, in other words, that speaks to people who worry that some corporate entity, rightfully nicknamed The Man, is going to try to take away their right to be lazy smartasses

So what does Everything Everywhere All At Once say about us?

That we're terrified.

An urge to return to traditional verities, like goodness and family, is a signpost of fear.

It raises its head when a society is faced with things they don't understand, or with things they believe might annihilate them. This is a core sensibility of American conservatism, which tends to preach that the new and the different must, at the very least, be approached with caution, and at the very most must be kept at bay with all of the force that can be mustered. Now, however, we are also beginning to see this urge snake its way into the minds of people who want to think of themselves as progressive. (My guess is that neither of the Daniels would self-identify as conservative, although that's just a guess.)

And how else than as an expression of fear can you explain the film's consistent and totalizing reductionism? Everything it pulls into its scope is simplified to the broadest and most basic terms possible. All complication, all disruption, all evil is a matter of a lack of goodness, a lack of love.

The complexity is even sucked out of the very idea of joyous, experimental filmmaking itself. In the same way that its vision of different worlds is that they will essentially reflect our own, few, simple truths, all of the technical hijinks here serve not to challenge us in any way, but to actively reinforce the verities in which we already believe. (Again, note how telling it is that it doesn't occur to the filmmakers that an alternate existence in an alternate universe might actually be deeply alien to ours, and thus present difficulties for our conception of what it means to exist, in the way that Kubrick seems to be hinting at in the end of 2001).

This childish simplicity undergirds virtually every element of the film, lying like a sturdy set of joists beneath all of the fanciful pseudo-postmodern structures. There are more examples of this than I have the time to run through in this piece, but here's one: why is it that there is no real bad guy in the film?

There is, instead, a misguided teenager who, because she feels unloved by her family, has decided to destroy everything there is. Well, one reason is that we are in the grip of a panic about the state of our teenagers. Study after study, report after report, tells us that the younger generation is deeply unhappy and bitterly pessimistic about their future. One imagines that a tale of one of their own having the power of so much destruction in her hands strikes a chord ­– with both that generation and their parents – as does the notion that this state of radical bleakness about the future is not permanent, that any nihilism, no matter how deep, can be salved.

But at the same time, there is something almost petulant in the film's insistence that bad things come about because of a lack of goodness. There is no sense of the irredeemable malignancy of the rednecks who shotgun the free spirits off the back of their motorcycles to close Easy Rider, or of the naked greed of the Big Lebowski in The Big Lebowski, nor of the villainy of Hans Gruber in Die Hard or the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Arc, or the callous horror of world events in Casablanca, or even the mindless homicidality of Agent Smith in The Matrix.

A fascinating parallel to this was brought to mind recently when I had the chance to re-read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, in which he tries to grapple with what is all too lightly called "the horrors of war" (not by him, of course). It is a book that uses remarkably similar techniques to Everything Everywhere All At Once – absurdism, comedy, trips into the narrative gyres of science fiction – and it is a book at the beginning of which Vonnegut notes that his own father once said of his writing, "You know – you never wrote a story with a villain in it."

But here lies the rub. Vonnegut's story has no real villain because it is trying to deal with the fact that the impossible inhumanity of people is, actually, very possible. It is a constituent element of history itself. Human atrocity exists, for Vonnegut, simply because it does. The absurd factuality of this, the inescapable truth of it, is exactly what he's trying to wrap his head around. His book is responding to facts on the ground, things he observed in war, yes, but also simply by looking around.

Everything Everywhere All At Once, in contrast, is responding to a potentiality, a horror that may envelop us if we stray from the path of love of the self and of family. Thus, the lack of a villain in the novel results from the facts of history and humanity, and an attempt to look clearly at that; the lack of a villain in the film results from a deep, contemporary, cultural horror of the future and the present, a fear about what our lack of family values is doing to our kids, a terror of the unknown future sweeping down on us. It's an attempt to look away from that by wishing it away, frantically trying to reassure us that there really are no bad guys out there, just a lack of love.

And is there anything wrong with this?

Here is where I think I've shifted as I've grown older. I've lost some of the cutting edge of my disdain for artists who don't share my anger at the larger forces pushing us around. I'm more attuned to the reasons people (particularly those who disagree with me) believe what they do, and are drawn to what they are. With age has come the realization that it is true, if difficult to accept, that the world is ofttimes a sadness, and that standing face to face with that truth is sometimes just too damned difficult.

Who can blame the filmmakers and their audience for being scared? It's a scary time. We are surrounded by a world that feels as if it is spinning rapidly out of control.

From climate change to visions of a new world dominated by AI, from the metronomic beat of school shootings to the apocalyptic tone of the far right, epitomized by Donald Trump's continued insistence that we are a "failing nation," from the day-to-day economy to the desperation about the fact that future generations in America will most likely not be able to achieve the same standard of living their parents enjoyed, it's a time of radical insecurity.

People are scared, and here is a movie that says to them, "It's okay. If we love each other and work hard and raise our eyes and make sure our family is doing fine, we'll make it through. Do these things, and you can be safe."

And maybe we can be. And maybe the point of writing and thinking and talking about a film is to try to understand these things in us it speaks to. For it is certainly the case that whatever problems may be out there, a film that makes people feel good for a few hours can't be that high on the list.