Laundry, Taxes, and Nihilism All at Once
From an everything bagel as a doomsday device to hot dog hands and beyond, Everything Everywhere All at Once has arrived to ecstatic reviews since its limited release last month. Written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (also known as Daniels, collectively), the film centers on Evelyn and Waymond Wang, a Chinese immigrant couple running a laundromat in California with mounting debt and a crumbling marriage under the all-consuming pressure from running the business and raising their teen daughter Joy.
The film opens with Evelyn sitting in the middle of endless piles of receipts from their family-owned business. She scrambles to complete their taxes since the IRS is auditing their laundromat. The Wangs embody a painful normal version of American ideals, struggling to keep their business afloat and navigating an adopted culture.
The film presents a cosmic parable for the strife of first-generation immigrants, their splintered identities, and carrying the weight of all that. It borrows textures and dynamics from Kwan’s parents’ story, and a multiverse seems to be the best place to look back at all the regrets in a middle-aged immigrant person’s life. As Evelyn and Waymond’s relationship ebbs and flows through the multiverses, their daughter Joy represents a growing generational divide. All the pressure from her splintered identities manifests in a rebellion so great it stretches beyond the multiverses into a realm where a giant everything bagel looms like a black hole ready to suck everyone into the void.
The movie also excels on a technical level. Every object in Daniels’ lens carries its significance. In a movie where randomness is an intentional plot rule, nothing is unaffected. Actions, costumes, sets and props are also defined by unexpectedness, and the visually mesmerizing montage makes these multiverse moments possible.
The earliest hints of ideas around multiverses can be dated back to Ancient Greek Schools of thought. Since then , the multiverse theory has been popular for centuries in various kinds of mass media ranging from movies, comics, books, to TV shows, all with their own rules and variations that center the concept. Some modern examples are Rick and Morty, the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse released in 2018, Spider-Man: No Way Home released in last December and set the stage for the whole multiverse of the upcoming Dr.Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which all delved into their own versions of the multiverse and created new storytelling opportunities in which characters from one continuity interact with those from another.
But there are things that can distinguish the multiverse in Everything Everywhere All at Once from these super-powered cinematic ones that please longtime fans by acknowledging all of their legitimacy. Daniels recognized that their resonant depictions of the multiverse are more interested in human emotion than they are in the mechanics involved. More technically, the Daniels’ multiverse is more cause-and-effect, and a new universe appears when someone makes a choice that deviates from the main trajectory and creates a new timeline. The various worlds in Evelyn’s world don’t exist separately. They are all birthed in connection to a previous world and will naturally continue growing, like branches all linked together by the roots.
This concept of parallel universes offers freedom from fate or destiny. It centers on the idea that there is inherently a power in making choices that define your identity and the most important choices you make are kind of your fingerprint. This is what separates Evelyn from the other version of her. It also gives rise to the possibility that she can get in and out of lives she's never lived and lean on the abilities of people she has only dreamed of being; whether that’s borrowing a bit of martial arts mastery from a version Evelyn that becomes a film star, or an expanded lung capacity from a variant that is the opera singer she always wanted to be.
There’s the trilingual switching between English, Mandarin, and Cantonese in the family—sometimes mid-sentence—to signal generational disconnect. Evelyn’s crabby misremembering of Ratatouille as “Raccaccoonie,” which becomes the film’s best running gag. And ultimately, the generational conflict of parental pressure and obligations: the visiting, judgmental grandfather will not likely fully understand his granddaughter being gay, while Evelyn continues to take care of him in his old age. From Joy’s perspective, the see-saw of seeking approval from her family and honoring her own identity does feel universe-shattering. The fast-paced and farcical movie is the tug and pull between Evelyn and Joy, a relationship that has the power to tear down multiple universes (there are lots of videos of people “crying uncontrollably” after watching the movie on Tik-Tok).
Overall, it’s a story of a mother pulling together her family, tackling generational and cultural differences to do so, while also learning the encompassing totality of love in the face of the insidious lure of nihilism. The movie doesn't reject nihilism as a philosophy, it rather promotes a more optimistic, humanist nihilism. Instead of "nothing matters, so why bother?" it says "nothing matters, unless you decide that it does."
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a collage of visual stimulation and an attack on the senses. The complex yet dazzling montage of shots takes the audience to the edge of the multiverse and back, all the while reminding us to be kind and to love with our whole hearts. Everything Everywhere All at Once is precisely that. Everything. Everywhere. All at once.
