A Love Letter to 'Everything Everywhere All At Once'
I had wanted to see this year’s Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All At Once, with my best friend at the local movie theater, but plans fell through and I ended up watching it alone in my basement, the reflection of my laptop screen on my glasses capturing all two hours and nineteen minutes. For the last half of the movie — and for two hours after the closing title sequence — I cried.
Because I watched it in June, three months after the film’s theatrical release, I already knew Everything Everywhere All At Once was going to change my life. For weeks, my friends and the Internet gushed about the simple themes juxtaposed with complex visuals. Shortly after the movie opened in theaters, a popular Letterboxd review wrote simply, “This movie should be required viewing for every man, woman, and child on earth,” accumulating over 6,000 likes. What transformed this movie from a goofy science fiction movie to a cultural artifact is simple: its universality.
The premise of the movie, variants of the same characters inhabiting multiple universes, is one already beloved in popular culture. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe has continuously dominated the box office, with individual titles earning several hundred million dollars, even after disappointing critical reception. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, the multiverse theory becomes a metaphor for the American Dream. Like main character Evelyn Wang, many immigrants are caught in a multiverse between life in the diaspora and what could’ve been in their homelands. Behind this intense sci-fi epic is a story about navigating life while physically removed from everything you’ve ever known.
Watching an immigrant mother bend reality to save the universe and the life she built for her family, I am reminded of me and my own mother. Everything Everywhere All At Once certainly isn’t the first movie that attempts a modern depiction of a complicated mother-daughter relationship — my favorite movie of all time is Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird and I thoroughly enjoyed Pixar’s Turning Red — but for me, this movie is like seeing my mother and I on the big screen.
Both Lady Bird and Turning Red center the daughter’s feelings, but Everything Everywhere All At Once gives its teenage and young adult audience a glimpse into a mother’s perspective. Evelyn is frustrated with her daughter, Joy (or antagonist Jobu Tupaki in the other universes) for not meeting her expectations for her daughter’s adult life. Joy’s fierce need for individuality and personal expression clashes with her parents’ culture of community and family. It strains their dynamic, but it also reflects Evelyn’s fear of her own failure. Many immigrants and children of immigrants relate to the pressure to do something big with their lives as a way to prove that dislocation to America was worth it, that this was the best reality in the diasporic multiverse. Laundry and taxes aren’t enough for Evelyn, so she needs her daughter to have more, to want more.
Of course, I’m not the only person who feels understood by this mother-daughter dynamic. TikTok user @poppinponyo writes, “I now understand the complexity and pain and love present in a mother/daughter relationship” after “watching a rock fall off a cliff after another rock,” referring to the iconic rock scene, in which Evelyn and Joy are two different colored stones. Even a universe without humanity has the timeless dichotomy of mother and daughter. On Tumblr, @lesbalisious strips the movie from its entropy entirely: “Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film about a girl ripping the entire universe apart just to find a part of her mother that she feels understands her. And everything everywhere all at once is a film about a mother ripping the entire universe apart just to understand her daughter.” It’s not hotdog fingers or universe jumping; Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie about the desperate human need to love and be understood.
The first night I visited college — I slept in a dorm without either of my parents — I thought of Evelyn and Joy. I had just gotten off the phone with my mother and I was taking in my future in a tiny dorm room. I just didn’t expect to miss her that much. Like Joy, I had finally gotten what I wanted, independence, but I lost the comfort of knowing my mother was in the next room. It was only for one day, but I knew that in a few months, there would be many days to come without her physical presence. In that way, I felt like Evelyn, moving from China to America to pursue a dream. The absurdity of my grieving a loss that hadn’t even occurred while thinking of an indie blockbuster spoke, to me, to the delicacy of a movie like Everything Everywhere All At Once while searching for familiarity. ♦