Beautiful Execution
If you’ve ever watched a movie, you’ve undoubtedly had the thought ‘I could have done that better.’ That is notably not the case with Everything Everywhere All At Once(EEAAO). This show does it all. It has action, romance, intrigue and even odd, sexual rituals. The premise is simple: Nothing matters. And when nothing matters, the only things that matter are the things that we choose to matter. EEAAO has such a short, simple question that it wants to explore, but it does it in such a wonderfully well thought out and executed way, that it never leaves you wanting more. It’s success is driven by three techniques. First, it keeps the topic simple. Second, it hits a home run on the execution. And third, it’s sub plots and themes serve to bring attention back to the main question, keeping things interesting but on track.
Let me give a brief overview of the movie to recap. Evelynne and her husband Waymond are being audited by the IRS due to them using their laundromat for business adjacent tax write offs. Evelynne is the type who is serious and wants to get things done, while Waymond is the more joking, have a good time type. During their audit, Waymond becomes possessed by an alternate universe version of himself. He tells Evelynne that she needs to help him save the multiverse from their daughter, Joy, also known as Jobu Tupaki, who has become a nihilistic, narcissistic, dimensional traveler determined to destroy all possible worlds. Through a crazy series of events that includes cookie kung fu, butt plugs and hot dogs for fingers, Evelynne finds a way to save and reconnect with her daughter, husband and father. She also saves the universe, I think. It’s not totally clear about that one.
To understand what EEAAO is trying to say, we have to go way back to the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a philosopher of the 19th century, who is popular for exploring the idea of Nihilism - that is the idea that there is no objective truth in life and all things in life are meaningless. This is the topic that EEAAO attempts to grapple with as well. The show asks the question: ‘what is the point of life when nothing matters?’ EEAAO makes light of it by making a joke of it by having the main antagonist realize this by putting everything(and I mean everything) on a bagel. The bagel collapses in on itself and creates a black hole that devours everything near it. This idea of nothing mattering is very hard. Many people find it uncomfortable. The movie does not care. It is determined to find out the answer to this very specific question. This is explicitly stated when Joy as Jobu Tupaki meets Evelynne for the first time.
The screenplay execution of EEAAO is another area that really sets it apart. The acting is fantastic. Michelle Yeoh, as Evelynne, is an excellent lead and she really sells the ‘I am trying very hard to please everyone’ Asian mother/daughter character. Ke huy Quan, Evelynne’s husband Waymond, is a rising star in Hollywood and nails the ‘simple but too earnest to dislike’ Asian dad. Stephanie Hsu as Joy or Jobu Tupaki plays a wonderful ‘I am crazy and you will like it’ distraught daughter trying to find her way in life. All of the supporting actors also play their roles with believability and take this not so serious show very seriously.
Setting visuals is the second way that EEAAO excels. Take, for example, the universe where people evolved with hot dogs for fingers. This is gross and one of my least favorite things about the movie just because of how gross I find it. Despite my personal feelings about it, it is a perfect example of how nothing truly matters. The idea that people could have evolved in this way is ridiculous. And it is that choice of something so ridiculous that goes to accent the movie’s main message through it’s setting choices. Nothing matters means that no choices for setting that the writers choose actually matter as well. It is that freedom that allows them to choose something so ridiculous to portray exactly how nothing matters. They could have just as easily chosen a universe where humans evolved melons for heads. This would still not have changed the main message, it would only have changed how that message was portrayed. Thus nothing mattered. But because nothing mattered, they were able to make something so silly, matter.
Another thing that EEAAO does very well is intention. The writers of this show have clearly put a lot of thought into this movie. Recall the scene at the end when Evelynne is helping out the characters that are trying to stop her. She helps Raccacoonie get his racoon friend back. She helps the guy who need ‘special’ sexual attention. She gives the lonely laundromat guy, who recognizes Evelynne’s perfume as the one his wife used to wear, a nice memory of his late wife. Each of these flashbacks are set up throughout the movie, showing that the writers actually put some thought into using their side characters. Rather than just having characters show up and not be used later, the writers were aware of what they wanted to do in the beginning, middle, and end of the movie and planned accordingly.
Every good world with unique abilities should do two things to enhance those assets. They need to set up the rules to access those abilities, and they need to introduce stakes to used them. EEAAO clearly states both of these for it’s manic multiverse jumping. EEAAO has the wacky idea that if you can move your mind to another universe(using the tech that the ‘alpha-verse’ has engineered) that you exist in, you can inherit the skills and memories that that universe’s version you has access to. Early on in the movie, the show lays a couple of rules out to achieve this:
To move universes, you must do something that you would not normally have done that day.
Moving universes causes a strain on the user’s psyche.
For example, Waymond, in an effort to fight off the pro-wrestling, IRS agent Diedre, needs to give himself four papers cuts between his fingers. Once he is able to do this unusual task that he never would have done in his normal day-to-day, he is able to slingshot his mind to another universe, thereby unlocking the powers of a professional Gymnast. Waymond from the alpha-verse is a practiced user of this art, so his mind is not shaken so easily, and he is able to resist the strain to his psyche. But the first time that Evelynne does this, by confessing her love to Diedre, she is tempted to stay in the mind of the alternate universe, because she is untrained. These 2 rules give the story stakes. We know that if the character is prevented from doing something wacky, they cannot access new powers. This sets up a few scenes later in the movie that would not otherwise be possible(again showing the skill of the writers ability to plan ahead).
The show does keep it’s focus on the main topic, but that doesn’t meant that it doesn’t toy with other topics as well. It also entertains the themes of depression and dealing with the weight of other people’s expectations. But the movie doesn’t stray too far from the point and also uses these themes to enhance the main topic by using the main topic to answer the tangential thoughts.
Joy, having achieved a sort of enlightenment, sees the multiverse as bland and pointless. That is wild. The multiverse as literally an uncountable number of new things to experience and new ways to experience them, but she has become jaded to all the novelty. Her thoughts are stated as ‘why care about all of it when none of it is actually her universe. She is describing a feeling here that many people struggle with. As people get older, they experience new things differently from when they were kids. Maybe this is because they have experienced so many new things before, that the experience of experiencing new things is itself less novel. Joy experiences this in it’s ultimate form, and as a result she has lost interest in anything that used to bring excitement into her life. The movie has Joy try to convince Evelynne of this in the scene where Joy is trying to get her to enter the donut.
But Evelynne is drawn back from the edge of nothingness by her weird and, from Joy’s perspective, pointless conflict about her laundromat. She stands on the brink of destruction with her daughter that she loves and wants to save, but gets distracted by the fact that her husband was able to stave off the IRS’s repossession of their business for one more week. This is the movie saying that, sure nothing really matters, but for some reason you’ve chosen the things that do. There are a myriad of things that could happen - just like there are a myriad of universes that could have been. But at the end of the day, there are interesting things happening right next to you. The unique situation that you’ve got yourself wrapped up in is actually very interesting and is worthy of your attention. Nothing really matters, but for some reason your things do matter. And that idea is enough to get through one more day. It’s enough to keep pushing through to see what’s at the end of the road.
There are also two characters that struggle with their role as children. They are Joy and Evelynne. Joy is struggling to have her mother accept her and her girlfriend, despite being from a traditional Chinese family. Meanwhile, Evelynne is trying to be accepted by her father who abandoned her when she left China to go to America with Waymond. Both Joy and Evelynne are being so hard on themselves because they think that they need to be accepted by their parent figure, but are not. And yet, they do not realized that they have always had the freedom to be exactly who they want to be. At then end of the movie, Evelynne tells her father that Joy is dating a woman, and he doesn’t actually care all that much. Likewise, Joy tells Evelynne why she needs her space and why she feels so smothered, and Evelynne respects that and they move past it. The only thing that mattered here was that both of these characters imagined their thoughts mattered, that there was something real to them. The movie uses both of these character arcs to say they that these are another of the things that do not matter - they are only as big of a deal as the characters made them to be.
The perfect execution and succinct story telling are what keep me watching EEAAO time and time again. It is such a nicely structured story with lots of deep, interesting topics that make me think, laugh, cry and feel more strongly than many other movies out there. It really is a shining example that other movie writers should watch and study to get better at their craft, and so that we can all get better movies in the future.