by Did you love Everything Everywhere All at Once, yet find some things little hard to fully grasp? Don’t worry, I will help you understand the details. This analysis will explain the meaning of the movie and allow you to see it from a different lens.
Watching this movie is more than just a couple of hours of pure entertainment—it is a whole experience. It is a work of art that will capture your attention for every minute, including two minutes straight of rocks talking to each other. The movie is filled with comedy, irony, dynamism, rhythm, and existential crisis. These are faced, sarcastically and cynically.
The movie starts with Chinese mother, wife, and laundry service owner, Evelyn Quan Wang. She is organizing a birthday party for her father, Gong Gong, and checking the paperwork for the IRS, because she is being audited. Her husband, Waymond Wang, is helping her prepare the food, but she seems annoyed by him. When her daughter, Joy Wang, arrives, Evelyn insists on introducing Joy’s girlfriend as a friend because she is worried about her father’s judgment.
The following day, Evelyn, Gong Gong, and Waymond go to their appointment with the IRS when a Waymond from another universe, called the Alphaverse, visits Evelyn and downloads her memory into a system full of memories from other universes in the Metaverse. Each memory allows individuals to visit other universes and practice the abilities of themselves from another world through verse jumping. Doing so requires a specific step: eating a lipstick, for example, or saying “I love you,” or switching shoes to the wrong feet, etc. A gadget that communicates with people who are guiding you through the Metaverse’s database has to be turned on.
When the IRS agent, Deidre, is going through the Wang’s taxes, Evelyn visits another universe at the same time, and she experiences a chaotic circumstance where she gets killed by that same IRS agent. That’s when she gets lost between worlds and accidentally punches the IRS agent right after Waymond asked for a divorce in the world she belongs to. This triggers all sorts of consequences in her universe while she is being followed by the IRS agent and police officers. While she jumps among universes, she is followed in all of them.
The Evelyn from the Alphaverse created the system where individuals can download their memories to travel through the Metaverse. She also forced the Joy from that same universe to train her mind to travel through different worlds at the same time. Consequently, Joy collapsed and became invincible. That Joy became Jobu Tupaki, a woman who could visit and destroy every world at the same time. She wants to destroy every world and throw them into a bagel she created, which functions like a black hole.
The reason why Waymond from the Alphaverse visits Evelyn is because he is on the lookout for the perfect and strongest Evelyn to fight Jobu. This Evelyn is the chosen one because she has many dreams she never followed. She is the worst Evelyn with the incredible power to do whatever she wants because she couldn’t do anything in her own universe.
At the same time, Gong Gong from the other world, along with Deidre and their troops, are trying to stop Jobu Tupaki by killing her. As soon as Evelyn finds out their plan, she refuses to go along with it. Instead, she starts listening to Jobu Tupaki. In some scenes she fights her, but she keeps trying to make Jobu change her mind.
Whilst paying attention to Jobu, she becomes more empathetic towards her. Eventually, she comprehends why Jobu wants to destroy every universe. Jobu carries the feelings of disappointment and rejection of all the Joys from every universe. Even though Evelyn did not abandon her, she constantly disregarded Joy’s singularity in every universe. All Joy ever wanted was her mother’s approval and love, but in her struggle, she finds out that nothing makes sense.
Her Bagel/void aimed to destroy everything, including her existence. She says, “When you put everything in the bagel, you find the truth… Nothing matters”. If nothing matters, then all the pain from all your life goes away. When she is about to enter the black hole to disappear forever, Evelyn finally expresses her grace for her. Together, Evelyn, Waymond, and Gong Gong try to get Jobu out of the bagel, until they let her go. But she doesn’t disappear. Evelyn shows how much she grew after traveling through different universes, she lets Jobu know that even if nothing matters, love gives a sense to each individual and universe; both Evelyn and Waymond explain that if nothing matters, you can choose what does.
Waymond and Evelyn show Jobu how much they love her and how doing so gives meaning to their lives. Even something as irrelevant as owning a home, a laundry service, and having a family can give purpose to someone’s life.
In the end, Jobu stops sending every world to the Bagel’s meaningless void. They all go back to the original world and finish their taxes correctly. The IRS agent arrives to the celebration of Gong Gong’s birthday with police officers to arrest Evelyn. Waymond talks to Deidre and convinces her to let Evelyn go. He explains he was asking for a divorce and Evelyn accidentally hit her out of stress. He also convinces her to give them two more weeks to finish their taxes. Then Deidre and Evelyn sit down on a bench and vape while they reflect on life. Evelyn says, “You’re not unlovable. There is always something to love.”
In an emotional ending, Evelyn and Joy make up, showing each other care and love. Evelyn also welcomes Becky into the family and introduces her to Gong Gong as Joy’s partner. Waymond expresses his love for Evelyn and explains he no longer wants a divorce; he wants to relish the deep affection they have for each other before it gets lost. At last, Evelyn admits she could have been a better mother to Joy, but ends up telling her the things she can do better, because that is her way of expressing love. She also tells Becky to let her hair grow as part of an acceptance and appreciation for her.
Individuality
The movie touches on different themes, including individuality. It shows how every Evelyn from each universe shares a set of characteristics, but each Evelyn made a different decision which took her to different a place. As Waymond from the Alphaverse said, “Every decision has a consequence that can last over a lifetime.”
For example, the Evelyn from the original universe got married to Waymond, moved to the United States, owned a laundry service, and had Joy. In another universe, Evelyn left Waymond, trained to be a Kung Fu master, and became a famous action movie star. Another Evelyn lived in a universe where her hands and feet looked like sausages and married Deidre. Even though each Evelyn was born in China and had the same body, they had their own experiences based on their choices. This deepens on the following dilemma: Even if other versions of ourselves exist and live in a parallel dimension, they’d still be different people with their own decisions and personality.
Another way in which the movie expresses the importance of individuality is through Jobu Tupaki’s fight. Jobu disrupts and destroys every world because she is facing the difficulty of nihilism, of thinking nothing makes sense.
At the end of the movie, we can see Jobu was trying to stop the pain from her existential crisis, from not feeling loved and accepted by her mother. She wanted Evelyn to see her and validate her individually, including her sexual orientation. She wanted Evelyn to understand she was a different person than her, with a different perspective of life and set of ideals.
Generational Trauma
The modern aphorism, “Hurt people hurt people,” is another theme in the movie. Evelyn is rough and judgmental towards Waymond and Joy, and struggles to express her love, yet she is trying her hardest to do better than her father. As a girl, her parents did not support her marriage to Waymond, and her father disinherited her as soon as she moved to the United States. Evelyn’s own parents were hard on her and they constantly found ways of criticizing her, making her feel like she was never good enough.
It was also difficult for Evelyn to accept Joy’s sexuality, and throughout the movie, Jobu Tupaki is trying to make the Evelyns from each world embrace her. When Evelyn finally learns to communicate her love for Joy, she also becomes appreciative of Becky. Evelyn learns how to set her ego aside to allow herself to feel the love for her family, and as a result overcomes her struggles and the family pattern by telling her father, “I am no longer willing to do my daughter what you did to me.”
Nihilism
Nihilism is the belief that all values are meaningless; it is based on an extreme pessimism and radical skepticism. A true nihilist believes in nothing, has no loyalties and no purpose, which mainly leads to an impulse for destruction. If nothing matters, existence has no meaning, so nothing is valuable enough to exist, and even destroying it is meaningless.
This is exactly what Jobu Tupaki is dealing with. After battling with her existential crisis and her pain and sadness, Jobu concludes that nothing matters. Automatically, her impulse for destruction begins. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Nihilism has a corrosive effect that would destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions. He was afraid it could create the greatest crisis in human history. And he explained further how existential despair can trigger an attitude of indifference.
Jobu is extremely indifferent to anyone’s feelings or suffering. She has allowed her ego to be her own conviction after realizing that nothing has meaning, and she is not afraid of any consequences. Adding to her crisis, she reveals everything in every world happens out of a statistical inevitability. Each decision will eventually be taken. Jobu thinks that destruction is also a statistical inevitability, and if nothing matters, destruction is without impact, neither new nor special, because in the end, it was going to happen anyway.
While Evelyn verse-jumps to stop Jobu, she finally sympathizes with her. In the universe where they are rocks, Joy explains that she wanted Evelyn to find a new perspective towards existential dread. Maybe Evelyn could see something different and therefore Joy wouldn’t have to die.
In the end, Waymond and Evelyn help their daughter understand nihilism through a different lens, one that encourages her to choose what is important. Since nothing has inherent meaning, she has the liberty to choose what has meaning for her.
The Importance of Love
The movie deepens on how nothing has meaning, but it also shows how love can move people and things. Love is what allows Evelyn overcome herself, to change into a better woman and mother, and, more importantly, to see through Joy’s eyes.
The authorities from the Alphaverse wanted to convince Evelyn Quan Wang to kill Jobu Tupaki, but her profound love for Jobu moved her to fight for her. Evelyn’s immense love pushes her to finally set her ego aside for Joy, Waymond, and her father.
Evelyn also realizes Waymond has been using love to fight for her and for their relationship. This is when she tells him, “I’m learning to fight like you.” She proceeds to fight from love for love. She uses the things others loved to beat them, even if they seemed banal. For example, she fights a man with the perfume from his diseased wife.
When Jobu is about to enter the bagel, Waymond and Gong Gong help Evelyn stop Jobu. They try to pull her out of it, but must join their strength to do so. This is clear imagery of the power of love and how humans need it to support each other and grow. Eventually, they let her go. This is also an example of deep love, because when you truly love someone, you let them be by respecting them enough to make their own choices.
couldn’t have put it any better myself. I loved this review
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