After the film Everything Everywhere All at Once (Everything Everywhere…) swept the Academy Awards, I thought that I should see it. I was initially hesitant because I had seen Marvel’s Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and I did not think it was very good at all. The idea of the multiverse is not new to me and probably isn’t to most people. I first encountered the concept in the novel by the writer, poet, and psychic, Jane Roberts. She wrote The Education of Oversoul Seven. The novel focuses on the education of an oversoul through the lives that it lives and the various personalities that it creates. Each personality has free will, living different lives as different sexes and ethnicities. All the lives are lived simultaneously, existing on different timelines. The novel was published in 1973, almost 50 years before Everything Everywhere… came to the big screen.
Films of Influence
Approaching this film from our usual, right brain, rational focus may interfere with the ability to understand it. I have heard the stories of people who walked out of the theater before it was over or turned off their TV because it did not make sense to them. I don’t believe my parents, who enjoyed a good film, would have understood this one. They are both deceased now but grew up in a time when storytelling was more linear. They liked westerns where the good guy and bad guy are obvious. They also liked the Twilight Zone and many of those stories had loops and twists. My mother watched the Matrix with me and could not follow what was going on. It just did not make sense to her. On my first viewing of the film I was confused by some things too, but eventually I made sense of it.
My father was a film buff. He introduced me to many films of his youth, one of them being MGM’s 1939 production of The Wizard of Oz that I still love. It is one of the top films on my list, along with The Matrix, The Matrix Resurrections, and now Everything Everywhere… There are of course, many other films on my list like Black Narcissus (1947), No Country for Old Men (2007), She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Akira (1991), Daughters of the Dust (1991), and Nope (2022). Everything Everywhere … made it to the top of my list because I saw it not only as a conveyor of fantasy and entertainment, but also as a film that challenged me to broaden my perspective on life.
Lessons of the multiverse
The creators of Everything Everywhere… ask you to indulge them as they expand the concept of personality by suggesting that our lives are far richer than we give them credit for. That our toolkit for problem solving may be deeper and wider than we know. That imagination, acceptance and kindness can be tools for resolving our most mundane and extraordinary challenges. The heroine of the film, Evelyn Wang, is the most ordinary of ordinary. She runs a coin laundry business that provides for her family. Her business is being audited by the IRS. She isn’t connected with either her daughter, Joy, or her husband, Waymond. She isn’t connected with herself, but instead with who she should be. Her daughter is not turning out to be the success she had hoped for. She does not understand Joy’s same sex attraction. She doesn’t believe that her father approves of her either.
One of the lines I love from the film is when her husband from the alpha-verse says to her: “You’re capable of anything because you’re so bad at everything.” It is this ability that makes her perfect for saving the multiverse, and through that, finding peace in the life she is experiencing. She believes her husband is weak and naïve. He is too nice, and lacks strength. He bakes cookies for the IRS agent. However, it is his character that helps her to effectively deal with her adversaries, not through violence, but by being kind. Evelyn is shown how to call upon the skills she developed in some of her multiverse lives to help her in the present one she is living. By the end of the film, she realizes that ordinary is not mediocre. It is astounding!
She doesn’t understand her life, other than that she doesn’t like it. She feels like she has lost the ability and desire to improve it. Her alpha-verse husband tells her, My dear Evelyn, I know you. With every passing moment, you fear you might have missed your chance to make something of your life. I’m here to tell you, every rejection, every disappointment has led you here, to this moment. Don’t let anything distract you from it.
As the film continues, she realizes that the desire for improvement is not the answer. It takes her out of the moment. She must accept her life as it is before she can change it. She must accept her daughter as she is to change their relationship. She must tell her father that she knows that he doesn’t approve of her life, and that she is okay with that because it is only his perception. Her husband is serving her with divorce papers so that he can get her attention focused on the state of their relationship. To save it she must accept that it is in trouble. Her husband from the alpha-verse explains to her: “I’m not the Waymond who wants to divorce you. I’m the Waymond who is saving your life. Now, you can either come with me and live up to your ultimate potential or lie here and live with the consequences.”
Evelyn responds, “I want to lie here.” But, she does not.
The Power of Kindness
As mentioned earlier, Waymond from Evelyn’s universe offers her a tool to combat her challenges, kindness. He literally demonstrates to her that there is great strength in kindness. He uses kindness to help tame the IRS agent. He uses it to keep their relationship going. He is not some naïve fool. His actions are deliberate and based on kindness. Waymond tells Evelyn at the peak of a major fight to stop Jo Bu Tupaki, “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on. He isn’t worried about appearing weak. He understands that we don’t know everything that is going on around us and feels that the best way to proceed is gently and not like a hammer, because we don’t have all the answers. Evelyn begins making real headway once she adopts Waymond’s advice, symbolized by the googly eye that he uses to remind himself not to take everything so seriously. She puts a googly eye on her forehead. It became her third eye. The eye that sees only one and she begins going through the adversaries between herself and her daughter, performing acts of kindness. The army Evelyn faces is protecting her multiverse daughter, who, as the entity Jo Bu Tupaki, has connected with all the multiverses and seeks to reduce everything to nothing, herself included. Earlier in the film Evelyn believed that Jo Bu Tupaki had taken over her daughter and must be defeated. However, she begins to realize that her daughter is also Jo Bu Tupaki and to destroy one is to destroy the other. She does not want to destroy her daughter, so she must use kindness to reach her, saving their relationship and the multiverse at the same time.
You don’t need to believe in or accept the theory of the multiverse, although there are scientists seriously investigating the theory. You can believe in the power of kindness, now.We instinctively reach for the hammer to attack problems and we do our best to beat them into submission. To not do so implies that one is naïve and weak, stupid, and out of touch. We have predominantly used the hammer approach for many centuries, and the problems persist, like whack a mole. When someone says we need love or kindness or that we must show empathy, many are dumbfounded, that is no way to treat a nail. You must beat it down so that it will stay in its place. Learning to use other tools may be called for. Hatred and fear of the other, and partisanship are not working for us. We don’t need more guns. We have gone as far as we can with the hammer. We will benefit from applying kindness. When the river encounters a rock in its path, it goes around it and eventually wears it away. There is strength in bending with the direction of the flow. If you only offer resistance, you eventually break.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s tactic against institutionalized and systemic racism was non-violence. He reflected the ignorance encountered back on itself. The violence and hatred unleashed on the peaceful protesters was shown to the nation, thanks to television. Viewers could watch and form their own conclusion about what they were seeing. And many concluded that what they saw was inconsistent with the country's stated beliefs about equality and fairness for all. The movement he built was non-violent and real. It takes great strength to effectively wield the “weapon” of kindness. It is not a tool for the weak or foolish.