About
Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis
Directors: Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
“An aging Chinese immigrant is swept up in an insane adventure, where she alone can save the world by exploring other universes connecting with the lives she could have led.” (IMDb)
What to Expect
Sucked into a Bagel
Trophies
Falling rocks
Why You Should Watch It
“That was so much better than any Marvel movie,” he said, standing to face me right as Joe and Anthony Russo’s names flashed across the screen behind his head. I chose not to point out to my partner that the duo who had worked on four Marvel movies were apparently producers in Everything Everywhere. This was our second multiverse movie in as many days that weekend, but he was right: this is not just another superhero mass production.
This film is hilarious, ridiculous, heartwarming, and is almost guaranteed to make you cry by the end. It’s a work of art that holds deeper meaning with each additional viewing (personally, I sobbed much harder on my second watch). There’s more than one message to the story, so you’ll be discussing interpretations with your friends long after the credits roll. And the acting, costume design, and plot are all spectacular. It’s everything. Everywhere. All at once.
Must See! (A)
The Spoilers
Evelyn (Yeoh) is very busy. She’s trying to get receipts in order for the IRS audit of the laundromat. She’s cooking food so her father, Gong Gong (Hong), will have something to eat when he wakes up. And she’s making sure the laundromat is in order before the Chinese New Year party that evening, all while she and her husband, Waymond (Quan), assist customers. She doesn’t have time to explain to her father that his granddaughter is a lesbian, or talk with Waymond about divorce. She especially doesn’t have time to get dragged into a multiversal war, at which she is seemingly the center. But when the evil Jobu Tupaki reveals herself to be a version of Evelyn and Waymond’s daughter, Joy (Hsu), Evelyn determines to fight back in order to save her.
Many Worlds
Before we get into the explanations, here’s a quick rundown of the principal universes we see in Everything Everywhere (compiled with the help of this article).
Prime Universe: Borrowing the coinage from the above article, this is the “main” universe the audience is first introduced to, where Evelyn punches Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Curtis), dies momentarily, and has a big showdown in the IRS building.
Alphaverse: Where Alpha Waymond comes from, and the universe that created Jobu Tupaki. When Alpha Gong Gong tries to kills Jobu, he calls in Alphaverse troops to jump into their Prime Universe variants.
Worst Universe: This is the universe that split from the Prime Universe after Alpha Waymond’s interference. It goes through what would have happened if he had never showed up (or if Evelyn had ignored his instructions). It’s where Waymond and Evelyn discuss the divorce in their car and the New Year’s party happens. So named because Alpha Waymond explains to Prime Evelyn that she is living the absolute worst version of herself in the multiverse. However, it is Worst Evelyn who sees Waymond’s quirks as strengths, has the healing conversations with Joy and Deirdre, and ends up saving the day.
Kung Fu Universe: In this variant, Evelyn rejects Waymond’s proposal to start a new life in America. After a female kung fu master saves her from a mugging, she trains in kung fu herself and becomes a successful movie star (similar to Yeoh’s real-life trajectory as an actress in Hong Kong action films). This is where she reconnects with Waymond and they realize that even though they are both successful now, they are lonely and still have feelings for each other.
Hotdog Finger Universe: Where Evelyn is in a relationship with Deirdre instead of Waymond (and, you know…everybody has hotdog fingers instead of normal hands). One of the key universes that shows her how important the little moments are in life, and how Evelyn was able to connect with Deirdre in the Worst Universe.
The Bagel
The Everything Bagel Jobu creates is foreshadowed numerous times: in the donut-patterned umbrella Alpha Waymond opens in the elevator, the large dark circle Deirdre draws on the karaoke machine receipt, and the bagels Evelyn and Alpha Waymond eat for sustenance.
The Bagel is a clear symbol of depression. It’s responsible for Jobu and Evelyn’s nihilistic viewpoint, and giving into it means death. Jobu voices wanting things to end, and hopes that going into the Bagel would be a release from the torture of living too many lives (i.e., just living). Its foreshadowing could be a metaphor for the prevalence of depression, how it always lurks around even if you don’t notice it’s there. And just like depression, Jobu wanted someone else to feel what she felt so she might be a little less alone.
“All we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense,” Jobu explains after Evelyn merged with her multiversal selves and experienced the full force of the Bagel. Jobu argues the good and happy moments are greatly outweighed by everything else. In the grand scheme of the multiverse, love, acceptance, kindness, or joy are ultimately meaningless. Because of this, Joy wants to give up. But also because of this, Evelyn believes these small moments are worth fighting for. And she chooses the perfect weapon: googly eyes, which are an inverse of the black Bagel with its bright glowing center.
Family Trauma
One crucial moment in Prime Evelyn’s universe is choosing to start a new life in the U.S. with Waymond. Her father disowns her for doing so, only coming back into her life because he needed a caretaker in his old age. She carries the hurt of this rejection for decades, unable to stand up to him again.
We see her grapple with it when attempting to introduce Becky (Tallie Medel) as Joy’s longtime girlfriend, ultimately choosing to tell Gong Gong that Becky was just a “good friend.” Joy sees this as Evelyn being unaccepting, so, hurt and exasperated, she goes to leave. Evelyn follows, wanting to explain herself, but unable. Instead, she tells Joy she is getting fat, and only hurts her more.
This interaction early in the movie shows that Evelyn has obviously hurt Joy before, and their relationship is strained. When Evelyn meets Jobu Tupaki, she immediately blames this version for all of Joy’s faults, and believes that defeating Jobu will return the “real” Joy to her. But eventually Evelyn realizes Jobu encapsulates all that Joy is (even removing most of the letters in “Jobu Tupaki” leaves “Joi.”), and she needs to accept her daughter for all that she is, not just the person she wants her to be.
But their resolution isn’t so simple. Evelyn has her epiphany about accepting Joy, and finally introduces Becky to Gong Gong appropriately (in the Worst Universe), but for Joy it’s too late. She’s been too hurt by her mother and wants the pain to end. She insists many times, throughout more than one universe, for Evelyn to let her go. And Evelyn is tempted. Not because she doesn’t care for Joy, but because she doesn’t want to see her daughter hurt anymore either. But then she remembers how it felt to have her parents turn their backs on her, and she can’t bear to make the same decision with Joy. In the Prime Universe, she turns to Gong Gong and challenges him: “How could you just let me go?” In the Worst Universe, she chooses to break the cycle of family trauma, speaking to Joy through Jobu.
“Why not go somewhere where your daughter is more than just this,” Jobu asks Evelyn through tears, reminding her that she can be anything, anywhere. And Evelyn agrees. But she stands by her Joy, loving her despite all of her flaws; despite not fully understanding everything about her. And recognizing that unconditional love and acceptance was all Jobu was ever looking for, across countless worlds.
Waymond
In the end, Evelyn saves the day. She saves the multiverse and salvages her relationships across her many different lives. But she never would have gotten there without Waymond.
When Evelyn went on her nihilistic rampage and stabbed Waymond in the Prime Universe, he put himself between her and her adversaries, pleading with everyone not to use violence. She physically hurt him, yet he still tried to protect her, tried to get everyone to choose love.
When Evelyn defiantly signed the divorce paper and said she hated the laundromat and vandalized it in the Worst Universe, Waymond was there to plead for another extension on the audit, and calmly begins to sweep the broken glass off the floor.
When Evelyn refuses Waymond’s advances again in the Kung Fu Universe—says they would be poor and struggling in America if she had chosen him—the more stoic Waymond says, “In another life, I would have loved doing laundry and taxes with you.”
Evelyn looked down on Waymond for being silly and weak, instead of recognizing his kindness and love as his greatest strengths. Seeing him choose love in those moments across universes shows Evelyn the importance of choosing it in life, instead of trying to fight against everything. Waymond saves Evelyn, and Evelyn in turn is able to reconcile with Joy/Jobu, with her marriage, and with Deirdre.
Another important observation: Evelyn isn’t able to pull Jobu from the Bagel by herself, but succeeds with the help of Waymond and Gong Gong. Evelyn often wanted to do things herself, thinking someone else (read: Waymond) would do it wrong. But she comes to the realization that she and Waymond complement each other, and that a family is stronger together.
Film & Music References
The Daniels threw many references into Everything Everywhere, sometimes unintentionally.
Take Alpha Waymond’s line, “Your clothes never wear as well the next day, your hair never falls in quite the same way.” While it elicited a chuckle from me for recognizing that he was reciting song lyrics, I couldn’t quite remember the full lyrics or the song name. It was a funny earworm that came and went.
Apparently Dan Kwan felt the same way as he was writing the line, realizing it came from somewhere, but not fully remembering it’s a verse from the Nine Days song “Absolutely (Story of a Girl).” Unable to find a better replacement, the Daniels eventually asked the lead singer of Nine Days to get permission to use the lyrics, and ended up with three custom song covers that are sprinkled throughout the film. (Listen to them here, and on your next watch see if you can catch John Hampson clearly crooning “My safeword’s ‘smile’” as the IRS executive is being dragged out of his secret playroom.)
The Daniels also noticed the lyrics in “Absolutely” were describing Jobu perfectly. The first line of the song goes, “This is the story of a girl / Who cried a river and drowned the whole world.”
“It’s about [her],” Kwan told Mashable. “She’s so sad [that] she’s going to destroy the world.”
As for film references, there are plenty:
The ape ancestors in the Hotdog Finger Universe kill off their human-handed ancestors in a scene taken from 2001: A Space Odyssey—and using the same song that bookends 2001.
Evelyn stopped bullets in a style similarly seen in The Matrix, and when she makes her first successful jump to the Kung Fu Universe, you half expect her to say, “I know kung fu,” just like Neo.
The Kung Fu Universe also pays homage to Clan of the White Lotus (among other classic kung fu films) with its martial arts training montages, and In the Mood for Love, when Evelyn and Waymond talk in the alley.
The plain blue-and-white label on the Chapstick Alpha Waymond eats was a tiny Easter egg for the bland product packaging in Repo Man.
Evelyn mistakenly recounts the plot of Ratatouille with a raccoon instead of a rat, calling it Raccacoonie. Later, she jumps to a universe where she is a hibachi chef who catches her rival chef in cahoots with a racoon that controls his movements. This payoff suggests Evelyn may have been in touch with her many selves before she fully merged (or…that this is all in her head…).
This one may be a stretch, but Ke Huy Quan played Data in The Goonies, whose full name is Richard Wang. Quan’s character in Everything Everywhere is Waymond Wang.
Thanks to The Big Lebowski, this isn’t the first time we’ve had a movie with nihilist antagonists. (The connection here is probably unintentional, but it still made me giggle.)
But What Does It All Mean?!
Ask 10 people on the street what the main takeaway was from Everything Everywhere, and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. I believe the heart of this story is about accepting someone for all that they are. But there is also healing family trauma by choosing love and kindness. It could also be interpreted as a metaphor for the lengths some [queer] children have to go through to get their family to accept or understand them. There’s the obvious parallels with depression. The message about living in the moment and showing up for yourself. And we can’t forget that Worst Evelyn was the hero out of all the Evelyns, showing how “ordinary” people can still be special. Or that we all have the capacity to change for the better.
I like to think, just like the film, it’s all of these things at once.