• What ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ represents

Everything Everywhere All at Once may be the most reviewed movie at present due to the number of prestigious awards it bagged this awards season, including seven awards at the 95th Academy Awards last week.

The movie, featuring Academy Awards Best Actress Michelle Yeoh, Best Supporting Actor Ke Huy Quan, Best Supporting Actress nominee Stephanie Hsu, and Best Supporting Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, is a 2022 American science fiction comedy-drama film directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The movie also won the Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Original Script awards at the Oscars.

In Psych Matters this week, we explore what this award-winning movie represents, and must warn the reader of Everything Everywhere All at Once spoilers.

‘The universe is so much bigger than you realise’ – Alpha Waymond

Everything Everywhere All at Once explores many themes including the basics like action, adventure, comedy, and fantasy, and complex themes such as LGBTQIA+, dark comedy, absurdism, and existence. The storyline follows Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese-American immigrant who, while being audited on her laundromat transactions by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), must connect with parallel universe versions of herself to prevent a powerful villain from destroying the multiverse. Two decades previously, Evelyn eloped to the United States with her husband Waymond and had a daughter, Joy. Waymond is trying to serve Evelyn divorce papers, and Evelyn’s traditional and hard-to-please father is visiting for her Chinese New Year/birthday party. Evelyn is also reluctant to accept her daughter’s queer relationship with a non-Chinese girlfriend.

Evelyn’s life takes a surreal turn when she discovers her connection to multiple parallel universes and is confronted with the task to save the world. She is expected to navigate these parallel universes where she meets different versions of herself, each with their own unique lives and choices. She must confront the different versions of herself and come to terms with her own past choices, including the ones that led to her daughter’s current life decisions. Evelyn also discovers that she is the only one who can save the multiverse from destruction, as she possesses a unique ability that enables her to jump between different parallel universes.

Jobu: “Every new discovery is just a reminder…”

Evelyn: “We’re all small and stupid”

The film also features several psychological themes and principles in connection to Evelyn’s life, relationships, and choices. The film challenges the notion of reality and how people perceive it. It raises the question of whether what we see and experience is really what is happening or just our perception of it. The directors have also included several metaphors in the movie that provide endless possibilities of connections to the audience.

In the movie, mirrors are used as a metaphor for self-reflection and self-discovery. Evelyn encounters different versions of herself in the multiverse, and each version represents a different aspect of her identity. The mirrors allow her to see these different versions of herself and confront her own past choices. This is something we, as humans, often wonder. What if we had made a different choice? 

The concept of the multiverse itself is also a metaphor for the many different paths that our lives can take based on the choices we make. In the movie, as Evelyn travels through different parallel universes, she encounters different versions of her loved ones, including her daughter and her husband. This represents the idea that there are many possible versions of our lives, and each decision we make can lead us down a different path.

‘Another year, pretending we know what we’re doing, but really we’re just going around in circles’ – Evelyn

The bagel, circles, and googly eyes can be seen everywhere in the movie. Although the simple outlook on these elements present in the movie looks absurd and amusing, their presence toughens the meaning of the plot. Critics argue that the circles in the story, starting from the IRS inspector circling her paperwork in black ink, connect with Evelyn becoming aware of the circular nature of her life and it is also argued that the circles represent Evelyn’s dissatisfaction with her extremely mundane life with her family.

The everything bagel, a tool to destroy the multiverse, was created by Jobu Tupaki, a version of Eveyln’s daughter Joy, after becoming aware of the meaninglessness of her existence. The bagel has everything on it yet its core is empty, like a black hole. The bagel works as a symbol of Evelyn and Joy’s nihilistic worldview. Critics say that the destructive nature of the bagel, and the fact that its original purpose was to destroy its creator, Jobu, demonstrates that the bagel also denotes despair, once one discovers the hollowness of their existence.

The googly eyes symbolise Waymond’s (the husband’s) philosophy of life that even if existence is meaningless, one can find joy within it. He puts them on everything he can find. Evelyn, who is dissatisfied with her life and husband, removes them and rejects his attempts at humour and happiness. The googly eyes and the bagel are also visual opposites. When compared side by side, the googly eyes and bagels resemble the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang.

‘Every rejection, every disappointment has led you here to this moment’ – Alpha Waymond

The film touches on the idea of memory and how traumatic events can shape our perception of the world. The protagonist is haunted by memories of the events of her past life which brought her rejection, disappointment and trauma. Evelyn failed at many things, but each of these failures connected her to a different version of herself who succeeded. Some of the best Everything Everywhere All at Once quotes are reminders that failure is inevitable in life, and it is how people respond to life’s challenges that matter to them.

The film also emphasises the importance of emotional intelligence and empathy. The protagonist’s ability to understand and empathise with different versions of herself is crucial to her success in navigating the parallel universes and saving her loved ones. It also explores how Evelyn’s perception of the world moulds the environment around Joy, the daughter, which drives her to a very dark place in her life without the feelings of acceptance, belonging, and the simple cravings to be understood by someone.

‘I wasn’t looking for you so I could kill you. I was just looking for someone who could see what I see, feel what I feel’ – Jobu Tupaki

Jobu Tupaki, the villain, who has lost all sense of morality after experiencing everything in the multiverse all at once hunts down various versions of her mother, all in an attempt to find someone who could share her immense pain. Until she finally comes face to face with Evelyn. Jobu Tupaki seems like a heartless villain with a motivation to end versions of Evelyn, the audience is told that the villain is on the look for her. However, when Jobu finds what she’s been searching for, it is revealed that she was driven by a desire for companionship and simply wanted to be understood, (by her own mother).

There has been a significant amount of psychological research on mother-daughter relationships. The quality of the mother-daughter relationship can have a significant impact on the daughter’s emotional development and how an insecure attachment can lead to anxiety and insecurity. Conflict is a natural part of any relationship like the conflicts present between Evelyn and Joy. Although the movie is categorised as science fiction and action, overall it feels like the movie’s main theme was indeed the different magnitudes of human relationships exploring the ideas of love, attachment, belongingness and self-discovery.

(The writer is a mental health professional and has, over the past 10 years, contributed to several Sri Lankan media publications in both English and Sinhala languages, focusing on topics related to psychology and counselling)

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.