To be Here With You: An Analysis of Family and Alienation in "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once"

 

The Poster for Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022)

 

    We tend to have certain expectations when it comes to family. Chief among these expectations is closeness. As a society, we assume that the bond between blood relatives is stronger than any other, especially the bond between parent and child. It's a bond portrayed as unbreakable and sacred, almost divine, in pretty much every culture throughout history. Yet, despite how common this assumption is, it's not uncommon to see people fail to live up to this expectation. What is that like? How can one explain the feeling of being alone whilst being surrounded by those they're supposed to feel closest to? How can we even let that happen? Directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert attempt to tackle this question in their 2022 film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, framing it as an issue gnawing away at the roots of our reality. The movie uses family and the shattering of reality to show how we alienate ourselves from those closest to ourselves, and that the only way to mend the cracks we form in our relationships is to be kind, no matter what.

Part I: A Quick Summary

    The film's central conflict revolves around Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh), and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Joy's alienation from her family leads to her nihilistic worldview, of which her multiversal counterpart Jobu Tupaki is a manifestation. Tupaki, the creator of a very literal everything bagel, seeks to find a version of Evelyn that understand her worldview so that they can truly die together. Evelyn, upon first seeing the bagel, agrees with Jobu, leading her to further alienate those around her. However, right before her complete oblivion, her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), makes a plea for everyone to be kind, even in the face of nothing mattering. Upon hearing this, Evelyn recognizes the importance of making our time important rather than simply hope to find that importance. She then begins to fight against Jobu and those serving her, not through violence, but through empathy. In doing so, she helps to mend the relationship with both her husband and her daughter. The final philosophical blow is dealt to Jobu when Evelyn says that she will "Always, always want to be," with Joy, regardless of the infinite amount of alternative paths that she could've taken and every path's inherent pointlessness. The film ends with the family, now at last together (even if not perfect), going to properly refile Evelyn's taxes.

Part II: Rifts in Family, Rifts in Reality

        With the summary out of the way, let's begin our discussion by talking about the simplest example of alienation in the family: Gong-Gong (James Hong). Everyone in the family has trouble speaking with Gong-Gong, most literally represented through language. The core cast almost all speak a mix of Chinese and English, with some characters leaning more towards one of the two languages (Waymond tends to default to Chinese, Joy speaks almost exclusively English, etc.). Gong-Gong, on the other hand, speaks only Chinese. This is already a degree of separation, but the real dividing factor is the type of Chinese the characters speak. Evelyn, Waymond, and Joy (when she speaks in Chinese), always speak in Mandarin Chinese, whereas Gong-Gong speaks exclusively in Cantonese. While the two share words, the pronunciations of said words and the languages' grammars are different, so even if you understand one, you won't understand the other. This language barrier serves to represent just how separated Gong-Gong is from the rest of the family, but especially Evelyn. We get more clear examples of their separation when Evelyn's life flashes before her eyes when she first verse-jumps. First, the literal moment she was born, the doctor apologizes that Evelyn is a girl instead of a boy. Second, we see the moment Evelyn leaves with Waymond for America, where Gong-Gong declares that Evelyn is no longer his daughter. From these, we can gleam not only the lack of attachment felt between Evelyn and her father, but also the causes of the rift between them. First, it's all but explicitly told to us that Gong-Gong clearly wanted a son, if the doctor apologizing to him for delivering a daughter wasn't confirmation enough of that. Already a rift is formed, as Evelyn now has to live with her father's perpetual disappointment (likely enforced by the society around her, if the doctor's apology indicates anything). This rift only deepens when Evelyn elopes with Waymond, a partner Gong-Gong very clearly doesn't approve of. Yet, even though Gong-Gong doesn't view Evelyn as a daughter, she still takes care of him. Her treatment is far from stellar. She treats Gong-Gong as a burden: another mouth to feed at the party, and another person required to come with her to her meeting with the IRS. This attitude towards Gong-Gong is likely a reflection of his views of Evelyn: another person they're responsible for, not family. Since Evelyn is Gong-Gong's link to the rest of the family, he doesn't fair much better with Waymond or Joy. As stated above, they can barely communicate with each other, but we also only see them interact with him when Evelyn forces them to. No matter what, Gong-Gong is tied to Evelyn and vice-versa, even though neither of them seem to want that to be the case.

    Let's shift now to Evelyn. Unsurprisingly, as our main character, most of the family's problems come back to her. As discussed, Gong-Gong had a severely negative view of her, one implied to be extremely cold and unloved, focused on value rather than connection. Evelyn was a victim of this mindset, but she is also a perpetrator of it. Even though she left her family behind, their influence lingered. We see this through how Evelyn interacts with Waymond and Joy through most of the movie. Regarding Waymond, Evelyn almost completely ignores him, either giving him tasks to do or dismissing his attempts at talking to her, even though the discussion he wants to have is an extremely important one about the state of their marriage. Even when Waymond's not around, Evelyn demeans him, at one point questioning how far he would've gotten if not for her (we see later that he would've done very well for himself if he and Evelyn didn't run away together). Their relationship reaches a breaking point when Evelyn sees an alternate universe where she didn't go with Waymond and she became a very prominent action star, prompting her to tell Waymond how much better her life was without him. Even so, Waymond still stays by her, and even helps her get more time with the IRS later in the movie. 

    I'm going to table Evelyn and Waymond's arc in the movie for now, as how their arc concludes will be very important later. For now, I want to shift to the central dynamic of the movie: Evelyn and Joy. Evelyn's trauma most clearly manifests in her treatment of Joy. About halfway through the movie, she talks about how she didn't want to Joy to turn out like her. This mindset manifests as a refusal to accept an imperfect version of her daughter. Evelyn always has something to criticize about Joy, be it that she's getting "fat," her getting a tattoo, her dating a non-Chinese person, or her being a lesbian. The latter problem seems to be the one that sticks the most, being the one thing about Joy Evelyn refuses to tell Gong-Gong about (hiding behind the excuse of Gong-Gong being "from a different time," and being "unable to accept it," a representation of Evelyn's own inability to accept her daughter's homosexuality), and one of the "problems," she blames Jobu Tupaki for (something even Jobu calls out as a ridiculous complaint when she's literally destroying realities). It's this treatment of Joy that leads to her developing a nihilistic mindset. Even in the film, Alpha-Universe Joy becomes Jobu Tupaki after Alpha-Evelyn pushes her verse-jumping abilities too far. While the whole family is practically alienated from each other, Joy suffers from it the most. Even as Jobu Tupaki, all she wants before complete annihilation is a version of her mother that will connect with her, something Joy suffers from a lack of. This is where the movie connects the family-drama to the end of reality plot. It's the rifts in the family that lead to the rifts in reality we see throughout the film, and while Jobu-Tubaki may have created the reality-annihilating everything bagel, it was Evelyn that pushed her to do so. It's Evelyn who broke reality by refusing to close old scars and opening new ones.

Part III: Mending

    So, we've discussed how the rifts were formed. How do they get mended? To answer this, we need to circle back to Waymond and the reality where Evelyn became a star. In this reality, we see Evelyn and Waymond meet again decades after they split. In this reality, Evelyn realizes a sudden emptiness within her, and tries to find out how Waymond found success. Waymond tells her that in every situation, there will always be bad (a belief not too dissimilar to Jobu Tubaki's belief that humanity will continue to confirm its own pointlessness time and time again). However, Waymond twists this belief by saying that with every negative is a positive and that no matter what, you have to focus on that positivity. This, along with a plea from her husband for compassion, causes Evelyn to see how to stop the fracturing realities. In every relationship, Evelyn focused on the negative: what she missed out on with Waymond, what she suffered through with Gong-Gong, and what she didn't get with Joy. She spent so much time on the past or on potential futures that she didn't look at what she had: an endlessly loving and loyal husband, and a daughter in desperate need of connection. She sees that she already had what she needed and works to mend it as best she can, as represented with her talk with Joy. It's this final talk that finally causes things to become normal again, and to save Jobu-Tubaki. We can also see Evelyn's growth through her shifting view of Tubaki. She starts out by thinking she needs to defeat her, but eventually grows into realizing that she needs to save her, something she can only do by trying to mend the rift between her and Joy. This arc of mending rifts is tied into the film's absurdist message, that maybe there are things we can't control. Hell, there's a lot of things we can't control. What we can control, however, is how we choose to approach life. We can choose to approach it seeking to extract any sense of meaning from reality and every last drop of value from our loved ones, or we can choose to make our own meaning by by accepting the inherent value in everyone around us and the bonds we have with them. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a movie that shows us the true core of reality: the people we're closest to.