The Blooming Rose of Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Blooming Rose of Everything Everywhere All At Once
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is one of the most important movies in years for many reasons. If you haven't seen it yet, close this tab, run outside, tickle a mailbox, and watch it. Because there will be major spoilers here. (It’s available to stream, now.)
First, to briefly set the stage. I was reading The Corpus Hermeticum, or The Way of Hermes (100-300 AD), over coffee with my spouse a couple of hours before the movie, contemplating taking the perspective of God. Hermes Trismegistus(?) bids us to actually journey within ourselves, to adopt the perspective of everything, an actual practice of divinity.
Everything's depictions make vast implications in brief moments. Being a bit of a fool, I believe in taking jokes very seriously, and Everywhere makes a lot of them. All At Once it shows us alternate universes where Evelyn is a star, a blind singer, a hibachi chef competing with another Raccacoonie-controlled hibachi chef, a hot-dog-fingered woman in a relationship with the IRS lady, a telepathic rock, and a bunch of other gags. In broad winks it implies animism, telepathy, animal communication, and the literally unimaginable as a reasonable backdrop for any reality.
At exactly 13:21, normalverse-Waymond is possessed by Alphaverse Waymond and tells Evelyn that she can either go left to her meeting with Deirdre, or right into the janitor's closet. She protests and after using magical science technology to make her reencounter her self and take account of her entire past, Waymond gives her the instructions: put your shoes on the wrong feet. Imagine you're in the janitor's closet. You might have made the wrong choice but break the pattern and use the mind. Press the button. (P.S.: Don't forget to breathe.)
Joyce makes her first dimensional jump (possibly a direct reference to /r/DimensionalJumping which has existed since ~2015), an initiation via janitor's closet, and she refuses the call. She's too busy to do kung fu and save the universe; she has to work and pay the taxwoman. Literal transcendence and access to a version of self that's an accountant is available but Evelyn's blinders are on so strong she can't even reckon with the phenomena happening before her very eyes.
EEAaO plays around with initiations, shatterings, exile. Jobu Tupaki's world was ruptured by her mother's actions but she survived it, an initiation into exile from meaning in every form. The effects of Evelyn's carelessness in a world accelerated by technology come back to haunt her; it's only her impact here that keep her harms proportionally small, but her ignorance, her blindness, her refusal to see her daughter wounds her. Joy can never be the same again; Jobu Tupaki is a randomly chosen string of sounds, a meaningless collision of syllables. She breaks and wanders the spheres, a god in every one whose mastery of the clattering symbols allows her to turn bullets into smoke and batons into dildos. In every universe she is archetypal (just scroll some GIFs), where she has embraced a form of herself, though fallen.
Jobu's total awareness overwhelms her. "Nothing matters" is the nihilistic theme here, but her mistake is that in fact everything matters; every possibility and every universe is now connected and intertwined because of the actions of the split, the journeyer, the magician. And being a magician means taking responsibility for everything that happens in one's life. But Jobu's warped perspective, marred by pain and trauma, prevents her from seeing the beauty of being everything. There is too much weight for each moment to be as light as it should; instead it is weighed down, deadened, and she even tries to find an escape in the colossal, fatal density of The Bagel.
When Evelyn dares to undergo her own initiation to meet her daughter across the universes, she is persecuted by her own for it out of wild, misunderstanding fear. But Evelyn has her own pain from her father, and she cannot cope and risks losing herself completely. Not until Waymond's heart shows her the way, again and again, that love is the answer. In every universe where Waymond exists he exerts his love; he matters, everywhere. Once Evelyn reconnects with her heart, she can embrace every universe with a sense of dynamism and play, defeating her foes by realizing their inherent kinship by their very intertwining. She takes a bullet aimed at her and transforms it into a googly eye; a symbol of childishness that had once triggered her own repression and shame of freedom lost, becomes the child-like symbol of vision.
Love opens Evelyn's heart and allows her to act with wisdom: truth-telling, holding space, accepting, and seeing. Jobu goes beyond, to cross the void; but their healing gives her the equanimity to return and bridge between worlds, reconnecting with her mother, a blooming rose across universes. It's tremendous how the movie manages to depict so much for me to read into while keeping the story relatable, rooted in human experience, sorrow, nihilism, fear of the unknown and the overwhelming complexity of an increasingly connected and hypervisible world. I can't be sure if all of these parallels are intentional, but for those on a path of spiritual exploration, EEAO practically shouts from your face its esoteric implications by its metaphysical nods and winks. (Even the production companies are suggestive yet oblivious: both Year of the Rat and Ley Line Entertainment don't produce particularly esoteric works even as they nominally symbolize them.)
This story feels like a culmination of both time-traveling reality-bending movies and a vortex of cultural forces contemplating the universe, the mystical, what it means to see all, and how to balance that against the grounding forces of the "here" and "now". Regardless, when we learn to see with wisdom we bloom, ourselves.