Nothing matters, so we can do whatever we want
The optimism of despair in Everything Everywhere All At Once
I don’t know what it is about everything I’ve been watching lately, but generational trauma as a theme runs through so many of the media properties I’ve recently consumed. Encanto, the second season of Russian Doll, the Pixar movie Turning Red, and now Everything Everywhere All At Once. Or maybe it’s just that my mind keeps picking at it, finding that loose thread and pulling it out instead of stepping back and taking in the tapestry as a whole.
I’m late to the Everything Everywhere All At Once party. I’m late to anything with a theatrical release tbh; the pandemic took away a lot of the pleasure I had in going to a movie theater as an event and absolutely nothing excited me enough not to wait for it show up on HBOMax. In the case of Everything Everywhere All At Once, my local indie theater only began showing screenings last week, when it available on streaming as well. But I did go see this at my local indie with Bear and a few friends, the first outing to a cinema I’ve had in almost three years.1
I can’t think of a better movie to break my dry spell with.
I laughed until I cried, cried until I laughed, and then just straight up bawled nonstop through the last 20 minutes of the film. Then sobbed on my way home. Even now, I start tearing up whenever I think about it, which makes me want to watch it again so I can have a proper cry for the catharsis.
I haven’t felt this way about anything in a long, long time.
I haven’t felt anything in a long, long time.
🚨 WARNING: Spoilers ahead 🚨
If you haven’t seen Everything Everywhere All At Once, please, I beg you—go do so IMMEDIATELY. Not because you need to have watched it to understand this newsletter, but because you are doing yourself a disservice to have not seen it. I can’t even begin to describe what a ride it is, and how much you deserve to give yourself this much joy.
No, that’s not entirely true. I’ve felt this deeply about a lot of things—including and especially BTS—very recently, but I have not felt this way about anything new for literal years. But very little has broken through the general sense of malaise and ennui that seems to have permeated my media consumption; everything I like seems to be more of an exception rather than a genuine way out of my rut. And I am in a rut. Fucking hell, I’ve been in a rut since 2017 and thought maybe this was just a part of growing up, of becoming adulterated, as it were. It sucked, I hated it, there was a resignation in it, and I hated most that there was resignation in it. I will never again exist in a state of chronic delight the way I used to when I was younger, and that was simply the way of life, I guess.
As I have written multiple times on my newsletter, I am drowning in vibes. Nothing interests me—not because I’m depressed,2 but because no one is giving me a reason to care. Everything feels tired. While in the early stages of the pandemic, I needed to retreat to my comfort reads and comfort movies, I’m slowly starting to feel safe enough to feel adventuresome in my media consumption again. But instead of a new frontier, I find myself right back walking the same old streets I did before, only this time the paths are choked, crumbling, and overgrown with weeds, and the realtors are trying to sell me on a property I already own.
In my monthly Lexical Gaps, I’ve been struggling to come up with books I’ve been reading, partially because I’m not reading much, but mostly because I just can’t connect to most of it. And I want to. So desperately. Or, barring connection, I want to be able to finish a book. My success rate has been rather abysmal.
Movies and TV shows aren’t exempt either. I started Obi-Wan Kenobi and my god…I am bored. I am SO BORED. And I don’t want to be bored! I love Ewan McGregor! Little Leia is freaking adorable! But I can’t find it in myself to give a shit about an Obi-Wan suffering from PTSD and guilt—not because I can’t find him sympathetic, but because the show hasn’t given me a single reason I should care aside from his name. I can dredge up a smidge of feeling because of my affection for the character and his history (especially from the Clone Wars show), but if I didn’t have any of that? Obi-Wan is just an incredibly dull piece of canonized fanfic with no real emotional stakes, or at least, poorly realized emotional stakes. I don’t care enough to figure out what the emotional stakes are.
Also remember when Star Wars used to be fun? It hasn’t been fun in a long, long time, and it was in a galaxy far, far away.
But I don’t want to talk about Star Wars. I wanted to talk about Everything Everywhere All At Once. It is everything the critics were raving about—funny, absurd, profound, touching, heartbreaking and heartwarming—and I felt absolutely all of those emotions and more while watching.
What I didn’t expect to feel was an overwhelming sense of grief.
For me, grief is different from sadness, which is temporary and usually in response to some sort of external circumstance. Grief is a constant thing, a wound that scabs over and heals but never truly goes away. Grief, like the arthritis in my shattered-and-reconstructed knee, sometimes aches and hurts without warning, hobbling me from the physical activities I take for granted.
I don’t often think about generational trauma. I consider my life fairly charmed, not to mention my Aries moon/Type 7/ADHD makes it hard for me to hold on to pain for long. To think of myself as someone who is a product of generational trauma seems…false. Or if not false, then disconnected from me, perhaps. Unlike most portrayals of fractured parent-sibling immigrant relationships, my relationship with my immigrant mother is quite close, and her own relationship with her mother was close as well. During my teenage years and early adulthood, my mother and I butted heads (to put it lightly), and I know—know acutely in absolutely every universe that exists—what the pain that Joy describes feels like.
“I don’t want to hurt anymore, and for some reason when I’m with you, it just hurts the both of us.”
A lot of movie critics have touched upon the mother-daughter dynamics of this film, and while a lot of the emotional aspects of Everything Everywhere All At Once are universal, the reason for the pain is so specific to children of immigrants, and especially children of East Asian immigrants. The pain is not because there is a lack of love. There is so much love, and we know it. We feel it. It is not that our parents do not desire to understand us, it only that a thousand different choices in a thousand different universes have led us to this moment—where layers upon layers of traumatic separation and upheaval across generations have created a fissure so deep, it feels as though no amount of love can bridge it.
I think it’s telling that the moment Joy tears away from her mother is the moment Evelyn introduces her daughter’s girlfriend to her own conservative father. In a typical Western movie, this would the culmination, the climax, the high point of the film where Evelyn comes to terms with herself and begins the first steps toward healing the relationship with her daughter. Then we would cut to the epilogue, where we would see everyone a clear and delineated path toward reconciliation.
But that is not how it works. Sometimes, it hurts more to be validated than it does to be rejected. The most agonizing words I ever heard from my mother was I’m proud of you. Nothing hurt more because it was all I had ever wanted to hear, yet it didn’t bring me happiness—only pain. The endless, searing pain of having gotten what I wanted and finding it nothing like what I expected, and the resulting self-loathing that stains your soul forever after. Everything pure becomes sullied by the black void of your emotions.
“I was just looking for someone who could see what I see, feel what I feel.”
How many times have I said this to my own mother, a sincere plea not for understanding, but sympathy. My mother can never and will never know what I feel; she lived not just another lifetime, but another language, another country, another culture ago. It’s not because she doesn’t want to feel what I feel; it’s because it is impossible.
Because my spoken Korean is awkward, because my mother raised me away from home, because the Japanese stole our land from my grandmother, and on and on and on. Tiny choices that shattered and scattered like shards of a broken mirror, I have been severed from the complete image of myself.
And that is what I grieve the most.
The thing about most multiverse media is that they tend to use multiverse concept as set dressing for some sort of action or plot-oriented narrative, but very few take the concept of a multiverse as metaphor. For what? For whatever the story needs it to be. In the case of Everything Everywhere All At Once, the concept is flexible enough to stand for generational trauma, ADHD,3 and also…existential despair.
Lemon and I once tried to parse the communications styles of (white) American boomers, Gen X, millennials, and zoomers through the lens of the collective traumas each generation has endured. For white boomers, the relative homogeneity of their youths was shattered by the Civil Rights movement, which turns them all defensive at the drop of a hat. Gen X lived under the existential threat of nuclear war for much of their formative years, leading to a fatalistic sort irony. Millennials enjoyed a relatively prosperous childhood before our optimism about the future was destroyed by 9/11 and the Iraq War. And two enormous financial crises. Despite the lack of any real hope for our futures, a hopeful outlook remains in our unbearable earnestness.
But Gen Z…Gen Z was born and raised into despair. The climate is fucked, possibly beyond repair, late-stage capitalism has rotted away the foundations of American society, fascism is on the rise and our government can’t do anything to stop it, a worldwide pandemic is raging and no one seems to care anymore, and on and on and on. What is the point?
There is no point. Nothing matters.
This is the existential question with which we all have to grapple in times like these, not just Gen Z. But I think for Gen Z, this sort of nihilism has them laughing at the absurd, a sort of sad clown defiance, or else has them adopt a rigid set of rules with which to police themselves and each other in a misguided attempt to feel some semblance of control. Everything Everywhere All At Once makes its audience feel overwhelmed and inundated by too much sensory information, in much the same way we are all constantly inundated by too much news, too much social media (but not enough socialization), too much, too much, too much. When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.
Nothing matters.
So what do you do when you’ve reached the event horizon of despair? Through the character of Joy/Jobu Tobacki, we get a passive Nietzschean nihilism, a resignation to the joyless meaningless of existence and a “will toward nothing.” (The Bagel, as it were.) We might get some relief every once in a while, but it always balances itself back out into an endless, howling void.
But through Waymond we see a different sort of philosophy, one not rooted in nihilism but a sort of absurdism. That he laughs, that is he is kind, that he looks for the good because it is his only way to cope with despair. Beyond that event horizon, you can choose to fight, you can choose to give up…or you can choose to laugh. Our lives have no meaning beyond what meaning we choose to give it, so why not choose kindness instead of pain?
You might as well laugh because it sure as fuck feels better than crying.
I understand that in my bones. I don’t hold onto pain very well, after all. There is something radical about laughing in the face of darkness, and not in defiance of despair, but because of it. It’s a very Asian sort of philosophy in its own way, derived from the teachings of the Buddha, in contrast to the Christian idea of justice. Nirvana is nothingness, but Heaven is a reward. If you don’t believe in Heaven and believe nothingness is release from suffering, you might as well enjoy the ride until the end.
If nothing matters, then we can do whatever we want.
How freeing that is.
some housekeeping notes 🧹
Going forward, all essays like this will live in the section of the newsletter called Obscure Arts. If you just wan’t regular old updates, then you can unsubscribe from the essays under your Substack account (if you have one). Click on your profile > manage subscription, then uncheck all you don’t want to get in your inbox!
사랑해,
JJ
The last movie I saw in the theater before this was in 2019. It was Cats.
…yeah.
For the first time in years, I’m actually not depressed!
I have never seen anything that comes as close to visualizing the way my brain functions as this movie.
I studied writing in undergrad and I don't have the words for this movie -- so I'm glad you did. I wish I could draw/paint/etc. because all my feelings are colors and sounds and explosions of the senses. ADHD won't let me properly compute it all but it was profound -- an experience like no other.