Movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, psychoanalysis, psychology, family therapy.
On a recent road trip, I heard a New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Stephanie Hsu, one of the stars of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. She commented that she watched the premiere with her mother and, at the end of the film, she turned to her mother to see if she was OK with it. She was afraid that her mother might not get it, for reasons I will try to make clear soon, but her Mother's experience was one of gratitude. "You got it," she said, indicating that the film captures something essential about the experience of raising adolescent kids in this country as an Asian immigrant.
Based on the heartfelt endorsement of Hsu's mother, I recommended
it to one of my patients struggling with similar issues without my having seen it first. My patient dutifully watched
it and thought it would be something good to talk about with her family, but,
she said, she didn’t understand the multiverse aspect of the film and wondered
if I would watch it so that we could talk about that part. I was happy to do that, and the reluctant wife
was happy to go along to make it into a date instead of an assignment. Since it is not streaming this is the first
movie we have seen in a theater in almost three years!
Wow. I should preview
movies before recommending them to patients.
This film has some rough edges and rough spots. The construction of the
film appears to suggest that the filmmakers are trying to appeal to a young
audience – so I might cringe at recommending a movie with graphic butt plug humor
to an older, immigrant patient. On the
other hand, the central message of the film – essentially that love conquers
all – might cause me to cringe at the idea of recommending it to a
younger/adolescent audience. The fact
that it is such a good film in part because of the cheesy special effects, not
in spite of them, and because of the somewhat cloying and heavy handed message,
not in spite of it, will lead me to continue to recommend it, but there will be
appropriate warnings depending on the client. Appropriate warnings that I wasn't able to offer this client. My guess is that she wants to talk about more than the multiverse aspect, but that is an important component of the film...
So, the multiverse…
This film has, as a central element the idea that there are infinite
universes and a new universe is created each time that we make a decision. If we turn left, there are a set of
consequences that follow and if we turn right, same thing, and we live in each of
these multiverses.
The multiverse is pretty standard science fiction fare, I
think, and it is an intriguing psychological model. All those close calls we’ve had in our
lives? Somewhere there is a universe
where the bad alternative happens and we are maimed or dead in that universe,
but in this universe, of course, we are still living. How else to explain the incredible luck and
fortune that lands us in the particular place where we are now? And if we aren’t so lucky? Well, in some alternate place we are. Either way there is solace, but also a way of making meaning of this particular life and how we have lived it.
The way that this idea gets applied in this film is that the
fulcrum of history – or the future – is being determined by the lives of Evelyn
Wang (Michelle Yeoh),
a woman who left her family in China when her lover Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) asks her to
marry him and move to the United States.
They did this and they opened a laundry and had a child, Joy (Stephanie Hsu - the woman in the interview) who
is now in her early twenties and a lesbian.
The action revolves around a special day in the life of Wangs, the day
when they throw a party to celebrate their business and marriage to impress
Evelyn’s estranged father, Gong Gong (James Hong).
Evelyn is a tiger Mom, berating her husband, running her
business, cooking for her father, keeping track of which of her customers is putting shoes in the
washing machines (which is, of course, against the rules), and tracking her
daughter – giving no one the time of day because she is too busy and too
stressed to manage all that is going on around her – and what is going on
around her is that everything is falling apart.
Her daughter is not living up to her standards and her daughter’s
homosexuality is something that she is struggling with and hides from her
father. Oh, and her husband is filing
for divorce, the papers are written up but she hasn't seen them yet and doesn't know they are coming.
The absurd but essential plot idea is that the fate of the
universe rests in the hands of this woman who means nothing to no one – except perhaps
to her daughter, who experiences her as a repressive and unhelpful mother. It turns out that alpha Waymond – the Waymond
from the alphaverse, the place where people first learned to move between the
multiverses, has been searching for the right Evelyn among all of the Evelyns
that exist – he has been searching for the Evelyn that has the power to prevent
the most terrible thing from happening – that the entire universe of multiverses will be pulled into
the equivalent of a black hole, but much worse because, in addition to a
gravitational pull, this black hole, shaped like a bagel, has a toxic emotional
pull. Who would create such a
thing?
Joy from the alphaverse – where her tiger mom, alphaverse Evelyn, directed her to do so much jumping between multiverses so that they could
accumulate power – got so tired of being used by her mother and so fractured by the multiverse jumping that she became the evil Jobu Topaki and built the Black Hole Bagel. None of the other Evelyns that Waymond has
found had the power to stop Jobu Topaki because, Waymond surmises, all of them
were more successful that this most pathetic of all Evelyns. Because this Evelyn is the product of the
worst possible decision at every turn, she is the one who is most closely
connected to all of the Evelyns in all of the Mulitverses. This, in turn, is critical because when we
jump between multiverses, we jump into other versions of our selves – and all
that we can bring back are the skills that our selves have gained in the
alternate universe.
God, I hope I haven’t lost you. If you are still hanging in there, this Evelyn, the
one we get to know so well in the first “act” of this movie, “Everywhere”, is
perfect for the job because she is the least competent and gifted of all the
Evelyns in the multiverse. What a great
premise for a movie! I am a superhero –
I have the most superpowers of any superhero – because I am the weakest of all
possible version of – myself. My
superpower is that I can tap into what I woulda shoulda coulda been… Oh, if only. Imagine what I could have been! And Evelyn gets to do that right before our
eyes…
The cute part of this movie is that this doesn’t mean that
we move into a multiverse that is filled with fantastic and fabulous
alternative versions of Evelyn and her family, but recognizable ones. Some are absurd (the universe where everyone’s
fingers are hot dogs is farcically funny), but the ultimate fight scene in the
film that takes place in the alphaverse in a generic suburban mall! Even the most talented and successful
versions of Evelyn end up in gorgeous, but still dingy places. Even the best versions of ourselves live in
places very much like the one we actually live in. And even the best versions of Evelyn have the
same central problems in everyday living – and the most important one, of
course, is the problem of how to deal with an unruly teenager who is marching
to beat of a very different cultural drum.
The brilliance of this campy, ridiculous film is that it
presents alternate universes that are believable neighbors of the one we live in. And, the other brilliant part of it is that
those versions of ourselves, which are very different, are also recognizable,
at core, as versions of who we are. Drab
Evelyn is still visible in glamorous Evelyn.
Waymond’s essentially good character is consistent in the more competent
versions of himself, and Joy’s befuddled objections to the old ways of her
ancestors are an apparent factor in the evilness that is Jobu Topaki.
Parenthetically, this becomes a really fun acting
opportunity for these very gifted thespians.
Further, it is an opportunity to express the range of characters
possible for a marginalized group that has been stereotyped as monocharacterological. We discover the character ranges within each
of the actors, but also within the frequently sequestered cultural niches that
are inhabited by first generation Asian immigrants who can be dismissed, like
all minorities, as being essentially alike, not because they are, but because
our disinterest in them makes them so.
Ultimately I think this film, in its absurdity, paints a
potentially spot on picture of the generational conflicts that I am seeing in
my consulting room. Harried, anxious,
hard working parents are terrified when the children that they have chosen to
raise in this country because of the opportunities that it will afford those
children freak out when the children take advantage of those
opportunities. The children,
misperceiving this as an attempt to control them, turn away from the parents, creating
the unfathomable pain within the parents.
When the parents are able to weather this tremendously difficult period;
when they are able to remain steadfastly committed to their children while
being bewildered by them but respecting the boundaries the children erect, can frequently greet them as those children
emerge from the process of individuating themselves in mutually beneficial
ways. The depth of the divide can, I have seen, ultimately forge tremendously powerful bonds.
Of course this is true not just of immigrant parents but of
all parents who are navigating the complex waters of the individuation of their
children. Our youth oriented culture
supports the branching out of children – it supports their expressing in
various ways their uniqueness. This is
part of what makes our culture attractive across the world. But it also creates a difficult position for
the older generation. We have to trust
that the essential values that we have inculcated will withstand the powerful
cultural currents that will sweep our children in unexpected directions. As we watch them tumble and turn through that
maelstrom, staying connected to, interested in, and loving of the people who can
seem to be, at times, alien creatures, is a challenge.
It occurs to me that recommending this film – a film that
relies so garishly on the worst of our American movie tropes (think Bill and
Ted’s Excellent Adventure meets Walt Disney’s sappiest happy ending with just a
dash of R-rated Beavis and Butthead) – to immigrant parents may, inadvertently,
be a good test of whether immigrant parents – or just plain parents of
teenagers – have what it takes to weather the storms of children who individuate. Can they enjoy the humor in it? Can they recognize how their superpower is their lack of power?
On the other side, can adolescent children stomach the
saccharine desires of their parents to connect with them while recognizing the
essential need to also have those parents recognize their independence? Can they learn from this film (and their
lived experience) to respectfully stand up for what they believe in and trust that
their parents, when given enough information, can join them in celebrating who
it is that they are and who it is that they coming to be?
Of course, watching it myself (and living through my own
version of it) will, I hope, improve my ability to be a vicarious passenger in
my patients’ voyages towards not just survival, but the expression of our most basic
desire – to love those we care about most.
Perhaps this is the absurd element at the heart of this movie – that of
all the gin joints in all the world, the only one that matters is the one that
we are living in – and if that gin joint disintegrates, the universe
disintegrates with it, so we’d best invest all that we have in maintaining it.
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