"Everything Everywhere All at Once," AKA One Woman's Quest to Make Her Mommy Issues Everyone Else's Problem
Wait, is this fucking play about us?
If ever there was a time for fans to rally behind a fictional villain’s righteous quest (like r/ThanosDidNothingWrong or the Killmonger Was Right crowd), Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) is it.
The fantastically outfitted, deliciously unpredictable antagonist of Everything Everywhere All at Once is a self-proclaimed nihilist whose sole guiding principle – “nothing matters” – strikes a chord with anyone who finds themself increasingly disillusioned with the futility of striving for something beyond just microdosing the feeling of not hating your life in between shifts at work. I mean, this can’t be it, right? Everything we did to prepare for adulthood has to add up to more than a slow march towards death paved with health insurance policies, the compulsion to open and close the same five apps on a loop even though they only make you feel weird and sad, and a creeping sense of dread that the disparate threads of existence might never cohere into something important, beautiful, or meaningful.
In the Alphaverse, verse-jumping technology allows people to access the skills, memories and bodies of their parallel universe alter egos. The threatening specter of Jobu Tupaki was born out of the hubris of her own mother, Alpha-Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who pushed Jobu Tupaki so hard to train her verse-jumping abilities that she breached the limits of what her mind could handle. Suddenly, she has no escape from experiencing all universes simultaneously. She feels everything and is everywhere, all at once. Staring into the infinite, mind-fracturing possibilities of the multiverse reveals to her that life is never going to make sense in any version you can dream up – even one where we have hot dogs for fingers. There’s no point in trying or caring or feeling or being here at all. The only escape is oblivion.
Except – there is something that matters to her, someone for whom she’s willing to rip apart the multiverse by its very seams: Evelyn. Her mother in some universes, her foe in others, and, in every last one of them, her best hope for figuring out if her existence has any meaning.
When you’re a child of immigrants, your creation myth begins and ends with your parents’ origin stories. The Before Immigration (B.I.) and After Immigration (A.I.) branches of the family tree are so different that they might as well be different types of wood altogether. What is lost versus what is gained in that transition forms the narrative framework of Everything Everywhere All at Once. As Daniel Kwan, one-half of the movie’s directing duo Daniels, put it: “The multiverse is so much about asking ‘what if,’ and wondering about regrets and so much of the immigrant story is about taking risks and asking ‘what if.’”
In the film’s main universe, our Evelyn is a first-generation Chinese immigrant and laundromat owner who’s stuck – stuck in an unsatisfying marriage and business, stuck with an IRS inspector who’s out to get her for misfiling her taxes, and stuck in a holding pattern with both her dad and her daughter (Joy, a version of Jobu Tupaki). When the Alphaverse variant of her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), crashes into her life to inform her of her mission to save the multiverse from Jobu Tupaki, it’s the jolt she needs to wake up after years of operating on autopilot. Armed with verse-jumping tech, Evelyn finally finds answers to the “what ifs” of her life. What if she had rejected Waymond’s marriage proposal and stayed in China instead of coming to America all those years ago? There’s another Evelyn out there who was basically destined to become Michelle Yeoh as a result – kung fu master, movie star, icon. The idea that every single decision you make spawns a separate universe where you chose differently is compelling for anyone to contemplate, but especially so for immigrants. When you decide to uproot your life and begin again in a world you barely recognize, home becomes more of an idea than a physical place you can return to. You raise your daughter to be fluent in a language and culture that’s still incomprehensible to you at times and you watch, terrified, as she faces down her own set of “what ifs” that you aren’t equipped to handle in her stead. Needless to say, that’s a substantial bridge to have never crossed in some parallel universe where you became a different person altogether.
So, yes, Jobu Tupaki might be an all-powerful being to whom the laws of conservation of matter and energy do not apply, but the part of her splintered mind that has experienced what it is to be a second-generation immigrant kid still needs to know what her mom would do, what her mom would think, and whether her mom would disapprove. Like me, her earliest ideas of the type of life she was supposed to live formed around her mom: how to move in the world while looking the way we look; how we should expect to be treated by other people in this country; how to show care to those we love; when to be satisfied and when to ask for more; what’s worth getting angry over; and how to react to getting belittled (a frequent occurrence) or celebrated (slightly more infrequent). It really should come as no surprise that, given enough strength to obliterate the multiverse with a snap of her fingers, Jobu Tupaki uses it instead to hunt for a rare version of her mom who actually listens to her and empathizes with her.
“I wasn't looking for you so I could kill you,” she tells Evelyn near the film’s conclusion. “I was just looking for someone who could see what I see, feel what I feel.” Until that point, her motivations had been unclear. We knew she was searching for Evelyn, but to what end? We saw foreboding visions of some creation or weapon that she planned to unleash, but the actual purpose remained shrouded in mystery. What could someone who believes that “nothing matters” want so badly that her single-minded pursuit of it leaves a trail of universes laid to waste in her wake?
As it turns out, her act of ultimate destruction was always aimed inward, not outward. At its core, beneath all the verse-jumping and fight choreography and googly eye sight gags, Everything Everywhere All at Once is about a daughter considering giving up on her life and her family for good, and a mother who reacts by beginning to disrupt inherited patterns of stubbornness and hurt. If Evelyn spends the movie asking “what if,” then Jobu Tupaki is asking “why” – why should she keep going if there’s no point to any of this? The only person she can think of who might know better than her is her mom. Before she finally surrenders to the void, she ransacks the multiverse in search of an Evelyn who feels the same bone-deep hopelessness as she does. Finally, common ground with the person by whom she’s always felt the most misunderstood. Now she can let go.
Her mistake – and her salvation – is underestimating Evelyn. Only Alpha-Waymond sizes Evelyn up accurately, seeing her regret, guilt, and bitterness over the way her life could’ve gone as a strength rather than a defect. Our Evelyn is “so bad at everything” that she’s “capable of anything,” including breaking her family’s cycle of shame and rejection. Unlike her father, who disowned her for marrying Waymond against his wishes, Evelyn is unwilling to watch her daughter walk away from her out of unyielding pride and obstinacy. Even if that means treating Joy’s girlfriend Becky as more than an inconvenience she simply has to tolerate. She opens her arms to Joy (and, by virtue, Jobu Tupaki) and offers her the chance to stay and learn to love each other better.
All it took was a brief detour into a universe where the conditions were inhospitable to the formation of life to put things into perspective. Maybe it’s true that, in the end, nothing really matters. But Evelyn would still choose to be by her daughter’s side anyway, in every imaginable universe.