Review of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Seen in 2026.
Stating the obvious, this is a superhero movie built on a deliberately silly set of metaphors and adages. The most central of these metaphors is the “everything bagel”, an everyday food item like something out of a Weird Al song, parodied here as a bagel with literally everything on it, not just your deli’s popular spreads. In its effects, the bagel approaches what H. P. Lovecraft called cosmicism. The two writer-directors drop Lovecraft’s racism, but they fail to make any other improvements. In fact, their bagel is less a symbol of dysteleology than a symbol of the resentful relationship between an emotionally distant parent and their mildly non-conforming young-adult child. Contrary to Lovecraft, the anthropocentrism is so strong that even rocks in a totally lifeless alternative universe are people.
In the superhero framing, the child becomes a Joker-like figure of nihilism, while the parent becomes both Paprika (2006) and Neo from The Matrix (1999). Crucially, the two figures end up using whimsical tactics that are virtually identical except in their morally dichotomous emotional valence. Whimsy is built right into the supernatural premises, which are so distantly based off of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that there is no form of credibility on offer. “The less sense it makes”, says one character explaining the writers’ feelings, “the better”.
In place of credibility, you get more and more layers of metafiction and metaphor, about being nice, about the Chinese-US migrant experience, and about the state of online discourse at the time of the film’s production: The narrow corridors of thought and conspiracy theory of the COVID-19 pandemic. The way the supernatural premises tidy up local consequences to play into conspiracy theory and The Fantastic (1970) is uncommonly lazy. The writer Ezra Klein spun the bagel motif into an idea of unfocused “everything-bagel liberalism” in political project management: Interesting but relevant only insofar as the film would probably have been better adhering to a central idea.