The Jungian Journey that gets the adventure going comes after Evelyn, frustrated by the flatulent IRS bureaucrat Deidre (Curtis), auditing the Wang family laundromat business, sucker punches Deidre on her way to the elevator. Seemingly, Evelyn has misinterpreted the expression on Deidre's face as an imminent threat and over-reacts. In this instance, it's Deidre who receives a Jungian Wound, and the odyssey toward new selfhood begins (even, eventually, for Deidre, who comes to learn she's a "lovable" lesbian " in Evelyn's mind). Suddenly, there is chaos at the IRS office. Suddenly, normal domestic intranquility and quiet quest for Confucian-American balance becomes like something out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Suddenly, it's an audit to die for. As Evelyn, Waymond and Gong Gong (Kong) show us some stylized violence that is laugh out loud funny. And Deidre comes at them now as Laurie Strode channeling Michael Myers. You wish you could sic Deidre on Trump and his tax havens.
Even as Evelyn sat at Deidre's desk accompanied by Waymond and Gong Gong, she goes off on hallucinatory reveries. Waymond is seen as a superhero with gizmos capable of transporting Evelyn to other simultaneous universes, a kind of Jungian synchronicity. He wears a contraption on his head that lights up and that eerily conjures up a computer-brain interface I've been reading about lately (You can send emails by thinking it to the computer!). The interface works as a kind of wormhole through which Waymond acts as her guide on adventures that ultimately tests their continued love for each other. Similarly, she goes to strange new worlds to save her alienated relationship with Joy, who feels rejected by her conservative family for her lesbian identity and "weight issues" that Evelyn keeps remarking on. And now, this, the audit: everything coming at her, everywhere it seems, all the time.
Just before the sucker punch moment, Deidre has decided to give Evelyn "one more chance" to get the paperwork she needs to save the audit from going south -- 6 pm that day or it's curtains. There's just one item on the audit that causes the ruckus: The Wangs have declared a karaoke machine as a business expense, and Deidre isn't having any of it without more documentation -- she even circles, over and over, the receipt brought in. (This triggers for me a day I spent at Chicopee High School back in the 80s, when I was studying to be an English teacher, and sat in a class there, where the instructor handed me a photocopy of a fail paper he'd handed back to a student with the F circled and circled upper right -- about where the heart would be, if the paper were a person. I recalled, then, the walk-through metal detector coming into the school, and, later, at lunch the box milk cartons with missing childre n -- a seriously troubled school, and it didn't even have any people of color to blame.)
But still, mean Deidre, does give Evelyn one more chance to save herself. And she has one more chance to save her marriage, and to literally hold on to her daughter who threatens to enter the black hole that Joy imagines as a giant fat-f*ck bagel with everything, where she sees herself at the event horizon, soon to be swallowed up by identity rejection. But just as Waymond steps up to the plate in her fantasy life to prove himself a martial arts superhero, beating the snot out of IRS office security guards with him bumbag, so does Joy as, at first, she comes at mom from some other universe (mom and daughter are alienated -- get it?) and threatens to hurt her (Joy lashing out against the conservative rejection of her lesbian identity), but there's more (but no spoiler). Talk about Pressure Drop.
The bagel black hole becomes a metaphor that sustains the image of a world filled with human desire and light and being and bios getting swallowed up by death and destruction and war and eschatological anxiety amplified by CRISPRs and AIs laughing at them (what else could it all mean when Americans have 425 million guns circulating other than that they know something's up and intend to fight their way out of extinction?). As playful as Everything Everywhere All At Once tries to be, it is also a fantasy that Nothing Matters amplified by the hungry Bagel, with cultures (subcultures) dissolving in homogeneous mediocrity and nuclear families melting down, and people going around he/him or she/her and dressed like every day was Carnival. WTF is going on? Have we gone barking dog MAGA mad?
What if we find ourselves showing up on milk cartons, childhoods missing?
Earlier, Deidre, pointing to the many receipts of the audit on her desk, tells the Wangs that each receipt tells a story, and she looks at them as a Judgement Day figure, wanting an accounting and justification for every moment spent in life. This partially accounts for the science fiction reveries that finds Evelyn "jumping" from universe to universe within her own memories and the flotsam and jetsam of accumulated experiences and their associations (the film's opening scene depicts Evelyn in her office almost swallowed up by artifacts on the wall and a desk filled with mountains of paperwork. Each memory is a receipt with a story. The multiverse on the microlevel is also the way to freedom and new chances and new ways of seeing. This is the journey that Joy brings her mother on -- a mother with one foot in the ancient world and one in this modern America, brimming with possibility. They don't always seem like complementary worlds on the surface, but there is a lucid dreaming side to things we don't always connect to, but Joy helps her Mom connect, and Mom pulls Joy away from being absorbed by the Bagel.
Everything Everywhere All At Once is often hilarious. The kung fu scenes, especially at the IRS office, are extremely entertaining. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert seem to go out of their way to make us bust a gut and end up in stitches watching the proxy national security state (the office guards) and the life auditor (Deidre) take a beating in a carnival of earthly delights. The film has a scene where Evelyn beats the sh*t out of her tormentors from inner-outerspace with enormous rubber dildoes, in lieu of the traditional nunchucks. Beats them down with their own dick mentality. Catharsis as deus ex machina takes a kick right in the hairy walnuts.
Everything Everywhere All At Once has three parts -- 1. Everything; 2. Everywhere; 3. All At Once -- and four distinct turns coming roughly every half hour. I liked the second half hour best, where the dialogue turns to miserable lives versus living up to one's potential -- the real theme of the film. Fighting the tyranny of banality and stasis. Abbie Hoffman used to say, Revolution for the Hell of It; it's always a good idea to take a nice long sh*t to make room for the next revolution. Hold on to your sh*t too long and it goes toxic. Whether it flushes right or left depends on the hemisphere you're in. The film lovingly recalls the happy days when lefties thought postmodernism would set us all free with the wonderful relativism of values. There's something at work here to suggest a raging battle is roiling just under the surface. And maybe just in time as we head into the technological singularity where we duke it out with AIs for evolutionary supremacy. What with the quantum ahead to contend with, too, we may come out of the fracas as slaves to machines with duckrabbitting societies of privilege where 'people' converse with each other at invite-only parties speaking English at auction speed. Or we can give ourselves a second chance to recover our humanity.
I (high) recommend Everything Everywhere All At Once. You like this fortune cookie dipped in Yo Soy sauce.
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