For anyone who didn’t get the hype about Everything Everywhere All At Once, this is for you.
You’ll read this essay and know exactly what the big deal is.
The film has so much going on, it’s easy to lose the thread amidst the chaos. Kung fu fighting with dildos sticking out of butts (spoiler alert). Lovers playing piano with hotdog fingers…
Plots weave, heave and crash into one another.
To some, the movie feels like a big ol’ mindfuck… without consent.
Meanwhile, there’s a whole legion of fans foaming at the mouth who can’t get enough.
If you look at those fans and think; ‘Did that many people get dropped on their heads at birth?’ or ‘How do people have such bad taste?’ or ‘Was 2023 Oscars just virtue signaling to Asians?’ then come with me, let’s go on a journey.
I’ll show you what you missed, why you missed it and how it proves this film is the most subtle sledgehammer of its generation.
Why?
Because it’s a perfect analogue to explore one of the most important things we could possibly talk about – suicide. From your favourite angle: intergenerational trauma.
Also known as ✨ s p i c y f e e l i n g s ✨.
Yes, of course it’s not actually your favourite angle.
Claims have been made, let’s begin.
First, the big picture.
Zoom out.
What story does the film tell?
There’s a family… Grandad, mother and father, daughter.
The daughter is deeply rejected, feeling intense pressure and simply trying to be herself. Her gay self. Her name is Joy.
Joy’s mother, the source of pressure, didn’t get the life she ‘should’ have, because she ran away from home to follow her heart.
Grandad disapproved of Joy’s mother, big time. Even banished her.
Joy’s dad is caught between everyone, just wanting people to smile.
What story is being told?
When you strip it all back, it’s about pressure going from generation to generation. Like an old debt growing interest, until eventually someone pays for it with the ultimate price – their life.
It’s a pretty old story.
A story of prejudice, fear, judgement.
But also a story of wanting to protect – our loved ones, ourselves.
It’s a story many can relate to.
But also one many can’t.
It’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on though, because so much is going on.
The movie feels like a surprise acid trip.
Right from the start it’s tense with frenetic energy.
It’s bombarding.
The opening shot pulls us through a mirror with weird music into a cluttered but mundane setting. Action, blocking, dialogue and movement all whir together into a storm that kinda feels like being assaulted.
If you want to look into the mirror at your own family, you just might find beautiful and horrific things hiding in wait.
That discomfort, the feeling of nails on chalkboard, it’s like the set was decorated by tv static.
Why do some people love it and others hate it?
The answer to this reveals why some ‘get’ it, and others think those people are idiots.
Some love it because it’s relatable.
The feeling of having so much happening in your brain that it spills out into your environment, that the disorder and chaos of your moment to moment thoughts, constantly behind on tasks and actions and duties and obligations, papers hoarded and collected just in case, constant anxieties choked away so you can barely keep it together for another ten minutes of survival because the kids need x and dad needs y and the house needs z and the business needs b and the-.
If you haven’t lived in a way that feels like the cluttered house of a multi-cultural multi-generational family, you wont understand the intensity of the mundane everyday.
It feels multi-dimensional.
What story is being told here?
It’s not cognitive, it’s experiential.
The feeling of being in the presence of a woman like the mother in that film, there’s a simmering level of background ‘noise’ that can put you on edge.
It’s tough to be in the presence of people like that, it can feel like nails on a chalk board.
Let me articulate with a story of my own.
Everyone felt my anxiety except me.
One time, I did a big project at work.
It took about six months of working beyond my full time hours, was extremely complex and stressful and it basically beat me bloody.
I thought I was doing alright, considering the impossible deadlines, the high stakes and my total lack of leadership and corporate experience.
But… looking back, I’m not so sure.
One day a colleague gave me a wake up call.
‘Are you ok, Said? You haven’t been acting yourself lately.’
Of course I was ok – I had a lot to do is all.
And, you know, working in suicide prevention, you want to get things right.
‘Yeah I’m ok! Just stressed of course, what do you mean?’
‘Well you’ve been very intense.’
Up until that point, I’d been finding the team so difficult to work with because people would drag their feet in meetings, or kick up a big fuss and then not follow through on the priorities they fought for.
Why were they so resistant to sharing info we all need?
Why didn’t they want to talk about the user experience or other important things that we really needed to cover?
I hadn’t seen myself through other people’s eyes during this project. I was only looking at others.
My instinct was to hand wave and dismiss her concerns but something pinged in my guts.
I could tell she was stepping out of her comfort zone to flag this with me, so it was the least I could do to slow down and listen.
What I found rocked me.
The closer attention I paid, the more I could see how different my reality was to everyone else’s.
The story in my head did not match the story in theirs.
I started to notice in meetings how people rippled in response any time I asked a question, as though I was dragging my nails down chalkboard.
I was basically the mother character in the film (or maybe even the grandad if I dare look that deeply, 🤮).
So how did I have such a deep mismatch between how I felt and how others felt around me?
I’d never noticed before this – I had anxiety.
I don’t feel it in my body, I don’t feel it in my lungs, I had no internal perception of anxiety at all, and yet if I looked at my behaviour all the signs were there.
My speech was quicker, my actions become more frenetic, I was grinding my teeth in my sleep, I wasn’t taking care of myself and I certainly wasn’t taking care of my partner or other important parts of my life.
People got a very different Said than what I thought they did.
Their map of Said included extras. Things not to say, things not to do. So many things like invisible boxes all around me in every conversation we had, cluttered noisy things that confused me, taking up mental space as I had to figure out why everyone was being so weird.
Life wanted to teach me to ask an important question.
What story is being told here?
The movie perfectly connects the seen to the unseen.
People familiar with this internal disconnect know others like this.
They know someone with a mind that’s cluttered and busy and anxious and completely blind to how it impacts others.
The music, the cinematics, the dialogue, blocking, even multiple languages happening at once so conversations feel like meteors crashing. It’s familiar territory and they tend to appreciate how well it’s articulated.
But if this is new to you, if you don’t live in this environment or haven’t spent long there, or maybe have forgotten what it’s like, then this experience will cause you to think probably along the same lines as my colleagues: is he trying to make me feel this way?
Does he want to make me feel confused? Does he want to make me feel belittled? Does he want to make me feel anxious?
Not at all! That was never my intention, my intention was to do the things that needed doing!
I was the only person blind to my own anxiety, it rolled off me in waves. It was obvious from the outside, and totally invisible from the inside. But it didn’t look like anxiety from their perspective, it looked like ‘intensity’.
In the same way, the daughter could ask herself the same questions my colleagues were probably asking themselves.
But when it’s someone you work with, versus the woman who is meant to love and support you and create a safe haven for you to find out who you are… well, it hits different.
Imagine the voice of younger, pre-teen Joy trying to figure out life and wondering about her mum…
Does she want me to feel this way?
All this pressure to perform, to be good, to get good grades, to succeed, to live out the dreams mum never got to, this unbearable weight. Like it feels so heavy that it might just become a black hole trying to suck me into it. Until I decide fuck it why shouldn’t I feed the hole my thoughts and my memories and my achievements and my love and my joy because all I really know at this point is the unbearable pit of darkness that’s bigger than my ability to process or control or even experience. Maybe I should feed it myself while I’m at it. What does it all matter anyway? Life is just pain.
How can she love me if she doesn’t even accept me?
All those questions which would have tumbled around in her mind growing volume and density and never being spoken.
Questions which could never be expressed because anxiety isn’t the only invisible wall. There’s also prejudice. Distrust. Hurt.
Family trauma.
Is that what a mother wants for her daughter?
Of course not! She wanted her daughter to never feel her own pain of regret. She wanted Joy to live up to her own potential. The innate potential she feels she didn’t get to live up to herself.
She would never consciously reject her own daughter in the same way her father rejected her.
Yet unconsciously that’s exactly what happened.
Joy’s grandfather wasn’t actively trying to hurt Joy’s mother, he didn’t want to break her heart, he was trying to protect her in the best way he knew how. He wanted her to excel and probably rise up further than he had. He wanted to protect the image of the family he’d built.
Each character misunderstands the next because of noise blocking them from empathy.
The fears, doubts and insecurities of each person adds up into these huge invisible walls people don’t know are there, caging them into a life they didn’t sign up for.
It’s the same thing you feel when you get home from work, your partner tells you what went wrong and you jump in and try to solve it. You’re listening to the noise not the signal. The noise in your head, not the signal coming from theirs.
I’ve heard people say this movie felt like it was celebrated for virtue signaling.
Watching a film like that it’s easy to experience this extreme level of discomfort and ask ‘am I having the experience they intended?’ almost looking at the film creators in the same way my colleagues looked at me or how the family members looked at each other.
I don’t think the Daniel’s made a film to make people feel dumb or frustrated.
It’s more that they’re illustrating something many people are lucky enough not to relate to so don’t really recognise at first glance.
If that’s you, consider yourself lucky.
When I saw this at the movies, one moment really showed what I’m describing.
The Daniel’s show the invisible tie between the pain we feel and the hurt we do.
Mother and daughter are finally united for perhaps the first time.
Lots happened. Dimensions warped, Jamie Lee Curtis transformed from Tax Agent Of The Month into a psycho pro-wrestling murder machine.
At one point Joy’s mother literally almost murders her because, you know, pressure.
Lots and lots has happened.
Mother now finally sees life from her daughter’s perspective.
We look out at a barren landscape.
Two grey rocks sitting on the edge of a cliff, subsumed by the majesty and size and scale of the horizon.
Dialogue is written on screen (rocks can’t talk, after all).
The moment conversation started, something unexpected happened.
The crowd burst into laughter as I burst into tears.
My throat did that thing, my heart followed, and with each new line of dialogue my crying got worse.
I bubbled over and absolutely lost it.
The thing is, I can empathise with Joy.
The overwhelming pressure of potential, the feeling of having this big black hole of carrying the burden of who I could be, the weight of expectation and the feeling of pressure that I’m meant to live out the dreams my parents didn’t get to.
As a young man I recoiled from this pressure into the comforting darkness of nihilism.
For a time, my life was an apathetic wasteland populated only by gray rocks who sometimes shared a glib joke or two.
If I was lucky I had someone who could perhaps wear some googly eyes and get a response out of me, something to show I was still alive and not all was lost to the big black hole inside my chest.
Those moments of someone just joining me and looking at the world by my side were immensely important to me.
More so than I could even recognise back then.
Suicide is like a bagel with everything on it.
The day I didn’t kill myself was absolutely like trying not to get sucked into a black hole.
I feel the prickle of tears as I write this, my heart hurts because I know there’s a lot of people out there who feel like there’s no hope. No chance of feeling like a human again nor making a real connection. People who feel like they’re multidimensional beings escaping mundane and painful reality into worlds of their making where they can kill or fly or control or rule as they like rather than stay here where the only option is to fight against the pull of a bagel so big, so dense and so profoundly empty that the pull of it’s despair might just be stronger than everything everywhere all at once.
The world is full of people like this, who are going through that right now or will go through it or have gone through it. What gets me so stirred up is how mediocre it all is.
The horror beneath all of this pain and suffering, the evil genius causing so many people to hurt one another, causing my colleagues to recoil when I’d open my mouth, causing my mum to forever lose the strength of her grip, causing the confusion of so many millions of bereaved people around the world trying to understand how someone would do that and what could they have said or done, the reason I bleed my broken heart all over the internet in the hopes it cracks through the veil and grabs you by the shoulders is because at the core of it, the monster behind so much suffering is just a plain, boring, lack of empathy.
It’s the simple moment of seeing a hyped up movie that’s confusing and frustrating and thinking ‘well, guess people have bad taste’.
It’s the act of bypassing another person’s experience because, ‘eh, can’t relate’.
At the end of the day, this is the same reason we go to war. The same reason we lie, cheat, steal and kill. This is why a child will push another. Why a politician will say, ‘those people are the problem’.
Because we’re listening to the noise in our heads, not the signal coming from theirs.
What story is being told in my mind about this?
What’s the story I tell myself and what’s the story others tell themselves?
Until we can truly listen to someone else and see the world through their eyes, until we can really ‘get’ what it’s like by slowing down and experiencing their story, we will never truly connect with them.
Listening to someone’s story can save their life.
It wasn’t even the real Joy who got to break through and shake her mother awake.
In order for Joy to feel seen and understood by her mother, she needed a megavillain, multidimensional pain fueled destroyer of universes version of herself to go on an intergallactic murder rampage.
That’s what it took for this woman to step outside of the confines of her own mundane anxiety!
Is that what it takes to break through the noise in someone’s head to get them to actually listen?
What has it taken your friends, family and loved ones to shake you awake throughout your life?
Sometimes a film like this will come out and change the landscape.
You know what I mean by that?
Similar to a drop of water trickling down the side of a mountain, it doesn’t look like much if you watch the progress of a single drop, but fast forward a hundred million years and that drop is now a flowing river.
This is how the emotional, cultural landscape changes too.
Except instead of a drop of water it’s a story being told.
Films like this carve through the world pulling into their wake the people who struggle in the silent, invisible feeling of that which is unspoken.
Life for us feels like trying to cut through a mountain with a drop of water.
We live in the world of unspoken things.
Things which cannot be seen.
The pressure of uncaring parents.
The hurt of disappointed expectations.
The pain of giving up rather than choosing to continue.
This film was such a big deal because it spoke to a lot of people who didn’t know how to connect the dots between wanting acceptance for being who they are and wanting to die rather than continue not fitting in.
It might sound really extreme, you might even think ‘wow really? die rather than not fit in?‘ in which case I’d reply, ‘Yeah, really. Can you picture how much pain it would take for that to be an option? If you can’t imagine it, please try.’
You might be quick to dismiss with some kind of label like ‘kids these days’ or ‘snowflakes’ or ‘people drink too much soy’ or something.
A quick protection to insulate against the discomfort of being present with someone in pain.
Empathy, trying to relate can be uneasy.
It can feel like nails on a chalkboard, like your soul is trying to cringe.
It might feel like being dragged into places you don’t want to go.
That’s totally ok, the better we can get out of our comfort zone, the better we can get into someone else’s.
It requires constantly asking a question of ourselves, of how we shape and make meaning about what’s happening around us.
What story is being told here?
Movies like this open us up to our invisible prejudice.
When I talk about invisible things, speaking the unspoken, what am I really on about?
This is about blindness to prejudice.
Just like how the only person’s breath I cannot smell is my own, the only person’s prejudice I cannot see is also my own.
A view of people who don’t show empathy, perhaps you can feel it like the thorns of a hedgehog in words of this essay (if these words don’t sting even a little, I haven’t really gotten the point across).
Or just like the prejudice of a mother who wants her daughter to not be rejected…
The hard part about all this invisible stuff is that speaking about what nobody else can see makes you look like a crazy person.
All we can do is our best to make the attempt and invite people into important spaces that might exist within one another.
We feel our way through the invisible, gently.
To speak up, we just have to start.
A few years ago, after I’d stopped taking a lot of drugs and before I’d started taking a lot of vitamins, I was going to move in with (another) stranger.
I’d already had gumtree sharehouse adventures plucked right from He Died With A Fellafel In His Hand, including the all-time favourite chicken-left-on-the-bench-during-Christmas-in-Brisbane-leading-to-an-absolute-explosion-of-maggots, so I felt a bit iffy about living with total strangers.
This time, I was living with someone I knew, and one I didn’t.
They were trans.
As in, going through a transition, changing gender from male to female.
Prejudice, speaking about invisible things, you can probably see where this is going.
We met, kept it light and pleasant enough, seemed to get along as they appeared rational and reasonable and all the things I tend to look for in a roommate (I could tell they knew what to do with raw chicken).
But at some point I realised I’d need to address something.
They’re trans.
While I am sensitive to how people feel, I’m totally ok not sharing the same beliefs.
I’m not feminist, not by today’s standards. The feminism I like celebrates difference, today’s… not so much.
This posed a problem.
How was I going to live with and get along with this person if I didn’t even have the slightest interest in the philosophy that (likely) underpinned their world view? Hell I even disagree with a lot of it.
The answer was pretty obvious.
I just told them.
‘Ok so we should talk about something if we’re going to make this work.’
‘Aha…?’
‘I don’t really know what to say or how to say it so… what about I just ramble for a while and then we chat.’
‘Okay…?’
‘Ok, so. I make jokes about everything and everyone, including trans people, black people, sick people, you name it. I have a dark sense of humour it’s how I cope. I’m ok with mysogynist jokes, I’m also ok if you have a problem with it… I really don’t want to tip toe around but if you have a problem I also want us to be able to have a respectful conversation about it. Make sense?’
‘Ha! Yeah, sure let’s talk about it. I appreciate that!’
So we did. They got that I am who I am and they were just grateful to know upfront and be invited to be real about it if it bothered them.
I wanted them to know I was open to being taught. Open to being shown stuff I didn’t naturally prioritise, but also I was ok having different beliefs.
How would it have been if we didn’t have that conversation?
What if I didn’t ask that question about what story was being told and just had my own noise bouncing around in my head?
Don’t let the politics distract you from the person.
Joy’s mum showed zero interest in Joy’s experience of reality, being attracted to women.
She only thought of her own pain at her father’s possible rejection of her daughter.
Similarly, I have zero interest in feminism (if you’re offended, so be it).
I’m not into the politics, but I am interested in the people who live, breathe and feel for what they believe in.
I’m interested in the very human and relatable experience of fighting to make the world better in the way they know how, same as me.
I can respect the hustle.
So even though I didn’t ask my new roommate to indoctrinate and change me, I did show genuine interest in their thoughts and feelings. I wanted to know their experience as much as they were willing to share it with me.
I wanted to see if I could stand next to them and look out at the world they see.
It’s the same thing with mental health.
People like my mum have big struggles to grapple with.
The voices she hears are hard enough to deal with, but what I’ve seen hurt her way worse are the voices of people in her life who push her away, show no empathy or interest.
People who don’t listen because of the noise in their heads.
It’s not about being fully up to date and educated.
You don’t need a bloody PhD in political correctness or whatever.
But a movie like Everything Everywhere All At Once offers you a trippy doorway to check whether you’re really listening or whether you can’t hear past the voice in your head trying to protect you from unease or discomfort. A voice that says ‘are they trying to make me feel confused and frustrated right now?’
I can guarantee that as an angsty teenager I wasn’t trying to make you feel frustrated and blocked out and shut down, though that’s probably how you felt. I was literally doing my best to communicate beyond invisible walls. I couldn’t escape the maze of my own hurts.
And as a social outcast when she’s screaming or swearing or going off, my mum isn’t trying to make you feel scared or intimidated, though that’s probably how you feel. She’s just unable to cope with what’s happening inside her.
The same way an autistic kid isn’t trying to make you feel heart break when they bash their skull against the floor. It’s their attempt to cope.
The same way a friend isn’t trying to make you feel guilty by ending their life.
The same way Joy isn’t trying to make her mum feel powerless and frustrated by shoving all of her pain and hurt into a supermassive bagel so dense with guilt and shame it consumes everything everywhere all at once.
Self awareness is uneasy.
The film made style choices some people find repulsive.
That’s A Okay! Feel how you feel.
The reason others absolutely love the movie is partly those exact same style choices.
We think differently based on the different experiences we’ve had, allowing us to relate to the crazy.
The movie is so scary good because it takes really important stories and it bottles them up in a fresh way that invites you to be here reading about it right now.
It didn’t just capture a mother’s fear for her daughter’s sexuality – the horror!
People were so busy wondering what the hotdog fingers had to do with anything, they missed the fact they were laughing about Joy’s mum in a relationship with another woman.
It didn’t just capture a grandfather’s fear for losing control of his family, it also gave us the robot exoskelleton armored power suit he needed to try and literally murder his granddaughter.
Taking the time honoured tradition of flipping society upside down and giving it a hard slap to see what absurd and invisible truths fall out, the Daniel’s reveal what we walk past every day.
Uneasy yet mundane things like the anxiety of trying to find that fucking receipt when you need to stir the noodles, cook the rice, get to the tax agent, support your daughter in her new lesbian relationship while also juggling your own existential horror at the fucking mess of the life you’ve created, just doing your best to survive the trauma your parents gave you, inverting all of this into zany images like a cosmic horror bagel, a couple of rocks on a cliff face, a pair of googly eyes.
The Daniels show an absolute masterful grasp of story.
They invite us to ask for ourselves what story is being told here?
They invite us to ask of ourselves, what story is being told in here?
Between the whiplash that leaves you wondering ‘am I meant to feel so frustrated?’ and the breakneck editing that makes you say ‘this is for an audience who grew up on TikTok’ this movie has the secrets to a brilliant life hidden right in plain sight.
How to connect and heal intergenerational trauma.
How to take responsibility for the impact you have on others.
How to apologise and see the world other people see.
How to look inward and learn about yourself.
How to confront the gravity of your own fears.
How to fight darkness with lightness.
How the fate of your children rests on your willingness to do the inner work you’re avoiding.
This film is so much better than you think it is, it is 100% an absolutely brilliant masterpiece.
I hope this write up helps you bridge the gap to someone in your life who you otherwise might dismiss with a hand-wave.
In the words of Joy’s dad…
You tell me that it’s a cruel world… and we’re all just running around in circles. I know that. I’ve been on this earth just as many days as you. When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It’s strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.
Who in your life needs to rethink Everyone Everywhere All At Once?
If you found this helpful or illuminating why not share it with them? Maybe they will too.
Above all, remember.
If you have times where you can’t imagine how others feel, maybe during the mundane moments like while you’re paying tax or doing your laundry, please try.
We need you to.
The fate of the multi-verse depends on it.
ps. This guy gets it.