How do you find meaning in a life that seems absurd?
This is the question the film Everything Everywhere All at Once keeps asking. Such a query, of course, is one that has haunted modernity since at least the days of existentialism. But the way the film goes about answering it is distinctly contemporary: it presents us with a blizzard of spectacular imagery from which to draw our conclusions.
The film’s basic plot is reminiscent of classic visionary narratives of the past, such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and especially The Wizard of Oz, except that it updates the dreamlike quality of these classics with the popular new trope of the multiverse.
If you haven’t seen it, the narrative works like this: Evelyn, the central character portrayed in a virtuoso performance by Michelle Yeoh, begins the film as a stressed, small business owner. She is trying to run a laundromat without much assistance from her spacey husband, rebellious teenage daughter and demanding father who has come to live with the family. To make matters worse, their enterprise is facing an audit from the IRS, and they are being grilled about receipts and expenses by a stern agent, played tongue-in-cheek by Jamie Lee Curtis.
Amid this turmoil, Evelyn discovers a new ability: she can travel through alternate universes, each of which presents a different version of her life. Such variations, we are led to understand, are the result of small choices she’s made. In one universe she is an opera singer, in another a high-society Brahman, in yet another a kung-fu messiah who is faced with the task of saving a world. The threat, in this case, comes from an alternate version of her daughter who is manipulating a black hole (that takes the hilarious shape of a cosmic “everything bagel”). There is even a universe where everyone’s fingers take the shape of rubbery hot dogs.
Shifting with Evelyn at eye-blink speed from one universe to another, the film calls to mind an experience a lot more banal than a multiverse: you feel like you’re searching for something to watch over our constantly proliferating streaming media choices. But whether scary, goofy, comedic or dramatic, the worlds presented in the film share a common trait: each seems more fun than the one she’s living in. This is why it’s mildly surprising that in the end, the universe where Evelyn finds the most meaning is the one where the film began: the laundromat business.
Plato’s advice on choosing between alternate lives
As I alluded to, such an outcome recalls the end of the Wizard of Oz film, where Dorothy concludes: “there’s no place like home.” But the film brought to my mind a more ancient tale. I am thinking of “The Myth of Er,” the fable that ends Plato’s Republic. In this afterlife parable, souls are asked to choose their next life from an array of possibilities (such reincarnation tales seem a predecessor to today’s more “scientific” myth of alternative universes). The lives offered in Plato’s myth, as in Everything Everywhere…” range from the glorious to the mundane. Souls are counseled to make wise decisions. Here is from Alain Badiou’s hyper contemporary translation of the classic:
“let us learn above all how… to choose an admirable life rather than a degraded one. For then we will have learned that a life, regardless of how lowly it may seem, is admirable when it’s oriented toward justice and that being oriented toward injustice, no matter how brilliant and famous one may be, is tantamount to ensuring one’s own degradation. That’s the only criterion. We must hold this conviction in ourselves, even into the world beyond…"
In Plato’s tale, a great hero of the past has seemingly learned this lesson better than most. Here is how, in Badiou’s translation, Odysseus chooses his next life (he is last in the line of souls making a “next life” selection):
“The memory of his arduous wanderings had cured him of all ambition. He spent ages trying to find the life of some ordinary person who’d been completely uninvolved in public affairs. With difficulty he managed to ferret out, off in a corner, the hard-working, never-changing life of a poor, industrious check-out woman at More Is Better, who, as she was the single mother of four children, got up every day at 5 a.m., did the housework, mended the clothes, washed the sheets, counted her pennies out one by one, and had nothing but the routine of domestic life to fill up her existence. Needless to say, none of the other dead had wanted that life. Odysseus immediately took it and said that even if chance had given him first dibs, he would have made the exact same choice.”
Where Evelyn, a contemporary Odysseus, concludes her journey is not so different from this ancestor. Like this heroic figure, she ends up at the end of the film as head of a family that struggles like hell. One of the reasons she is dissatisfied with more “glorious” lives is precisely their lack of justice. In the alternate life in which she is the universe’s savior, for example, the way she is to accomplish her mission is by murdering her daughter (which she refuses to do).
Further, in the final few scenes of the film, Evelyn shares with her daughter the discovery she’s made through her “arduous wanderings” across alternative universes. In the film’s most Platonic moment, she states that, despite the absurdity of this excess of lives, one ideal still holds out as truth/meaning: the love she feels for her daughter and family. Thus, it is only her more worrisome and mundane life as laundromat owner that answers the question of “what does it all mean?” In his book on love, Badiou comments:
“Plato is quite precise in what he says about love: a seed of universality resides in the impulse towards love. The experience of love is an impulse towards something that he calls the Idea… In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that.”
The moral of both The Republic and Everything, Everywhere…then, seems to be: to find meaning, one must become immersed in something bigger than one’s own self-interest, something “universal” as Badiou puts it. In this light, compared to the truth of love, the many alternative lives flashing through the film at warp speed seem like so many bullshit media images—or, in more classical terms, illusory shapes projected over the walls of Plato’s Cave.
But certain details in the film cast a shade over such a sunny conclusion. Before Evelyn went on her universe-hopping journey, her family was on the verge of disintegrating because of the financial and emotional stress running a small business created. It would seem that even traditionally unassailable ideals such as love require material support to flourish.
All of which leads one to conclude that leaving the cave of illusion for the land of truth is certainly desirable—if you can afford the admission fee.
