Everything All The Time to All People

Why independent filmmakers shouldn't sacrifice adult complexity for affirmation

Based on hype and word-of-mouth, one could easily assume Everything Everywhere All At Once is one of the year’s best films. Written and directed by the Daniels team (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), it follows a woman named Evelyn’s (Michelle Yeoh) multiversal journey to save her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) from suicidal nihilism. Along the way, she reconnects with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), stands up to her emotionally abusive father, Gong Gong (James Hong), and seemingly avoids the IRS’s repossession of her laundromat.

Most of the praise for the film revolves around its supposedly therapeutic qualities. Professional critics have hailed it as a “surreal, affecting odyssey,” something that makes viewers “laugh, cry, and think,” and as an “instant cult darling.” Writer Bertin Hunyh even credits it with “understanding the Asian psyche,” in a headline no self-respecting editor ever should’ve published. Laura Zornosa at The New York Times argues Everything Everywhere All At Once is helping to “heal intergeneration trauma,” and writers make similarly extravagant claims at Movieweb, Wired, and across social media. This seems to be exactly the response the filmmakers wanted. “We wanted... to bridge the generational gap that often crumbles into generational trauma,” Kwan and Scheinert wrote on Twitter.

But how exactly is a film supposed to “heal intergenerational trauma?” What do the Daniels think intergenerational trauma even is? The Times’s description of the healing process is fuzzy. “Peggy Loo, a licensed psychologist... believes that the film can serve as an exercise in imagination for those who have experienced trauma. To heal, we need to be able to see farther than what we’ve known and been exposed to.” Zornosa writes, Her description sounds more like new age spiritualism than psychoanalysis. But to be fair, I’m also skeptical because I’m not sold on the film’s premise. I don’t think Everything Everywhere All At Once can “heal trauma” because I’m not sure I’d describe its central mother-daughter relationship as traumatic—or at least no more traumatic than realizing your parents are flawed usually is.

Everything Everywhere All At Once contains two significant parental relationships: Evelyn’s with her father, Gong Gong, and Evelyn’s with her daughter, Joy. Gong Gong behaves monstrously towards Evelyn, disowning her and telling her “Do not call me father. You are not my daughter,” when she leaves China with a man he doesn’t approve of. They reconcile before the film starts but his judgment still hangs over her like a sword. Waymond tries to assuage her by telling her “You have a successful business and a happy family,” (both untrue). “You know that’s not what he’s going to see,” she darkly responds.

In contrast, Evelyn’s cardinal sin as a mother is that she’s inconsiderate rather than abusive. She’s critical of her daughter and insensitive about her sexuality, telling her “You are very lucky your mother is open to you dating a girl, especially a white girl” at the film’s beginning. But notably, she is open to it. It’s progress from the way her father treated her, even if it leaves much to be desired. But neither Joy nor the filmmakers seem to consider this. They burden Evelyn with self-actualization while allowing Joy to pout, shout, and refuse to consider her mother’s position. The idea that Joy could find peace by disentangling her self-worth from her mother’s approval, or that she could directly articulate her wants and needs to Evelyn never enters the film. The Daniels write Everything Everywhere All At Once about a mother but come down firmly on the kids’ side. “Trauma,” they suggest, encompasses both being disowned by your parents and the feeling they don’t fully understand you. 

If the feeling your parents don’t fully understand you is medical trauma instead of simple human misery, that suggests there’s also a medical cure. Everything Everywhere All At Once is tailor-made for people who hope that cure can be art that doubles as therapy. This turns it into what critic Emily St. James calls a “millennial parental apology fantasy,” or wish-fulfillment for people who want their parents to apologize for misunderstanding them. I’m sympathetic to this desire (I ran away from an abusive home at 13) but I don’t think filmmakers should pander to it. Adulthood necessitates you cultivate your own sense of self-worth and its reward is an autonomy no one else can dispense of. Accepting your parents won’t understand every part of you is an essential part of growing up. But the Daniels eschew acceptance to pursue catharsis via the fantasy of family reconciliation. They make an A24 film with a Disney ending in the process.

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The gush around Everything Everywhere All At Once reminded me of another middling movie that pandered to audiences’ inner children: Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Both films start off taut, then unravel when they coddle audiences at crucial junctures to avoid discomforting them.

In her excellent criticism of Lady Bird, Lauren Oyler describes the script as “original, cutting, and laugh-out-loud funny.” But the film, she says, later “undermines this funniness as it attempts to pull it all together in a grand thesis, about the beauty of youth or flaws or ambiguity or mothers and daughters or Sacramento or it all.” Oyler argues this shift occurs when Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) loses her virginity to Kyle (Timothée Chalamet). He reveals he’d lied to her about being a virgin and tries to deflect by talking about the Iraq War. Lady Bird doesn’t let him off the hook. “Different things can be sad... it’s not all war,” she tells him in a devastating one-liner. 

“It’s an extraordinary scene, perceptive and intelligent in a way you’d want your daughter to be in this situation and in a way that few daughters, if any, ever are,” Oyler writes. She’s right. Most teenagers would handle this situation messily. They’d lash out or further degrade themselves by submitting to it. But depicting authentic teenage humiliation might make audiences who identify with the protagonist uncomfortable. So Gerwig sidesteps that discomfort by ventriloquizing Lady Bird. She writes herself into what Oyler calls an “autoficitonal Freaky Friday” and delivers the cutting rebukes most people likely wish they could’ve during their own teenage romantic humiliations.

What happens to reality when you dispense with discomfort? After the sex scene, Gerwig leans on emotional affirmation in authenticity’s stead. The film moves at a clip and ends with a speech that’s calibrated to tearjerk. “It is exactly what a mother would want to happen: for all desires to be met without consequence or bad feeling, for all rites of passage to pass painlessly, for her to be the very best version of herself she can be,” Oyler writes. But it’s also dishonest about how growing up really works. Gerwig lets her audience “rewrite their adolescences from adulthood,” and indulge in the fantasy that they’d have been as poised and adroit as Saoirse Ronan, rather than awkward and uncomfortable like most teens actually are.

“I have a deep need to take care of my characters. It’s not that I don’t want to go down the dark avenues—I want to hold their hands down the dark avenues,” Gerwig said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. The Daniels’ approach to storytelling is as delusional as Gerwig’s is infantilizing. They write that Everything Everywhere All At Once is “an attempt to create the narrative equivalent of the Theory of Everything, a Big Data approach to Myth-Making... a dream about reconciling all the contradictions, making sense of the largest questions, and imbuing meaning onto the dumbest, most profane parts of humanity.” I audibly snorted the first time I read this. Never mind that the human condition is made up of irreconcilable contradictions. Never mind that the reconciliation of those contradictions has eluded artists and philosophers for millennia. The Daniels stride into their endeavor with the hubris of tech bros claiming their granola startup can change the world. They lean on similar crutches as Gerwig when they inevitably fail.

Everything Everywhere All At Once opens with Evelyn staring at a pile of receipts in preparation for her laundromat’s audit. Much like Gerwig, the Daniels draw their character dynamics masterfully in the film’s first act. Evelyn’s father shouts “Where’s my breakfast?”, she tells her sullen daughter to help prepare for an upcoming party, and she brushes her husband aside so absentmindedly she doesn’t notice he’s trying to serve her divorce papers. In the first ten minutes, the directors establish three conflicting relationships, a threatening tax audit, and a party at which everything will likely come to a head.

Then they add a fourth element: science fiction. At the IRS office, Waymond’s body language shifts and he temporarily becomes a fanny-pack sporting Morpheus. The “alpha” version of her husband splits her reality and pulls her away from her audit to deal with his fantasy issue. When she protests that she has to get back to managing her real life, Alpha Waymond sells her on the idea that that life has a much grander purpose. “Every rejection, every disappointment has led you to this moment. Don’t let anyone distract you from it,” he tells her.

I sat up excitedly in my chair on seeing this. “Is this a psychotic break?” I wondered. Is Evelyn hiding from her collapsing life amidst the American delusion that she’s the most important person in the world?  Is this film finally going to skewer Marvel superfans who deal with existential fear by retreating into the arms of imaginary strongmen? I was hopeful for a moment—I’ve been craving good commentary on how absurd it is that America’s heroes are Spider-Man and Spongebob, and of how deleterious it’s been to our collective pysche for years. “Is this finally going to be the film that ventures into that territory?” I wondered.

In short, no. Alpha Waymond introduces an “omniversal” off-screen villain called Jobu Tupaki, who has “no belief in objective morality.” The film then reveals her to be Evelyn’s daughter. I audibly groaned upon seeing this. All menace and mystery dissipate and the movie becomes a moralizing slog. In the Daniels’ world, people are hurt and hurt each other like intergenerational Newton balls. The idea that adults can be cruel because it feels good has no place in their infinite multiverse. 

The film’s problems snowball after this. Characters speechify about nihilism versus existentialism like first-year philosophy students. Gong Gong changes from being someone who disowned his daughter into someone who helps pull his granddaughter out of suicidal nihilism without explanation. Everything Everywhere All At Once even uses the same plot device as Spider-Man: No Way Home to explain away the existence of evil. At the end of the film, Evelyn’s enemies are revealed to be violent due to unresolved trauma. She learns to neuter their capacity for harm via emotional spinal readjustments. It’s similar to Tom Holland jabbing his enemies with a green serum to “cure” their villainy: a childish denial of a world where adults “can be bad, any of us, for no good reason” and an embrace of one in which “we can be made good, and therefore safe—as long as we follow the rules.” A world where no one’s evil and everyone’s just misunderstood. A world where kindness conquers all, magical thinking can solve material problems, and desire’s never dangerous.

This brings me to my final criticism: the Daniels scrub Evelyn of her desire to shoehorn in a happy ending. At the end of Everything Everywhere All At Once, Evelyn finally learns to appreciate her husband. She kisses him in a way that suggests marital renewal. But the kiss is mechanical and forced. Everything Everywhere All At Once successfully sells me on the idea that Evelyn comes to value her husband. But the Daniels never make it clear whether she actually wants to fuck him.

Why does this matter? Because I think Evelyn deserves to be happy. Why wouldn’t she be happy? Because I don’t think you can substitute respect for desire. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write “Sexuality and love... cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be stocked within an established order.” This attempt to adhere to the “established order” of a romantic conclusion is where the Daniels’ “big data approach to myth-making” catastrophically fails. Desire disrupts order: it launches warships, brings down kingdoms, and ends marriages. It’s the seismic fault line in life plans and the destabilizing element in relationships. It wants what it wants, regardless of what’s moral or convenient. Evelyn’s lack of desire for her husband threatens her renewed marriage like a time bomb. The Daniels ignore this because it’s inconvenient to their “theory of everything.”

The kiss was so jarringly tepid it made me wonder: What would be wrong with Evelyn divorcing Waymond? Do the Daniels not think we can process an amicable divorce as a happy ending? Throughout the film, Evelyn displays more attraction to the two “alpha” versions of her husband than she does towards her real one.  Ke Huy Quan gives a masterful performance despite the script’s limitations and even plays the characters differently. He hired a body movement coach who assigned him different animals to embody: For Alpha Waymond, it was an eagle; for CEO Waymond, a fox; and for the real Waymond, a squirrel. When Jobu Tupaki kills Alpha Waymond, he romantically tells Evelyn “I’m grateful that chance was kind enough to let us have these last few moments together.” She leans down to kiss him instinctively. Then her squirrel husband re-enters his body and Evelyn drops him in disgust. The Daniels play the shot for laughs but never address the issue it raises. Much like the Disney corporation, they solve the problem of eros by pretending it doesn’t exist. 

In an interview with critic Nick Allen, Kwan said “There’s always this tension between ‘I want the audience to love me’ and ‘I don’t care if you love me’... [with] this one, we kind of said, ‘I want them to love me.” Scheinert follows Kwan by saing “We knew it would reach an abrasive point two-thirds through... so we asked ‘What if we made it as lovable and possible at the beginning and the end?’” But in their quest to make something “lovable” the Daniels sacrifice narrative coherence for audience comfort. This also make the film incredibly socially regressive. In her landmark essay on infantilization in media, Gretchen Felker-Martin writes “the need for affirmation creates art that’s little more than a sort of neoliberal social conservatism.” It’s hard to imagine a more conservative ending than a woman traversing the multiverse to return to a sexless marriage.

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Unfortunately, cinematic infantilization isn’t a one-way street. Gerwig and the Daniels make movies that pander to their audiences’ adolescent selves because audiences pay for them. Everything Everywhere All At Once just displaced Uncut Gems as A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. Lady Bird is still one of its biggest earners, too.

In his critic’s manifesto, Daniel Mendelsohn writes “The negative review, after all, is also a form of enthusiasm; enthusiasm and passion for the genre which, in this particular instance, the reviewer feels has been let down by the work in question.” Lady Bird and Everything Everywhere All At Once are letdowns. The writer-directors squander their gifts (Gerwig’s for dialogue, the Daniels’ for practical effects) to tell an audience exactly what they want to hear. Big budget studios already scrub sex and complexity from film to sell tickets to children and adults alike. I’m worried this trend will spread further into independent cinema if critics don’t draw a line.

It can be difficult to criticize films that affirm people’s emotions because the internet encourages fans to be unpaid brand ambassadors. These worst of these fans take criticism of their favorite property as an attack on their personhood and respond in kind. But luckily, most of these attacks happen behind a screen. So my advice to critics is to leverage this distance and get meaner. We need to stop letting people evangelize middling art as masterful because it “affirmed their feelings,” “healed their intergenerational trauma,” or because they want us to “let people enjoy things.” It’s a claim to victimhood by people whose tastes already dictate film production. Anyone who values complex adult storytelling needs to push back. 

Adults should be embarrassed to gush over Steven Universe, to “pick sides between Tony and Cap,” or to expect art to be therapy rather than an exploration of the human condition. Disney’s successfully monetized personal identification with its properties, and reflexive liberal deference to that identification lines its executives’ pockets nicely. Gerwig, Kwan, and Scheinert are cashing in on this, too. Unchallenging feel-good films like Lady Bird and Everything Everywhere All At Once should be viewed as junk food rather than high art—pleasurable treats with little nutritional value. Because the difference between them and Marvel fare is the difference between boutique chicken tenders and McNuggets. Ultimately, it’s all still kids’ food.