Beware The Everything Bagel
Beware The Everything Bagel
Everything Everywhere All At Once, Frankenstein, C.S. Lewis, and the cosmic implications of loving others
This essay contains spoilers for the film Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Despite telling each other repeatedly over most of 2022 that we should go check it out, it wasn’t until the day after it won Best Picture at the Oscars that my wife and I finally found ourselves in the theater watching Everything Everywhere All At Once. We were both wildly entertained by this bizarre yet poignant story of a mother trying to come to grips with her own life choices and her fraught relationship with her daughter.
The theatrical conceit of EEAO is that it juxtaposes the mundane and the absurd. We meet Chinese immigrant Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) at the beginning of the film, trying to hold the family laundromat business together while also caring for her aged visiting father and trying to figure out how to have a relationship with her struggling daughter Joy. During a stressful audit visit with an IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis), Evelyn’s existence is ruptured when Alpha-Waymond (taking over Waymond’s body) reveals that she is just one in a multiverse of Evelyns, some of which made different past choices than she did, and some of which have hot-dog fingers (just…go with it). There is a villain named Jobu Tapaki who is threatening all the universes, and Alpha-Waymond thinks Evelyn is the only one who can defeat her.
Turns out, Jobu Tapaki is an alternate version of Joy that Alpha-Evelyn pushed too hard to travel the multiverse and broke her. Alpha-Joy/Jobu Tapaki has now embraced a nihilistic perspective and wants to absorb all universes into the Everything Bagel (again, just go with it), basically a black hole of nothingness, because “If nothing matters, then all the pain and guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away.”
Evelyn feels like she either has to fight or succumb to Jobu Tapaki, however, there may be a different way. You can sense that Evelyn looks down on her husband Waymond because he is not strong and assertive. He is sensitive and kind, which seems like a weakness. But as another version of himself says to her in the film, “You think because l'm kind that it means I'm naive, and maybe I am. It's strategic and necessary. This is how I fight.”
At a critical moment in the film, when everything seems about to go to hell, Waymond pleads to everyone, “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don't know what's going on.”
Evelyn realizes that instead of fighting Joy, she just needs to love her. She says:
Evelyn Wang: Maybe it's like you said. Maybe there is something out there, some new discovery that will make us feel like even smaller pieces of shit. Something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this noise. And why, no matter what, I still want to be here with you. I will always, always, want to be here with you.
Joy Wang: So what? You're just gonna ignore everything else? You could be anything, anywhere. Why not go somewhere where your daughter is more than just this? Here, all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.
Evelyn Wang: Then I will cherish these few specks of time.
This semester I have been teaching a literature class on the theme “Heroes and Monsters”, and recently we discussed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which at this point I have taught many times before. I find myself returning to Frankenstein because it is such a rich, fascinating text.
One thing that regularly emerges out of class conversations about Frankenstein with my students is how much the Creature’s fate in the story is dependent on how he is treated by those around him. He is rejected in horror by his maker at the moment of his “birth”, and he faces continual rejection from people in society as he tries to reach out for some kind of connection. Even his acts of kindness are met with fear and retribution. When he finally meets Victor Frankenstein again, he recounts his sad tale and begs his creator to make him a companion so that they may go and live in peace away from humanity. He pleads with Victor,
“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous…How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow creatures, who owe me nothing? They spurn and hate me….These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellow beings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction. Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies. I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you to make so great, that not only you and your family, but thousands of others, shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me.”
Victor relents in the face of the Creature’s pleas and agrees to make him a female companion, but then at the last minute, changes his mind and destroys her. Driven mad by rage and this latest betrayal, the Creature vows revenge on Victor and threatens to destroy his life, which he does my murdering Victor’s wife Elizabeth on their wedding night. Victor then vows his own revenge, and chases the Creature to the farthest northern parts of the world, where he succumbs to the harsh cold. Victor dies on the ship of an Arctic explorer Captain Walton after relaying his sad tale, and then Walton finds the Creature weeping over the body of Victor, confessing his crimes, and declaring that he will travel further north and burn himself alive on a pyre.
Shelley’s novel is a dark tragedy that hinges on the unkindness of a creator toward his creature that only looks like a monster.
In watching Everything Everywhere All At Once, and thinking once again about Frankenstein, I was reminded of this quote from C.S. Lewis in “The Weight of Glory”:
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
Everything Everywhere All At Once’s odd storytelling reminded me of the cosmic implications of our seemingly mundane relationships. It also made me shudder at how prolifically unkind we are. Lewis writes that it is with “awe and circumspection” that we should conduct all our dealings with each other. All I can think of is how flippantly we deal with each other in friendship, love, play, and politics. I catch snippets from radio and TV talk shows, or I scroll through the dreaded comment section on a social media post, and I see how casually, demeaningly, degradingly, and horrifically we treat each other. I feel it rise up like anger in my own heart, bubbling to cutting words on my own lips, about this or that person that pisses me off because they believe or advocate for “x” view or position. I see the deadly cyclical consequences of unkindness in yet another mass shooting in which someone who was probably broken by cruelty or indifference turned their inner rage, like Frankenstein’s creature, into outward violence against others.
Growing up, I had all sorts of ambitious ideas and goals for my life. These days, as I wearingly face a world that just seems non-stop cruel, I basically just want to be kind. That might seem like a weakness in a world that operates on the principle of, if someone punches you, you punch back harder. Like Waymond, it may make us seems weak and naive, but maybe kindness is how we fight.
Perhaps it’s dumb. Maybe the only way to get by in this world is to fight and take power. Though I’m tempted at times, I don’t really want to live that way. I choose to believe that love and kindness win in the end. And I hope you do too.