Whether the multiverse is a metaphysical reality or fantastical hypothesis, it’s implications as a psycho-emotional truth are all too pressingly felt in our day to day lives.
As humans, our defining characteristic is our immense ability to project hypotheticals onto the past and the future. This leaves us with the emotional toils of having to dispense with a myriad number of possibilities about how things could go & comparing them to an idealized should— an existential burden exacerbated by the infinite proximal lives we are exposed to through media and the internet. Thats why Everything Everywhere all at Once has such a timely resonance with our age. The zany, wild and absurd sci-fi backdrop is potent ground on which to explore the existential ideas that -to varying degrees- pester us all.
One of the most profound insights the movie illustrates is how the most destructive and chaotic force across the multiverse, is ultimately fueled by its own existential desire for a companion to sympathize with the terrifying realization that they are alone in the unique void that arises from absolute everything-ness. Ultimately, is this not the ultimate drive at the root of all relationships? The heart-wrenching desire to be seen, to have a companion in this vast completely absurd world, who can sit next to us in a silent mutual recognition that this whole life thing is utterly and terrifyingly meaningless.
This movie is so resonant with our times because it exposes nihilism – the (lack of) heart at the core of an increasingly exploitative and fragmented machine of modern materialism – and offers an alternative. What happens when we sit with the terror that nihilism evokes? We see it for what it is… a deep grief at the tragedy inherent in time — that everything we love and derive meaning from is fated to phase out of existence in a relative moment, that our desires and tragedys and stories and dreams are a blip in the infinity of the (perhaps multi) cosmos.
In the end, Everything Everywhere All at Once takes this grief – personified in teenage angst – and wraps it in the insistent arms of a mother who says “ I see you, I see you’re pain, I’ve seen the tragic meaningless-ness at the center of the cosmos, and I still choose to be here -even at the expense of inevitable heartbreak and pain -with you” thereby illustrating that – even after entering the mouth of the black hole of nihilism – unlike any other element of our existence: matter, logic, time, meaning – the force of love endures.
Everything Everywhere all at once shows what happens when we factor love into a theory of Everything – as only a story between a mother and daughter traversing the multiverse can do.