Nothing Matters, Or Why I Love Everything Everywhere All at Once

Note: Spoilers ahead for the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. If you haven’t seen it, put this down and come back after a viewing. 

“Nothing mat­ters.” ~ Jobu/Joy, Everything Everywhere All at Once

“Nothing mat­ters.” ~ Evelyn, Everything Everywhere All at Once

I just rewatched the bril­liant mul­ti­verse film Everything Everywhere All at Once. After an ini­tial view­ing, I imme­di­ate­ly told every­one I know to watch it, though I couldn’t explain exact­ly what it was about. It’s a Kung Fu meets Taoism fever dream about the mul­ti­verse. About iden­ti­ty. About laun­dry and tax­es and hot dog hands and goo­gly eyes and every­thing bagels. About free­dom and exis­ten­tial­ism and a mother’s love. It’s fun­ny and heart­break­ing and a visu­al treat, one of those once-in-a-life­time movies whose plot eschews an easy expla­na­tion. And it demands sev­er­al viewings. 

I first watched it on a plane, $12 mimosa in hand and crap­py ear­buds attempt­ing to drown out the drone of the pilot. I rewatched it last week ahead of the Academy Awards, where it took home sev­en Oscars, includ­ing Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress for Michelle Yeoh, the first time an Asian has won. I’m still think­ing about it. 

Jobu Tupaki is, in the cur­rent real­i­ty, Joy, Evelyn’s gay, Chinese-American daugh­ter. But she is also Jobu, god­dess of mul­ti­ver­sal destruc­tion. In her mil­lions of lives lived, she has seen noth­ing but suf­fer­ing and ran­dom chaos. In fact, she grows so bored by the hope­less absur­di­ty of life, she nihilis­ti­cal­ly puts every­thing on a bagel. Literally every­thing. “All my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every per­son­al ad on Craigslist… sesame… pop­py seed… salt. And it col­lapsed in on itself. Cause you see, when you real­ly put every­thing on a bagel, it becomes this … the truth.”

And the truth is? That noth­ing mat­ters. Jobu deliv­ers the line with­out inflec­tion, as Evelyn looks into the lim­it­less white hole of the black bagel (the sym­bol­ic dark yin to the light-heart­ed goo­gly eye’s yang, which is a black cir­cle sur­round­ed by a white one). The col­lapse of the every­thing bagel is about to destroy every time­line and life within. 

But the more chaot­ic life appears to become, the more oppor­tu­ni­ty there is for under­ly­ing order to reveal itself. We just need per­spec­tive to see it.

We can zoom our focus in and obsess, or we can zoom it out and observe. 

After many lives zoom­ing in, Evelyn zooms out and final­ly gets it. Her ever-increas­ing lev­els of vio­lence are con­tin­u­al­ly met with defeat. It’s only when she offers sliv­ers of com­pas­sion and peace toward her com­bat­ants does she start to under­stand the Tao. “Nothing mat­ters,” she says, as she hangs up on Deidre, Jamie Lee Curtis’s tax-audi­tor-from-hell. But what Evelyn means is that life is so absurd that things mat­ter only inso­far as they teach us to love. An audit isn’t the end of the world. Missing the life you’re lead­ing now in favor of the lives you’re liv­ing in your head is the real tragedy. All the things we long for – grace and grat­i­tude, laugh­ter and love, com­pas­sion and con­nec­tion – can be found right now, in the laun­dry and the tax­es and, yes, even in the every­thing bagel. 

“Nothing mat­ters, we can do any­thing,” Evelyn learns. We are designed to strive toward pur­pose. Even as rocks, Evelyn and Jobu/Joy con­stant­ly attempt to move for­ward. We get to choose what mat­ters, what has meaning. 

If the bagel rep­re­sents iso­la­tion and dread, the ran­dom­ly placed goo­gly eyes illus­trate that con­nec­tion lies every­where, all at once. All we need do is awak­en so that we can see what we bring to life, rather than what it brings to us.