Transcription
Let's talk about cultural codes, the traditions, customs, and stories we tell to anchor ourselves. They tell us how to live, what's valuable, and provide a sense of purpose that makes life bearable.
But, for the Wang family in Everything Everywhere All at Once, these cultural codes ain't cutting it. Marriage is supposed to be the unbreakable bedrock of family life, but Waymond is serving Evelyn divorce papers. Heteronormative expectations are supposed to provide familial continuity across generations, but Joy is in love with a woman and Evelyn fears it will destroy the family. Parents instill expectations in their children to guide them through [music] the world, but Evelyn has to lie to her father about their tax audit just to save face.
Every cultural code designed to structure life is suffocating the Wangs. It's no wonder, then, that Joy, in the form of Jobu Tupaki, concludes that life is meaningless. One might say the Wangs are living in an interregnum, a time between worlds. The [music] old codes are actively failing the people who rely on them, but no new ones have arrived to replace them. When that happens, what do you do?
Well, there's a movement of thinkers [music] actively wrestling with this question. It's called metamodernism, an aesthetic and philosophical sensibility that co-director Daniel Kwan acknowledged as an inspiration for the film, saying, quote, "I think that's the version of post-postmodernism that we're hunting for. That's metamodernism, if I'm going to be obnoxious." While the field is still developing and contains competing perspectives, at the heart of the metamodern project is recognition that as the world gets more complex, we need more complex ways of understanding ourselves and the [music] world. To move past the crushing meaninglessness of Jobu's everything bagel, we have to develop richer ways of thinking and a greater capacity to juggle contradicting ideas. Developing this perspective is the core of Evelyn's journey, and I'd argue why an experimental art film that features butt plug moral combat reached the peak of cultural relevance. It confronts us with what is perhaps the defining philosophical question of our time. When the old ideas can't offer stable meaning anymore, how do we choose to build a life worth living anyway?
Well, to find out, we'll have to chart the cultural codes of your through the history of cinema, revisit our mustachioed old pal Frederick, [music] and trace the similarities between Patrick Bateman and Rick Deckard. Let's dive in. But first, a quick recap. Evelyn Wang's life is far from glamorous. Failing laundromat, IRS audit, looming divorce, alienated daughter, disappointed dad, the works. During a meeting at the IRS, her husband Waymond is suddenly possessed by a version of himself from an alternate universe. Alpha Waymond reveals that reality is fracturing across an infinite multiverse and that Evelyn, in all her mediocrity, is the only one who can stop the evil Jobu Tupaki, an interdimensional destroyer [music] who has experienced so many universes that she's lost all sense of meaning. Oh, and turns out it's a super depressed version of her daughter Joy who's constructed the everything bagel, a black hole of pure negation that she intends [music] to pull everything into.
To save the multiverse, Evelyn learns to verse jump, [music] accessing the skills of her alternate selves across parallel life paths. But the more lives Evelyn witnesses, the more she's reminded of her own regrets and the more she identifies with Jobu. But when Waymond pleads for everyone to choose kindness, especially when nothing makes sense, Evelyn has an epiphany. She stops fighting people, choosing instead to heal them. Right as Joy is about to surrender to the void, Evelyn assures her that even though the multiverse is infinite and nothing has inherent meaning, there's nowhere she would rather be than with her. The bagel is defeated, the family begins to heal, and Evelyn accepts, even celebrates her mundane life. The end.
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All right, so, the meta-modern project is an attempt to work past post-modernism. While that term encompasses a lot, we can think of post-modernism broadly as a skepticism toward any anchor of meaning, a suspicion that the universal truths we inherit, whether traditional ones like family and duty or modern ones like progress and reason, are arbitrarily constructed, just made up by someone, somewhere, for reasons that advance their interests. The Wang family is deep in the pomo crisis. I already mentioned the broken marriage, Joy hiding her relationship and problems with Gong Gong, but it's most pronounced with Evelyn's feeling of lost potential. She's haunted by the sense that her life could have been something else, that marrying Waymond, following him to America, and building this particular life amounted to nothing. Then, Alpha Waymond shows up and introduces her to the multiverse, which initially confirms those feelings.
>> Let me finish talking with my husband. He needs to know how good my life could have been.
>> If infinite alternate Evelyns exist, then her life is just one arbitrary path along an endless sea of equally valid, equally meaningless possibilities.
>> How everything gets washed away in a sea of every other possibility. How everything is just a random rearrangement of particles in a vibrating superposition.
>> Follow this logic to its conclusion and you get Jobu Tupaki. Having experienced every perspective and every possible version of reality, she arrives at the place postmodernism always feared it was headed, total relativist burnout. Because everything is true, nothing is special, so she takes this realization and shapes it into the everything bagel, a black hole of meaninglessness.
>> Cuz you see, when you really put everything [music] on a bagel, it becomes this, the truth. Nothing matters.
I also think it's relevant that it's Joy, the daughter, who embodies this crisis of meaning. You can imagine a version of the movie where it's the IRS agent, the human face of a bureaucratic grinding machinery that nobody chose and nobody can escape, who serves as the harbinger of meaninglessness. But the Daniels made her a young woman raised between worlds, too Western for her grandfather, too Chinese to be red-blood Americana, too queer for her mother's comfort, and so online that she's undoubtedly been exposed to the infinite ways a life can be lived or judged.
>> If nothing matters, then all the pain and [music] guilt you feel for making nothing of your life goes away.
Millennials and Zoomers after them are the first to come of age fully inside the digital version of the postmodern condition, marinated in irony, raised on skepticism toward institutions, handed a world of infinite information, and told to somehow find meaning in it. By the film's midpoint, this perspective has almost entirely infected Evelyn. She trashes the laundromat and across the multiverse turns on the people she loves.
>> I said, "Shut up." It don't matter.
>> Nothing matters.
So, how do we work past this impasse of meaning? If meaning is what we crave, how do we commit ourselves to it knowing it's nonsense? In their series of books on metamodernism, Daniel Görtz and Emil Friis, who write collectively under the pseudonym Hanzi Freinacht, claim that the key to addressing our current crisis is understanding the necessity of development. Developing ourselves cognitively and culturally. Borrowing ideas from theorists Ken Wilber and Clare Graves, they suggest that to survive society has to upgrade its psychological and cultural logics. Metamodernism is about, as another thinker in the scene, Brendan Graham Dempsey, puts it, the cultural logic of cultural logics.
For Freinacht, this development operates on two tracks. The first is cognitive complexity, the brain's raw processing power. Think of it like the brain's hardware, its capacity to hold increasingly abstract and layered variables simultaneously. The second is symbolic development, the cultural software of a given era, the language, concepts, myths, and frameworks a society makes available to think with. When you combine cognitive capacity with symbolic code, you get what Freinacht calls an effective value meme, a society's operating system for making meaning, organizing values, and ultimately surviving reality. And like computers, when an operating system starts failing, as it clearly is for the Wang family, it's time to develop a new one.
In his book The Listening Society, Freinacht tracks the development of effective value memes across human history and how these memes are crystallized in the [music] stories a culture tells about itself. So, to grasp why Everything Everywhere All at Once aspires for a new frontier of meaning, it's worth tracing that development from the beginning to see the long sequence of cultural upgrades and how they're reflected in cinema. Let's start with what they call the animistic meme. Before agriculture or written language, humans lived entirely immersed in nature. Survival depended on understanding the immediate environment, and so the world was perceived as alive, saturated with spirit, populated by forces that had to be respected and communed with. Think Avatar. While obviously not an animistic era story, nor is it set in prehistory, it evokes certain pre-civilizational perspectives. The Na'vi connect directly with the planet and form bonds with animals, spirit-imbued trees, et cetera. Elements of this story would have resonated with an animistic era human. You got to live in harmony with an environment that's just as alive as you are.
Then the world changes. Around 10,000 BC, humans begin to farm and stockpile resources. And when you have a surplus, well, it becomes a viable strategy to steal your neighbors and critical to defend your own. Raw power and domination enter the scene, giving birth to the Faustian meme, the cultural code of early warrior cultures, organized entirely around physical courage, honor, and glory. A clean example of Faustian era values would be 300. Physical perfection, military prowess, infants being discarded for being too weak, a beautiful death in battle being the ultimate prize. You get it. Peak warrior ego stories resonated hardcore during this stage of cultural development.
Thing is, a world full of Faustian warlords is ungovernable. If you want to build lasting civilizations, you need rules. So, around the Axial Age and the great agrarian empires, a new meme takes hold, the post-Faustian. It tames the warrior ego by subordinating it to a higher authority. Gods, kings, the sacred order of the cosmos, et cetera. The Knights of the Round Table and Excalibur, for example, are no longer fighting for personal glory, but for their king and their god. Stories of this era emphasize duty and the discovery of one's ordained place. The highest virtue is obedience, to be a willing instrument of the divine order.
That meme had its own problems. What kind of god permits plague, famine, and the divine right of kings to throw soldiers into the meat grinder? Eventually, the question becomes, well, what if there is no sacred order? What if the universe is just a machine waiting to be figured out? So, the Enlightenment comes around and the modern meme is born. The church and king are dethroned by the scientific method and individual rights. The Martian is a good example of this worldview. It's a celebration of rational progress and mastering the environment.
>> I'm going to have to science the [ __ ] out of this.
>> There is no appeal to a god or magic to save Mark Watney. [music] Engineering and human ingenuity are his savior.
But, the modern meme carries the seeds of its own undoing. Two world wars, the nukes, [music] and environmental destruction made the modernist suggestion that reason and progress are the thing a bit difficult to stomach. Yeah, science gave us penicillin, but it also gave us mustard gas. Does humanity really arc toward progress or is that just a convenient story that benefits the powerful? This disillusionment breeds the postmodern meme, the one the Wongs are drowning in. So-called objective truth is rarely neutral, and the categories that we take for granted, like hero and villain, civilized and primitive, are constructs designed to serve someone's interest. There are no universal truths, only competing perspectives.
Take Blade Runner. There's no grand redemptive arc, just Deckard trying to figure out what he is and what's going on without any clear epiphany. Or American Psycho, where a rational society has produced a man who is perfectly optimized and completely evil. But the thing about a worldview whose highest achievement is casting doubt on everything is, well, you still have to live and having a reason to do so usually helps.
So, the metamodern meme attempts to build meaning again by casting a relentless doubt on relentless doubt, to deconstruct deconstruction, to be fully aware of the void and decide to act as if things matter anyway. One way to do that is what metamodernists call sincere irony or informed naivete. Basically, you juggle two competing perspectives without fully committing to either. [music]
From an aesthetic perspective, this can mean embracing something ridiculous or self-aware with complete earnestness, which is the film's core sensibility. So, for example, verse jumping. It requires Evelyn to do something maximally stupid to unlock new abilities, like feed daddy his own snot or declare love to her auditor. The stakes are cosmic, the means are silly, both sincere and ironic. Waymond clears a room of goons with a fanny pack, probably the least badass accessory a grown-ass man can wear. Ridiculous, but also sincerely awesome. Same thing with using giant sign twirling as combat training, swole pinky finger domination, fluffy dog projectiles, etc. Some of the film's most tender moments occur in ridiculous universes. The sausage-fingered lovers, Evelyn riding a man in search of his precious Racacoonie, all played straight, all genuinely touching. And there's a point to that. The fact that these moments resonate is evidence of an emerging metamodern meme, a new value system that wavers between the modern and the postmodern. [music]
You acknowledge that meaning is constructed and the universe indifferent, and then you choose to care passionately and authentically anyway. It's what Waymond models throughout and what Evelyn has to learn. Waymond is not, as she initially thinks, a weak and foolish man who can't face reality. He has faced reality and made a conscious choice about how to respond to it.
>> [music]
>> This is the metamodern position stated plainly, a deliberate eyes-open acceptance to the void, but a refusal to be consumed by it.
>> What are you doing?
>> I'm learning to fight like you.
It's all there in the film's defining image, the googly eyes. >> More googly eyes. >> Waymond placing them around changes nothing about their situation, and yet choosing to bring some light to the people he loves is an act of defiance against hopelessness. The googly eyes are goofy, that's the irony. They are an act of sincere devotion, that's the sincerity. Thus, the film's climax, Evelyn replacing a bullet in her head with the googly eyes. Rather than defeating the everything bagel, she recasts it as something silly. Same shape, different meaning. Dressing the void as something a little funny and a little endearing, forcibly and willfully imposing positivity on meaninglessness. [music]
In another book on metamodernism, theorist Brendan Graham Dempsey claims that metamodernist films outright declare values that were implicit in postmodern films. Films like American Psycho and Blade Runner suggest by showing us an apocalyptic [ __ ] and an unimaginable shallow psychopath that we probably want better institutions and humans capable of genuine depth, but they deliver that message cynically, through absence. Whereas [music] a metamodern approach is to invert that and just honestly, earnestly say what matters.
>> The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind.
One of the most important aspects of the metamodern meme is that it contains within it all the previous memes. It's not that all the old meaning-making technologies were wrong, they were partially right, but a more developed perspective means being able to hold them all at the same time, to access a Faustian warrior's courage without the brutality, or to acknowledge the postmodernist skepticism toward objective values without turning into Patrick Bateman. This is the difference between Evelyn and Jobu Tupaki. Both of them have been exposed to the infinite expanse of the multiverse, but Evelyn is the hero because instead of letting it shatter her, she holds them all, enables them to broaden her perspective, and turns it into empathy. In the climactic battle, she stops fighting. Her expanded perspective allows her to see what each person in front of her is actually starving for, no matter how weird it is, and gives it to them.
Evelyn's heroic act is looking at all the messy things in her life and saying yes to them, despite how unglamorous or arbitrary they are.
>> Maybe there is something out there. Some new discovery that will make us feel like even small pieces of [ __ ] No matter what, I will always want to be here with you.
Because despite what an advertising-saturated society would have you believe, love is not a sustained feeling of pleasurable stimulation over a lifetime, and happiness is not necessarily spontaneous. They're both conscious affirmations. Anyone in any situation can be dissatisfied with life. It takes courage to want the life in front of you. This is essentially what Nietzsche called amor fati, to love one's fate, to radically affirm your life exactly as it is. A related concept of his is eternal recurrence, the idea that you should live as though you will repeat your life infinitely, over and over. And I think the Daniels gesture toward this with the circle motif.
>> Another year. Pretending we know what we're doing, but really we're just going around in circles.
Circles can be sinister like one etched into a damning receipt or a nihilistic bagel, but they can be recast. Happy face cookies, googly eyes, or most importantly, the realization that whatever circle you're going through, at least it's with the people you love. And while Nietzsche wasn't a metamodernist, he predates postmodernism entirely, he did see nihilism coming and spent much of his career trying to figure out how to build meaning in its shadow. The metamodern project, in many ways, is still working on the same problem.
During his Oscar acceptance speech, co-director Daniel Kwan said something that stuck with me.
>> The one of the best things we can do for each other is shelter each other from the chaos [music] of this crazy world we live in. Um the world is changing rapidly and I fear [music] that our stories are not keeping at pace.
I also share Kwan's concern. Not enough movies are being made and we may not be building the cultural codes needed to orient ourselves. But implicit in that claim is a recognition of cinema's power to not only reflect our values, but actively develop them. In [music] Fryenax's words, to hand us new symbolic software. And that's why this channel is about movies. Unlike some more lucrative forms of entertainment these days, movies are potent myth-making tools. [music] The campfire stories of a civilization trying to figure out what it believes. A lot of entertainment talent goes into gaming these days, but as much as I love video games, they're more like really awesome sophisticated toys.
>> [music]
>> Only in very rare cases do they elevate themselves to myth status, and when they [music] do, it's usually because they've successfully adapted cinematic language. Social media content, too, for all its talent and creativity, is fundamentally raw material for algorithms designed to trigger immediate psychological reactions and convert it into ad revenue. Phones are just pacifiers for adults. A YouTube video is just an ad for an ad. The feed is a fart in the [music] wind.
We do find ourselves in an interregnum, a time between value systems. More information than ever before, more technologically sophisticated means of selling it to us, and [music] fewer popular stories than ever. A deficit in the myth-making that's always guided humanity through chaos. We need stories that keep pace with the complexity of our moment. Stories brave enough to look into the everything bagel and choose anyway to do laundry and taxes. [music]
Hey, y'all. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to check out Opera browser yourself by [music] clicking the link in the description. Also, be sure to subscribe to the channel because for my next video, I'll be revisiting the Matrix films yet again. And yep, this time I will be talking about Resurrections. As always, take it easy and see you next time. Peace.