The Bagel, Nihilism, Optimism, and Formal Failure

Thematically, it gets at the bagel—Jobu Tupaki’s everything bagel that Alpha Waymond fears will destroy the universe. Jobu explains she used her powers to put everything onto the bagel. The result is negation. A black hole. Everything equals nothing. The same thing happens with colors. Take a box of 256 crayons, draw a circle, then use every single crayon to fill the circle … By the end, all the brightness will be gone. You’re left with something dark and gloomy. It’s crushing. Jobu Tupaki embodies this negative state of being. When you experience everything, the highs and lows wash out. For every miracle, there’s catastrophe. For every joy, there’s tragedy. You become numb to it all. Novelty wears thin, wears off, and you’re left feeling nothing. The only thing left is to become nothing.72

Jobu’s nihilism echoes what Hitchcock said: “A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.”73 Among his own films, Hitchcock favored Shadow of a Doubt. The evil guy in the film, Uncle Charlie, was clearly a cipher for Hitchcock’s own misanthropic worldview—just recall the terrifying speech where Uncle Charlie decries to his niece, “Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? The world’s a hell.” In his classic book of dialogues with Hitchcock, François Truffaut suggests “it is obviously Hitchcock expressing himself in Shadow of a Doubt when Joseph Cotten says the world is a pigsty.”74

But how do we pass from here to the optimist conclusion of Everything Everywhere All at Once? Let’s go on with the quoted passage which summarizes the predominant reading:

But there’s a flipside to that, right? While Evelyn initially understands where Jobu Tupaki’s coming from with all the ennui and nihilism, and begins to fall into the horror of it all, ultimately, she rejects that point of view. Instead of being defeated the way Jobu Tupaki is, Evelyn finds peace. Having been everything and everywhere, she’s finally satisfied to just be one thing, in one place. Her breakthrough leads to her saving her daughter and the two of them coming to terms with life’s immensities. It’s like having tried every crayon from the 256 box, you realize it’s okay to pick one and be happy with that one.75

This is where the film fails, and its failure is already palpable at the level of its form, of how the complex story is told.

What characterizes a great film is that its basic message (often in contrast with the narrative line) is made clear through the peculiarities of the form itself. When watching The Shield (a TV series better than the more celebrated The Wire), one cannot but note its formal features: a shaky handheld camera, short cuts (often zooming into a face suddenly in one continuous shot instead of a cut to a close-up), fast turns between two people in conversation instead of the shot-and-countershot procedure, and establishing shots from above. These features render a certain subjective stance, that of the nervous and dynamic daily life of the special police unit portrayed in the show. They do not stick out as exceptions, like the spectacular long-moving shots in Hitchcock’s films; instead they are everywhere, written into the texture of the entire narrative. This fidelity to standard form is just another aspect of the fact that although the film is playing with multiple realities, this multiplicity remains rooted in the traumas and deadlocks of our single “true” reality. The topic of multiple realities in our popular culture is often linked to quantum mechanics, which talks about the superposition of multiple virtual versions of an event: Our ordinary reality emerges when the virtual multiplicity “collapses” into one real event. The version of quantum physics in Everything Everywhere All at Once is much less radical than the scientific notion of the superposition of states. In quantum theory, one version of multiple superpositions “collapses” into our common reality, but there is no fate or victory—the collapse happens in an irreducibly contingent way. There are collapses which are (from our standpoint) better or worse, even catastrophic, but it all depends on pure chance. So to say “it’s okay to pick one and be happy with that one” is false, because it is not us who picks. Nobody makes the choice, it just happens. The awareness that other versions might have happened should mobilize us for a struggle, not lull us into resigned satisfaction. There is a nice historical documentary available on YouTube called 1916, The Year First World War Should Have Ended; it proves that during 1916, several major battles took place that should have decided the fate of the war instead of prolonging it for two more years. Instead of saying “it’s okay to be happy with how these battles finished,” should this missed alternative (which would have prevented millions of superfluous deaths) not haunt us forever?