The Bleak and Empty Heart of Everything Everywhere All At Once

At the heart of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is a story of transformation. The film is often disregarded by casual moviegoers for its excessively slow pace and overly abstract final act. But it is its structure that reveals true intentions. The first act reveals that humanity’s evolution was sparked by an interaction with a mysterious alien monolith that caused the first stirring of consciousness in early humanity.

The final act shows a human being faced with that same process, watching his mind warped and his understanding of time, reality, and physical space ripped apart as he is transformed into the Star Child, a godling that returns to an Earth facing Cold War uncertainty and hostility, and smiling as he looks upon the world with fresh eyes.

The film’s ethos is very much a work of its time, imbibing the 1960s era counterculture progressive optimism regarding the limitless potential of humanity in the drug-addled new age, no longer bound by petty concepts like morality or reality. The film came from the era of science fiction seen in stories like The Last and First Men, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the original Star Trek—speculative texts that exemplified the boundless potential of humanity and interrogated strange and heretical ideas about the limitations of being and the hope for progress.

It is curious then that the film that arguably stands as the millennial answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey so clearly reflects the morals of its generation—banality, existentialism, and a pretense towards profundity.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is the newest film from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a pair of directors whose brief careers in filmmaking has been notable for its maximalism and hyperkinetic approach to cinema. Their previous film Swiss Army Man was an elaborate metaphor for their humanistic approach to life—a story where a man dialogs with a talking, farting corpse about the meaning of life, the nature of self-loathing, and suicide.

Now their newest film, released in early last year, has been awarded the highest prestige of our cinematic culture—winning ten Oscars at the most recent academy awards and setting itself apart as one of the most awarded and singularly celebrated films in history, and defining as a work of cinema future generations will have to note when they observe this moment in time.

As my colleague at The Pamphleteer points out, if the film had been any more awarded, “the definitive example of the American cinema would no longer feature a sled called Rosebud or a sinking ocean liner, but a scene where two minor characters shove IRS ‘Auditor of the Month’ trophies shaped like buttplugs up their rectums and have a manic kung fu fight.”

I certainly enjoyed Everything Everywhere All At Once the first time I watched it, and it is not hard to see why. It too is a hyperkinetic genre-mashup of popular martial arts films, comedies, and science fiction told with enough confidence and bravado to be fun and placative in the moment.

The more time has gone on, and the more approval this singular film has received from the mainstream, the more my overall thoughts on the film have soured. Much like a popular work like Rick and Morty—which has also come to epitomize a certain kind of pop-nihilism being embraced by the wider culture—it has become a worrying science that the popular mythology of our times is a form of misanthropic hopelessness held together by nothing but vague humanistic sentimentality in a culture of near-suicidal depression and despair.

What makes Everything Everywhere All At Once comparable to 2001: A Space Odyssey, beyond its genre, is the approach both films take towards ultimate questions. They’re both epic science fiction stories with grandiose runtimes and interested in tackling the challenging questions of being and identity in the face of a strange universe.

Kubrick, despite being a stylistic radical and a political outsider, steered his film into the mythological and abstract, diving right into the core of meaning and transformation. “We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest,” he once said. Kubrick was not a nihilist, and his films are often dense to the point of being ridiculous, sparking numerous conspiracy theories about what he was actually trying to say. But they are meaningful and inspire people.

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert know exactly what they’re trying to say—and it is that life is meaningless. Their film dresses down reality and meaning so deeply and thoroughly that the root of everything becomes nothing. To know everything is to know that everything is pointless. Knowledge and existence become pain and it leaves us on the precipice of suicide once you come to the conclusion that a Godless world leaves you no reason to stay alive.

Their story follows an average Generation X Chinese immigrant woman being sucked into an interdimensional conflict where an alternate universe version of her husband appears to her on the worst day of her life to reveal that she lives in a vast multiverse where different versions of herself live different (and often quite more glamorous and happier) lives. When it turns out her estranged lesbian daughter is a genocidal tyrant seeking a weapon powerful enough to kill a godling (namely herself), our lead character struggles to come to terms with the endless nature of the universe and the reality that there is no ultimate purpose behind her existence.

In the end, both the mother and daughter ultimately come to realize the fullness of this nihilistic truth, and the young girl comes close to her goal of annihilating soul to end her suffering. At the height of the story’s drama, both characters can only stare into the void of nothingness and say “Please, be kind,” giving their dumbest and least sensible side character a soliloquy about why the meaninglessness of life ought to justify a pacifying, her unserious mealy-mouthed form of humanism.

“I don’t know what the heck’s going on,” her husband says. “The only thing I do know is we have to be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on.”

And this is supposed to be profound. Every nihilist worth his salt knows you need a deeper philosophical grounding to address the state of the world. The Greeks understood that their gods were not personal and sparsely cared for their lives, and they built stoic philosophies centered on excellence, rationality, and self -mastery to live in spite the unfortunate state of the world—building up the self and living a civil and good life in line with who we are designed by our ultimate creator to be.

Kwan and Scheinert are subjects of the Epicureanism of our times, eager to fill the void with dopamine hits and pleasure. They have nothing deeper to tell, and so they fill the story with placative violence and comedy as they unfurl the bleak heart of their story, attempting to put a sentimental spin on meaninglessness. As Ethan McGuire writes, “sentimentality is the distinctive quality of our culture, & it has become increasingly sophisticated as sentimentality from cynical people.”

The sad reality is that if their film is our generation’s 2001, it reflects the moral and spiritual desert of our younger generations, utterly atomized and disconnected from the wisdom of the past. They have no context for their anxieties about the world. They don’t even know what they don’t know. They have no context or education for Christianity, Buddism, or Stoicism that might offer them an explanation for their uncertainty. They don’t even know why they disagree with those ideas—they haven’t been educated to understand them.

Kubrick may well have been spreading heresies and strange ideas, but his generation knew what it was fighting against. The counterculture knew it was at war with Christendom. It could quote the culture’s holy books and could count their hypocrisies. It knew the culture’s weaknesses and rules. This new generation doesn’t even know who it is fighting against, it has no frame of reference to satirize its critics—it is just flailing on the ground for any excuse not to kill itself.

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