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(upbeat music)
What's up guys, Michael here.
Today, we're gonna talk about what will likely
be the most important film this year
to feature sentient rocks.
And no, we don't mean Dwayne.
We're talking about "Everything Everywhere All At Once",
or as we like to call it,
"Michelle Yeoh and the Multiverse of Sadness."
This isn't the first movie to use
the multiverse as a storytelling device.
But, while some of these other films
might be accused of, I don't know, using the multiverse
as a way to backdoor corporate IP
into increasingly flimsy narratives,
"Everything Everywhere All At Once" is different.
It uses the multiverse to say some genuinely
interesting things about everything
from 24/7 digital culture,
to how sometimes parents just don't understand.
One of the film's directors even said
it explores his own adult ADHD diagnosis,
and its effects on his life.
But what really stood out to us,
is the way the film explores
two of our favorite philosophical sensibilities,
existentialism, and nihilism.
And while we've talked about these two spicy meatballs,
or hot dog fingers before,
"Everything Everywhere All At Once"
does something super interesting in using the multiverse
to explore the metaphysical implications
of the aforementioned meatballs.
So, does this film use the multiverse
to show us a way out of existential despair?
Or should we all be praying for nihilist bagels
to put us out of our misery?
Let's find out in this wisecrack edition
on "Everything Everywhere All At Once".
"Does Anything Mean Anything Anywhere?"
And, of course, major spoilers ahead for the movie.
(buzzer blaring)
But before we dive in,
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And now, back to the show.
Let's start with the film's central characters,
the Wang family.
You've got serious and stressed Evelyn,
her goofy but good-hearted husband, Waymond,
and their angsty daughter, Joy.
Each of these characters is going through
their own type of existential crisis right off the bat.
And that's before the fabric of reality starts to unravel.
Evelyn embodies the type of mundane exessential despair,
as she's seemingly depressed at the state of her life,
and keenly aware of what she hasn't accomplished.
She very much has the vibes
of a character from a Sartre or a Camu novel.
We even learn that she's
the only Evelyn in the multiverse
who never excelled at anything.
With every passing moment,
you feel you might have missed your chance
to make something of your life.
And during an IRS meeting,
we see that she hasn't let go of various failed dreams.
You're also a novelist, and a chef.
Last time you told me-
- Puh, please.
- [Narrator] And then we have Joy.
When we first meet her,
she's feeling alienated from her mother
both interpersonally, and also at the level
of wanting her queerness to be recognized.
(speaking a foreign language)
But later on, we'll know her as Jobu Topaki,
once her mind is shattered and exist
in every iteration of the multiverse.
While the original Joy is just looking for meaning
in her everyday life,
Jobu Topaki is on a search for meaning
at the cosmic level.
Existing in every multiverse,
has left her convinced, everything is random.
Nothing means anything, and there is no truth.
And finally, we have Waymond.
Who at first, doesn't appear to suffer
as deeply as his wife and daughter.
But he does seem dejected
by the loss of love in his marriage.
Rather than seeking some type of
cosmic meaning or purpose,
this dude just wants to love and be loved.
So to really get to the bottom of what
these characters are going through,
we need to revisit our old friends,
existentialism and nihilism.
Now we've covered these topics in the past,
and if you need a primer,
check out our classic video
on "Rick and Morty" and "Bojack" written by yours truly.
But something we haven't talked about before,
is what the early execentialists were responding to,
namely, rationalist and idealist schools of thought,
that believe the structure of reality
was something that was knowable through human consciousness,
i.e., that we can make sense of everything,
which is what philosophers call metaphysics.
The two most notable proto-existential
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,
came right after the era of German idealism.
During which, a crew of philosophers
tried to figure out the nature of the absolute.
Put differently, they were trying to logically comprehend
everything everywhere all at once.
Corny? Sure. But an aft description of what philosophers
like Hagel and Ficktel were doing, absolutely.
And these idealists philosophers offered an account
of both how human consciousness works,
but also how the reality
outside of our consciousness functions.
In their minds, they had more or less reached
the final boss philosophy.
But for some of the folks that came in their wake,
the idea that individual human minds
could somehow comprehend all the features of reality,
was a humorous illusion at best.
They weren't ready to go full Topaki.
And even those who thought
these absolute idealists were on to something,
still thought that this level of rational understanding
wasn't making folks any less miserable.
We see parallels in the film's antagonist, Jobu Topaki.
Jobu Topaki was able to experience
everything that's happening at all times.
But instead of giving her some greater sense
of truth or meaning,
it's made her absolutely miserable,
turning her into an anialist with a pension for
experimental fashion, and creative murders.
And this makes us think about a fellow traveler
of the existentialist, Albert Camus.
What his friends, Jean-Paul Simone and Maurice described
as the existential condition he called "the absurd."
"The absurd" describes what happens
when there is contradiction between two ideals.
For example, humanities desire for meaning and purpose,
and the universe's seamingly cold and meaningless structure.
Not to get too trippy, but it's basically what happens
if you're sittin' underneath the stars
with someone you love.
That feeling of love seems super meaningful
when you're gazing at your beloved.
But when you stare up at these seemingly lifeless
infinity of our universe, it's hard to not wonder
if human meaning is just a pleasant delusion we all share,
or if you're Jobu Topaki,
the absurd is the contradiction
between thinking that your individual life
has some sort of meaning,
and then experiencing these seeming randomness
and meaninglessness of life across the multiverse.
For Evelyn, it can be the contradiction
between her mundane and unfulfilling life,
and seeing that in another timeline, she's a movie star.
Now this contradiction drives Jobu to
bagel centered nihilism
which we'll get back to in a second,
but that wasn't Camu's journey.
He thought that the individual
could face the absurd in three ways;
suicide... and to be clear, he did not endorse this,
and there is no reading of the existentialist tradition
that endorses ending your own life.
A leap of faith, and once you turn to religion for meaning,
or a type of recognition or rebellion,
in which you acknowledge the utter absurdity
of existence, but are still able to discover meaning
at the individual level.
It's sort of embracing the paradox
that while the universe might have no inherent meaning,
you're going to keep searching for some meaning
non the less.
Kind of like searching for your soulmate at a funeral.
And this way, Camu's absurdism
is neither as cosmically hopeless as nihilism
nor as positive in its embrace
of freedom and humanity as existentialism.
At a certain point in the movie,
it seems like Jobu and Evelyn
have chosen Camu's very dark first option,
as Jobu's despair makes her want to simply
be sucked into the empty void of the bagel,
rather than face the absurdity of their situation,
they'd prefer not to exist at all.
Because as we see during Evelyn's long dramatic rampage,
what's the point?
For some contemporary theorists,
Camu's solution is kind of a cop out.
He comes close to embracing absolute
cosmic meaninglessness, but he doesn't go all the way.
One such theorist is writer, Eugene Thackard,
who in this aptly titled, "In The Dust of This Planet"
argues that there might not be a purpose to things,
or to your life,
or to your existence.
Or to the cosmos, that there might not be an order,
that we're not here for a reason;
that it's arbitrary, and an accident.
For Thacker, this cosmic nihilism
leads to a philosophy of pessimism,
which takes a largely negative view
of life and existence.
Pessimists believe that the conditions of existence,
often make life pretty shitty for most people
most of the time.
This seems to be the vibe of Jobu's crew
of circle headed weirdos.
Because life is (beep) anyways,
they embrace being sucked into the hole
of a heavily seasoned bagel.
Philosopher Ray Brasierre, takes this pessimistic view
even further in his understanding
of our desire for meaning.
As he sees it, because we can be scientifically certain
that eventually the sun is going to die out and explode,
there will be an inevitable heat death to the universe,
and earth will be cosmically canceled.
In this process, all human consciousness and history,
and thought, and art, and everything else,
is going to be destroyed forever,
and rendered cosmically meaningless.
And in light of this cosmic bummer,
we need to reconsider our desire for meaning,
and maybe reconsider the idea that real meaning
is something that we can ever find in the first place.
Basically, if the bagel is eventually
going to suck it all into oblivion anyways,
none of what's happening now
really matters all that much does it?
Classic existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism
are all about what we should do practically and ethically,
if life is meaningless.
But there are contemporary philosophers
who have functionally turned existentialism
back into a kind of metaphysics.
Remember, the very thing existentialism developed
in opposition to.
Basically, if existentialism was more about
how we should live, metaphysics consists of
classic questions about the meaning of reality.
Now the metaphysical implications of thinkers
like Thacker and Brassiere would of course
be ideal reading for Jobu and the bagel gang's book group.
They basically confirmed Jobu's nihilistic metaphysics
by arguing that the cosmos is a cold, uncaring nothing,
and that life has mostly pain and despair
with a few little moments of happiness
sprinkled here and there.
And like we already said,
at a certain point,
it seems like Evelyn wants in
on the book group as well.
But she snaps out of it due to Waymond's
simple but effective plea
for everyone to just be kind.
- The only thing I do know,
is that we have to be kind.
And while this could strike some as corny and reductive,
as if being kind is a cure to large scale,
metaphysical meaninglessness,
it actually gets at something important.
Now for Thacker and Brassier,
pessimism and nihilism aren't just existential principles.
But metaphysical and even scientific ones.
Because when everything humanity has ever created,
is burned like a bagel left in the toaster too long,
nothing we will have ever done is really gonna matter.
And all attempts to find happiness and purpose
in the meantime, are equivalent to closing your eyes
and listening to a mildly interesting podcast
as your plane hurdles towards the ground.
But this of course, isn't where the Wayne family ends up.
Evelyn, inspired by Waymond's unceasing optimism
and calls for kindness in the face of fear,
decides that existence is something worth fighting for.
And rather than using your homicidal pinky's
to take out her enemies,
she responds with a love and kindness
that seems to target the fear and despair
motivating her opponents.
And maybe, not surprisingly,
some recent French philosophers,
the children and grandchildren
of the existentialist so to speak,
are using the spirit of existentialism
to combat the metaphysics of niahlist despair.
Okay, so it's like this,
the existentialist operated with the principal
that the true nature of reality
was basically unknowable.
And trying to understand it would just make us miserable,
because we'd always experienced
the contradiction between our subjectivity,
and the objective nature of reality.
Instead, we should focus on making decisions
and taking responsibility for our own existence.
And anyways, why worry about metaphysics
when you can drink martini's?
But contemporary philosophers like Alain Badiou
and Quentin Meillassoux, are both continuing
to embrace the power that decisions play in existence,
while also embracing metaphysics.
And while it's kind of a lot of complicated stuff,
the just is, that while the existentialists focus
on the inconsistency between reality,
and our attempts to understand it,
this newer crop of French smarties
identify that inconsistency as a feature of reality itself.
In one sense, it seems like there is a lack of freedom
in the everything everywhere all at once multiverse,
as each version of Evelyn seems borderline destined
to carry out a specific type of existence.
But Badiou would argue,
that while each of these universes
seems to have finite limits,
within each universe, there is a trans finite
sense of possibility.
Put simply, while we would normally consider
the distance between the numbers one and two
to be a finite limit,
within that limit,
there's an infinite amount of numbers,
i.e., 1.0, 1.34, 1.5, 1.0009804356, et cetera.
In existential terms,
this means that even if we're caught
in a certain finite condition, i.e.,
we have hot dogs for fingers,
we still have infinite possibilities
within those conditions.
I.e., we can learn to play the piano with our feet.
For Badiou, this means that novel things can happen
in seemingly finite situations.
And when these things happen under what he calls
the four conditions of truth,
art, love, science, and politics,
we're capable of finding ideas
that can give our lives meaning.
And these ideas share something with existentialism,
and that we can't simply believe in them
like they're true or false,
rather, we need to take responsibility
for the consequences of these ideas
in our own lives.
At the end of the film,
Evelyn and Joys futures aren't certain
just because they've decided
to avoid anniahlation by bagel.
They'll have to stay faithful
to their decision each day,
as they continue to find meaning in their lives.
And Meillassoux argues
that rather than reality being either a chaotic,
meaningless mess, or a well ordered system
of necessary truth and causation,
it is both contingent and necessary.
Or as he puts it, "The only necessity is contingency."
To put it in terms a raccoon chef could understand,
it's not that reality doesn't make sense
because we're not capable of understanding it,
it's that reality simply doesn't make sense
in a clearly logical way.
It's basically a metaphysics reverse engineered
out of existentialism.
And this view of reality seems to be there
in the scene in the movie.
That really made me cry a lot.
Here, all we get are a few specks of time
where any of this actually makes any sense.
- [Narrator] Here, Evelyn and Jobu
are able to acknowledge that reality doesn't make sense,
and at the same time,
there is space for them to create
their own meaning and purpose.
- That I will cherish these few specks of time.
- And everything everywhere all at once,
seems to be saying precisely this;
that even though the universe doesn't have
any inherent sense of order or meaning,
that within the context
of these seemingly random contingencies,
we are capable of creating meaning.
And when we get scared or feel stupid
because reality and existence don't make sense to us,
problem isn't us.
It's that reality itself is kind of a mess.
So does everything everywhere all at once,
end up confirming that
the universe is inherently meaningful,
and that if we just look hard enough,
meaning and truth will be right there waiting for us?
Absolutely not.
But the film isn't coldly embracing niahlism.
Instead, it seems to be taking the route of arguing
that just because reality
doesn't come pre-loaded with meaning,
doesn't mean that we can't create truth in our own lives.
But what do you all think?
Is everything everywhere all at once a necessary tonic
for a time when reality feels pretty warped to begin with,
or were you just wondering when the super heroes
were gonna show up?
Let us know in the comments.
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Later.
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